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rikers island
End All Youth Detention and Torture at Rikers Island Now
Jun 14, 2015
Solitary confinement is pretty horrible for anybody, but it's especially horrible for a child. It is psychological torture.
-- Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy
When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it's unbelievable that this could happen to a teenager in New York City. He didn't get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!
-- Paul V. Prestia, Kalief Browder's lawyer to The New Yorker
Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.
-- Kalief Browder to Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The New Yorker
Nobody of any age should be held in jail without a trial for three years. No child or adolescent should be held in an adult jail. No child or youth should be housed in facilities where those entrusted to care for them violently assault them. Yet, a 16-year-old accused of stealing a backpack was kept in one of the most violent adult jails in the United States, Rikers Island in New York City, for three years without a trial. This was morally scandalous and inhumane. Even worse, he spent more than two years of that time in solitary confinement, locked up alone except to go to the shower, the recreation area, the visit room or the medical clinic. This was torture. The suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder on June 6, barely two years after his release and return home, was the final horror in his tragic and brutal journey into the depths of the adult criminal justice system in New York City and state.
At Rikers, Kalief was cruelly beaten by juvenile gangs, and beaten by a guard as he was calmly walking from solitary confinement to the shower. This violent abuse was caught on video and made public in April by an investigative reporter from The New Yorker. Other alleged abuses were not: The cruel guards who denied him meals, medical care, trips to the shower and extended his time in solitary confinement by making up disciplinary problems.
It should surprise no one that a teenager subjected to this continuous torture; a teenager who maintained his innocence and just wanted his right to a day in court to prove it; a teenager who turned down plea deals repeatedly although it would have meant he could go home immediately; a teenager with no history of mental illness before Rikers Island tried to commit suicide while held in solitary confinement for two of his three years there. It is beyond shameful that he was held without a trial, without being proven guilty and because he was a poor young Black male. This travesty was and is preventable and must be prevented for all youths at risk of such abuse.
If New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators act immediately before this state legislative session ends June 17, 2015 to raise the age of criminal responsibility, as 48 states have done, more tragedies and suffering like Kalief Browder's might be avoided. And youths still at Rikers might have reduced suffering and pain.
Kalief Browder's cruel and unjust treatment began May 15, 2010, when he was picked up with a friend in the Bronx. He shared his story later with a reporter from The New Yorker to make sure this would never happen to anyone else. Kalief was stopped for allegedly stealing a backpack earlier that evening. According to the report, he maintained his innocence and offered to let the police search his pockets. The only evidence against him was the testimony of the alleged victim he never got the chance to confront. Eyewitness identification is notoriously unreliable.
Kalief Browder was immediately funneled into the adult criminal justice system because of the unjust lottery of geography and poverty. New York remains one of only two states in our country that still automatically treats 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. More than a century ago, states began to legislate that children should be treated as children to prevent the inhumane, dangerous, and ineffective practice of putting them in adult jails. New York and North Carolina should end this practice immediately. Not one more young life should be ruined or tragically lost to Rikers preventable torture and violence.
We have long known that putting children in adult jails puts them in harm's way. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) first documented and began advocating for changes to end these harms nearly 40 years ago after visiting 500 jails across America and publishing in 1976 our deeply disturbing findings in a report on Children in Adult Jails. We found children incarcerated with adults suffered increased rates of physical abuse, like Kalief did. Today they are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile facilities. In light of this evidence, it is outrageous that any state today would subject its teenagers to any adult jail especially like Rikers Island whose culture of violence is notorious. New York must stop right now.
The unjust criminalization of the poor is another reason Kalief Browder ended up at Rikers Island. His family could not afford to hire an attorney or pay the $3,000 bail to keep him home to await a trial that never took place over three long years. Being poor, Black and male, the odds were high that he would end up in the Cradle to Prison PipelineTM and suffer preventable death.
Dr. Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, and an authority on suicidal behavior among African American males, says that among Black Americans, Black males between the ages of 15 to 24 are most likely to commit suicide. "The suicide of Kalief Browder highlights the glaring gap between the alarming psychiatric needs of black boys and men and the absence of effective treatments; a justice system that enacted psychological torture because a putative stolen backpack mattered more than the life and future of a black teen; and the importance to address the unattended psychological consequences resulting from the feverous adjudication, prosecution, and sentencing of black boys and men without regard for their mental health."
More than a thousand days after arriving at Rikers Island, Kalief Browder was abruptly released four days after his 20th birthday. He had spent most of the 17 previous months in solitary confinement. The charges against him were dismissed. It is unclear when the only evidence against him disappeared, and when and if the "victim" had returned to Mexico and could no longer be found. Two years later, after more suicide attempts and mental health hospitalizations, Kalief Browder took his life at home. He was 22-years-old.
His tragically short life has already made a difference. Mayor Bill de Blasio led New York City to ban solitary confinement for all juveniles when he heard Kalief's story. But the Governor and state legislature without another moment's delay must also take action on the age at which children can be placed in adult jails as the Governor's Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice recommended. No other child or youth should be at risk of Kalief Browder's fate and our nation needs to change the way we treat Black boys and men and recognize that all lives matter equally.
Albert Camus, the great French Nobel Literature Laureate, speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948 said: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." He described our responsibility as human beings "if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it" and "to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents." "I continue," he said "to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us including our elected officials who must be held accountable. Only then will the cries of the prophets for justice and peace and America's pretentions to be a just nation become a lasting reality.
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Kalief Browder Took His Own Life, but the System Murdered Him
When Browder was 16, he was arrested on a charge of stealing a book bag—a charge he denied. He spent three years in Rikers Island jail without ever receiving a trial. On Saturday he killed himself.
Jun 12, 2015
Kalief Browder was murdered, in the first degree.
The papers will say that on Saturday, Browder, 22, walked into a room in his home, took the air conditioner out of a wall and hanged himself.
But this was a premeditated murder of spirit, innocence, youth and dreams, which began in the spring of 2010 when police stopped a then-teenage Kalief on his way home. They say he stole a book bag. He tells them he didn't. They search him and find nothing. They tell him to come down to the station with them to get it all straightened out. They tell him he will go home.
For three years, Browder sat behind bars in one of the toughest detention centers in America refusing to crack. He didn't take the book bag, and he wasn't copping to it. His parents couldn't afford the $10,000 bail to get him out, so for three years he waited for his day in court--and it never came. While in jail, Browder would be abused by guards, tormented by gangs and spend some 400 days in solitary confinement, and then, one day, without a trial, he was set free.
As if setting him free would make it right. The 400 days of solitary without a trial broke his innocence and stole his youth. The true thieves that night in 2010 were the police who stopped Browder on a New York City street. That was kidnapping. The young man taken that night from his neighborhood would never return.
There was a crime here. One perpetuated by a legal system that sees black men as objects for prison; police who see young black men and women as thugs who must have done something (see McKinney, Texas); correction officers who don't see teens as children but as hardened criminals.
At 16, Browder was still young enough to believe that the adults around him weren't all corrupt. He was still young enough to believe that there was a chance he would see his classmates again, maybe take the girl he'd been eyeing to the prom, maybe still have time to walk across the stage with his graduating class. Except his reality was the jail cell where he spent 23 hours a day, with mice creeping out at night, crawling over the thin bedsheet under which his young body couldn't find rest.
He would tell HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill that while in jail, he tried to commit suicide "five or six" times. That he had asked correction officers for help because he needed to speak to someone. He wasn't feeling right and wanted to be "stress-free." No one helped him.
Video of Browder's imprisonment would show two telling facts about his incarceration and his character: One video shows Browder being escorted from his cell by a correction officer, and the size difference is jarring. The visual shows the physical makeup of a grown man standing next to a child. In seconds, the video turns violent. Browder said he had only asked the officer why his cuffs were so tight, and the officer's response was to slam Browder down on the cold jailhouse floor.
A second video speaks volumes as to how hard Browder was willing to fight to make sense of it all.
While he was in jail, a gang leader spit on him. The video shows Browder's response. In a room full of kids all bigger than him, Browder walks up to the leader and punches him in the face. He delivers a few more blows before he is mobbed. On the ground, he curls himself into a ball until the kicking stops, and then he finds his way into another cell.
The gang is relentless; members threaten him through the glass square in the door of the cell. Browder doesn't back down. He checks his fists. Pats his hair down a bit and paces the small space, surely hopped up on adrenaline. One kid kicks the door in and the gang mobs him again.
When asked about the fight once on the outside, Browder stated only that if he had allowed the kid to spit on him, he would have been spit on every day.
I mention this only to illustrate that the pain Browder chose to endure that day was because for him, right was right. It was all black and white. He didn't steal the book bag, so he wasn't copping to it. He wouldn't tolerate being spit on, so he fought back.
The system is also black and white, and that is the reason it couldn't see Browder as a kid, or the book bag as a book bag. The book bag became right and Browder wrong, so without a trial, without a conviction, he was given the death penalty of three years in jail without even knowing it would be three years; just unending time in the box at the crux of manhood, too innocent to accept the gray parts that started taking shape.
No one looked at the boy in the cell or the years that had gone by and saw that he was changing, that his face had lost the fullness of his youth. In time, Browder was becoming something even he couldn't recognize anymore. No one saw the kid in pain, and in turn, by the time they let him go free, he was on the edge of manhood and the kid was off in the wind like a kite with no string, never to return home.
And I feel like I need to say this here because I have heard it mentioned too many times by some folks in the black community, and I can't let it rest: Suicide doesn't make you a punk. It isn't a testament to an absence of bravery. It is a final act of control when one is walking inside that dark place, a place that followed Browder like the mice in his cell, not allowing him rest.
He would tell the New Yorker how he felt once he was released.
"People tell me, because I have this case against the city, I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."
Kalief Browder's dreams were stolen, his youth taken one night on a New York street. His life turned into a room, barely bigger than his outstretched arms, and like a plant without sunshine, his innocence began to wither away, and there's nothing redeeming in this story. There is no silver lining. If you need something to take from this story, take this: The world can be a miserable place filled with sadness, and for some young black men, money, Rosie O'Donnell and even Jay Z can't make it right (and I'm not using their names as metaphors for mythical figures; they actually tried to make Browder's story right).
If you need a happy ending, look someplace else.
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Kalief Browder, Albert Woodfox and the Torture of Solitary Confinement
Jun 11, 2015
Twelve days after his 22nd birthday, Kalief Browder wrapped an air-conditioner power cord around his neck and hanged himself. In 2010, at the age of 16, he was arrested after being accused of stealing a backpack. He would spend three years in New York City's Rikers Island prison, more than two of those years in solitary confinement. He was beaten by prison guards and inmates alike. He was not serving a sentence; he was in pretrial detention. He declined all plea bargains. He wanted his day in court, to prove his innocence. A judge finally dismissed the case against him. After his release, Kalief Browder tried to reclaim his life. In the end, the nightmare he lived through overwhelmed him. Two years after his release, he committed suicide.
Albert Woodfox also knows the torment of solitary confinement. Woodfox has the distinction of being the prisoner in the United States who has spent the most time in solitary confinement, now well over 42 years. For most of that time, he was locked up in the notorious maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary known as "Angola," built on the site of a former plantation worked by slaves from the African country of Angola.
Woodfox is one of the "Angola Three," three prisoners who served more than a century--that's right, more than 100 years--of solitary confinement between them. They believe the isolation was retaliation for forming the first prison chapter of the Black Panthers in 1971. They were targeted for organizing against segregation, inhumane working conditions and the systemic rape and sexual slavery inflicted on many imprisoned at Angola.
Woodfox and another of the Angola 3, the late Herman Wallace, were convicted for the 1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller. The case against them had significant flaws, and their convictions were later overturned. On Oct. 1, 2013, Herman Wallace was freed, but only after a federal judge threatened to arrest the warden if he did not release him. Wallace was suffering from advanced liver cancer, and died, surrounded by family and friends, several days later.
A federal judge has just issued a similarly urgent order for Albert Woodfox's release, but the state of Louisiana has appealed to a federal appeals court. Woodfox's conviction has been overturned not once but twice. Even the murdered guard's widow, Teenie Verret, has said she doesn't believe the men killed her husband. Nevertheless, Louisiana's Attorney General "Buddy" Caldwell would like to subject Woodfox, who is now 68, to a third trial for the same crime. Federal Judge James Brady is determined to set Woodfox free, once and for all.
Brady ordered, "Mr. Woodfox's age and poor health ... this Court's lack of confidence in the State to provide a fair third trial, the prejudice done onto Mr. Woodfox by spending over forty years in solitary confinement, and finally the very fact that Mr. Woodfox has already been tried twice and would otherwise face his third trial for a crime that occurred over forty years ago ... the only just remedy is an unconditional writ of habeas corpus barring retrial of Mr. Albert Woodfox and releasing Mr. Woodfox from custody immediately."
The warden of Angola, Burl Cain, said he had to keep Woodfox and the Angola 3 in solitary confinement because of their "Black Pantherism." Woodfox, speaking over a prison phone, said, "I thought that my cause, then and now, was noble. ... So they might bend me a little bit, they may cause me a lot of pain, they may even take my life; but they will never be able to break me."
Kalief Browder, sadly, was broken. Jennifer Gonnerman of The New Yorker magazine, who wrote eloquently about Kalief's case while he was alive, wrote on the day after his death, "He wanted the public to know what he had gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has ended solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year olds on Rikers Island, and hopes to end it soon for those under 21. After learning of the suicide, de Blasio said: "A lot of the changes we are making at Rikers Island right now are a result of the example of Kalief Browder. So I wish, I deeply wish we hadn't lost him, but he did not die in vain."
There are an estimated 80,000-100,000 prisoners held in some form of solitary confinement in the United States. The United Nations says the practice often amounts to torture. It is cruel and unusual punishment, and must be abolished, once and for all.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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