Lockdown on Rikers

by Ms. Mary E. Buser

  Lockdown on Rikers

  Shocking Stories of Abuse and Injustice at New York’s Notorious Jail

  Mary E. Buser

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  This book is dedicated to the memory of Jerome Murdough, Jason Echevarria, and to all those who fight the battle within. Be it the struggle with alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, or the agony of depression, may you find your way.

  And to Jerome and Jason, may you rest in peace.

  Preface

  At the end of a long cinder-block corridor, a correction officer in an elevated booth passes the time with a paperback book. Across from the booth, a barred gate cordons off a dim passageway. Along the passageway wall are the words CENTRAL PUNITIVE SEGREGATION UNIT.

  The officer looks up as I approach and nods. As acting chief of the Mental Health Department at Rikers Island, I’m a regular over here at “the Bing”—a curious moniker for this five-story tower of nothing but solitary confinement cells, one hundred per floor. They were designed for Rikers Island’s most recalcitrant inmates, the ones who have been pulled out of the general population for fighting, weapons possession, disobeying orders, assaulting staff. The officers refer to them as “the baddest of the bad,” “the worst of the worst.” I’m not so sure about that.

  The officer throws a switch, and the gate shudders open. Around a bend, I step into an elevator car. Since the problem inmate is on the third floor, I hold up three fingers to a corner camera that connects to a TV monitor. This is no ordinary elevator—no buttons to push here. The sweaty little box starts lifting, and as muffled wails seep through, my stomach tightens, the way it does every time I’m called over here. Which is often.

  Solitary confinement is punishment taken to the extreme. Rikers folklore has it that the term Bing was coined to describe the human brain under the strain of solitary—it goes . . . bing! Whether this story is true is unclear, but it makes sense. Solitary confinement induces the bleakest depression, plunging despair, and terrifying hallucinations. The Mental Health Department looms large in these units, doling out antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mountains of sleeping pills. If these inmates didn’t have mental health issues before they entered solitary, they do now. But even the most potent medications can only do so much, and when they give out—when human behavior deteriorates into frantic scenes of self-mutilation and makeshift nooses—we’re called to a cell door.

  The elevator rattles open on the third floor. Ahead, a long tinted window separates two plain doors, each one leading to a fifty-cell wing. Behind the window, correctional staff hover over paperwork. A logbook is thrust out; I sign it and point to the door on the left, “3 South.” When the knob buzzes, I pull the door open and step into what feels like a furnace. A long cement floor is lined with gray steel doors that face each other—twenty-five on one side, twenty-five on the other. Each door has a small window at the top and a flap for food trays on the bottom.

  At the far end, Dr. David Diaz and Pete Majors are waiting for me. I hesitate for a moment, dreading the walk through the gauntlet of misery. The smell of vomit and feces hangs in the hot, thick air. Bracing myself, I start past the doors, trying to stay focused on my colleagues. Still, I can see the inmates’ faces—dark-skinned, young—pressed up against the windows, eyes wild with panic. “Miss! Help! Please, miss!” They bang and slap the doors, sweaty palms sliding down the windows. “We’re dying in here, miss, we’re dying!” Resisting my natural instinct to rush to their aid, I keep going, reminding myself that there’s a reason they’re in here—that they’ve done something to warrant this punishment. The officers, themselves sweat-soaked and agitated, amble from cell to cell, pounding the doors with their fists, spinning around and kicking them with boot heels, “Shut the fuck up!”

  Diaz, a silver-haired psychiatrist, greets me with a weak smile. Pointing to a door that’s slightly ajar, he says, “We got a head basher.” He hands me the inmate’s chart. The label on the manila folder reads “Troy Jackson.” “He’s been going downhill for a while now,” Diaz explains. “I’ve upped his meds, changed them. We’ve talked to him, but at this point, we’re out of options.”

  “He’s been in for two months now,” says Pete, the lanky therapist who works with Diaz. “With three more to go.”

  I wince at the length of punishment. Two entire months spent inside an eight-by-nine-foot cell—just enough room to pace back and forth, about the only activity the cramped quarters allow. No phone, no TV, with one hour of “rec,” which amounts to a shackled walk to an outdoor cage to stand alone and glimpse the sky. Although the maximum punishment for any single infraction is ninety days, there’s nothing to keep infraction tickets from piling up, which is apparently what’s happened in this case.

  “All right, let me talk to him,” I say, with some vague hope of dispensing calming words that might enable Troy Jackson to hang on a little while longer.

  The officer pulls open the creaking door and steps back. Inside, a Black youth stands trembling, beads of sweat dripping from his chin. He’s barely out of his teens. Behind him, a little mesh-covered window transforms the day’s brilliance into grayness. A dingy sheet is strewn across a cot; across from it is a tiny metal sink and toilet. “Please, miss, please,” he whispers. “Help me . . .”

  For a moment, Troy Jackson and I stare at one another. In his jeans and T-shirt, he looks no different from every other kid on the street. I can easily picture him shooting basketballs on a city playground or bounding up subway steps headed for school. Instead, he’s trapped inside a cement box on Rikers Island. As his eyes plead with mine, blood seeps through his scalp, running down behind his ears. How could his young life have derailed this badly? I feel a clutch in my throat and my mind starts swirling back to my earlier days on Rikers, when I would have worked with him, listened to his story, helped him to find a better path for himself. But my days as an upbeat therapist are starting to feel like the distant past. As a newly appointed administrator, I remind myself that I’m not here to get to know Troy Jackson, or even to find out why he’s in solitary. I’m here to make sure of exactly one thing: that he remains alive. “Mr. Jackson, I’d like—”

  “I can’t,” he interrupts. “I’m telling you, I can’t. Please, miss, please. I’m begging you . . . I’m begging . . .”

  The blood is trickling down into his eyes, and I realize that we’re well beyond any therapeutic dialogue. “Okay, just give me a minute here, okay?”

  Pete, Diaz, and I huddle to the side of the cell, once again finding ourselves at a familiar miserable impasse. Although we have the authority to provide temporary relief in these situations, doing so is hardly a cut-and-dried matter. In the outside world, someone banging his head would be treated with a sense of urgency and alarm. But in here it’s different. Behind bars—and especially in
the Bing—these drastic acts are common, and the Mental Health Department is under fierce pressure to not give in to the inmates’ goal of a reprieve. Of course, it’s also up to us to make sure nobody actually dies. I’m still comprehending the reality of my new job, but it’s already clear that it entails walking the thinnest of tightropes.

  The question before us is whether the breaking point has truly been reached. If we agree that death or severe injury is likely, then Troy Jackson will be bused to a smaller, more specialized unit in another jail down the road. The bus ride alone seems to offer isolation-weary inmates enormous relief. We call it “bus therapy.” Once he’s a little better, though, he’ll be shipped right back here to complete his sentence. Like a weary swimmer treading water but starting to go under, he’ll be pulled out long enough to catch his breath, and then thrown back in. I can’t help but feel that this has all the earmarks of torture. But I brush the word from my mind. After all, I live in a civilized country that prohibits such things. Besides, I’m still new to this post, and there must be some reasonable rationale for this punishment that I’m missing, although I’m hard pressed to figure out what it could be.

  Diaz mops his forehead with a bandanna. “Medical can stitch him up,” he says, “but if we put him back in, he’ll just tear out the stitches—smash his skull right open—I’m sure of it.”

  “If we let him out,” says Pete, “we’re going to get copycats, but if we don’t, this is only going to get worse.”

  As acting chief, they look to me for a final answer. I want to give this kid a break, and I’m relieved that these two veterans of punitive segregation seem to want the same. “I don’t think we can let this go any further,” I say. “If somebody else tries the same thing, we’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “Agreed,” says Diaz.

  “Listen,” Pete says, “we better do something quick.”

  A loud moan comes from Jackson’s cell, and we rush back in just as the young man’s head thuds against the concrete. Blood is freely spilling now, the gash in his scalp revealing a patch of glinting whiteness.

  “Please, Mr. Jackson,” I say. “We’re trying to help you. We’re going to get you out. Just give us a chance here! Troy, please!”

  But Troy Jackson, beyond words, crumples to the floor.

  “You’re coming out,” says Diaz, leaning over him. “It’s over. It’s over now!”

  “Cap–tain!” the officer shouts. “We got one comin’ out.”

  With our decision made, I start back down to the clinic to begin the mountain of paperwork this transfer requires. On my way out, I move quickly past the cells, past the clamoring fists and pleading palms. In a day or two, we’ll be standing at any one of these other doors, faced with another scene of human desperation. Most won’t be as lucky as Jackson. For most, we simply offer words of encouragement and walk away, deeming them not yet decompensated enough to warrant the bus trip out. I try not to think about it. One day at a time.

  On the ground floor, the big barred gate is inching open to allow a new shift of officers to enter. I bolt through. Wending through cooler corridors, I walk alongside general population inmates who are headed to work details or to the law library. As I pass by the jail’s main entryway booth, officers glance up from their paperwork and wave. In some ways it’s almost pleasant. I manage a weak smile and with a quivering hand wave back, all the while struggling to blot out the white gleam of Troy Jackson’s bare skull.

  1

  On a gray September morning in 1991, I stood in front of Bloomingdale’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, eagerly waiting for my ride. As a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, I was beginning a yearlong internship at Rikers Island. I would report to New York City’s notorious correctional complex three days a week to provide emotional and psychiatric support to incarcerated women. While most people would balk at the mere thought of working with criminals, as soon as I learned about this assignment, I was intrigued. It incorporated my most important aspirations: to help the poor and underprivileged and to become a psychotherapist. The fact that the poor and underprivileged in this setting were also accused of crimes barely fazed me. Already in my mid-thirties, I had prior experience, not only with people in emotional distress, but with the incarcerated.

  I grew up during the sixties in a middle-class family on suburban Long Island. My father was a lawyer, and my mother was a homemaker and, later, a high school English teacher. Altruism was encouraged, both at home and in the Catholic school I attended. Even though our primary exposure to crime and racial strife came by way of the evening news, we were taught that helping the less fortunate was our responsibility, an ideal I took to heart. But it wasn’t only inner-city turmoil that flashed across the TV screen. The whole country was grappling with waves of change during the sixties, and I remember being drawn to the grainy images of the civil rights marches. Even then, I felt strongly about justice and fairness, not yet realizing that years later, despite all the country’s strides forward, I would discover a world beyond the reach of the six o’clock news, where inhumanity had found a whole new mode of ugly expression.

  As the oldest of seven children in a family that was as loving as it was dysfunctional, I often found myself in the role of listener and peacemaker. Sometimes at the kitchen table my mother would take off her glasses and rub her eyes, and I would listen as she told me how overwhelmed she felt by the day-to-day demands of raising a large family. Then she would replace her glasses, smile, and pat my arm. But I knew she felt a little better for having been heard. Everyone needs to be heard.

  In school, I was the one friends brought their troubles to. Whether it was anxiety over grades, fear for a parent battling cancer, or boyfriend woes, I quietly listened, noticing that as my pals talked things through, they usually felt better. Early on, I discovered that simply being heard is a great soother of life’s intangible hurts and struggles.

  After college, I volunteered at a Boston-based suicide prevention hotline called the Samaritans. No longer was I talking just with family and friends; now I was comforting total strangers. Whether it was an isolated elderly person who needed to talk or a distraught young man thinking about ending it all, I listened, allowing them to express their deepest levels of despair. And like a pipe releasing steam, more often than not their tears dried and their depression lifted. At least for the moment, they found the peace and relief that comes from being deeply heard by another. I couldn’t imagine being part of something more important.

  And then I decided to take things a step further. The Samaritans operated several outreach programs, one of them being a novel jailhouse program. The program had come about when a rash of suicides at Boston’s Charles Street Jail prompted alarm among city officials, who turned to the Samaritans. The result was Lifeline, a program designed to teach a group of inmates the same suicide prevention techniques we used on the hotline. In a setting better known for prisoners yelling “Jump!” to a despondent inmate posturing to end his life, it was hard to imagine incarcerated men coming together like this. But they did. Not only that, but after the Lifeline intervention, the annual suicide rate, which had been approaching double digits, dropped to zero.

  I found this astonishing—proof positive of the power of the human connection! I also knew I had to be part of it. The Lifeline team went into the jail every Wednesday night to support the Samaritan inmates, and on a cold winter evening I joined my fellow volunteers on the jailhouse steps for the first time. At twenty-three, I was the youngest in the crew. Nervous but eager, I followed along as guards led us through barred gates until we reached a room where five inmates sat behind a long table. As we took our place across from them, they did not seem particularly threatening but rather ordinary, save for the elaborate tattoos that decorated their forearms. After introductions were made, the Lifeline leader asked the men about their week as “jailhouse Samaritans.” They un
folded their crossed arms, and their hard faces softened as they took turns describing how they’d tried to comfort the despairing and suicidal in their own ranks. Of particular concern was a newly arrested inmate named Johnny, who was crying and leaving his food tray untouched. Anthony and Lamar, the most extroverted of the five, had approached him. “We asked him if he wanted to talk a little,” said Anthony, “you know—about how he was feeling and stuff.”

  “He looked kinda surprised,” the ponytailed Lamar deadpanned.

  “Yeah,” Anthony laughed, “to say the least. But he took us up on it, he talked, all right. Flat out told us he was thinking about stringing up a sheet. Then he lost it—cried like a baby. Told us he’d never been arrested before, that he’d lose his job, didn’t know how his family was going to get by, and was scared to death. And we just let him talk. We didn’t interrupt him.”

  “And when he was done,” said Lamar, “we told him we’d be with him. And he kept on saying, ‘Thank you, Thank you.’ Later on, he called his wife and looked a little calmer when he got off. He may have even eaten a little. But we’re going to keep an eye on him.”

  “Well done!” said the Lifeline leader. As the rest of us joined in, acknowledging their fine efforts, Anthony and Lamar were beaming. As the evening wore on, I melded into the conversation, and by the time the session ended, I’d almost forgotten where I was. After that night I became a Lifeline regular, and those Wednesday evening jailhouse visits were a cherished part of my week. Although I never did learn why those five men had been arrested, in terms of our particular mission, it didn’t matter. But what did matter to me was that I was supporting the goodness and humanity in the world—even in this unlikeliest of places.

  My Samaritans experience was so profound that I moved back to New York and cofounded the Samaritans of New York. Without forms to fill out or payment to be negotiated, New Yorkers in emotional distress could call our hotline for a caring human connection. I became the hotline’s first executive director and expanded the operation to include a speakers’ bureau on suicide prevention and Safe Place, a group forum for those who’d lost a loved one to suicide. I was especially pleased to have assisted the NYPD in producing a suicide prevention film that was shown to all incoming cadets. Yet as fulfilled as I was, six years later I had grown weary of fund-raising, budgets, and board issues. From my paper-strewn desk, I watched our volunteers taking calls from phones that I hadn’t answered in years. Hard as it was to leave something I’d helped to create, I needed to get back to what made me feel most alive—working directly with people. But this time, instead of fleeting encounters with hotline callers, I wanted continuity with those in emotional distress. I wanted to see if I might facilitate lasting change.