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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show we'll continue this month's full bio conversation about the life of Ted Kennedy, and today we will discuss Chappaquiddick. The Oscar nominations just came out and we'll talk about them with Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times and WNYC reporter Brigid Bergin joins me to discuss the latest on Congressman George Santos.

That is our plan so let's get this started with Rikers: An Oral History. In 2020, 19 incarcerated people died at Rikers jail facilities or at local hospitals where they were treated, according to our colleague WNYC and Gothamist reporter Matt Katz. Six were death by suicide and at least four were drug overdoses. One 31-year-old woman died of complications due to treatable diabetes. Katz reports that it was the deadliest year for people in city custody in 25 years. Those numbers are not surprising if you know much about the conditions of violence and dysfunction that pervade Rikers Island.

As one detainee says in the book, "You could put Mother Teresa in there, and in a month she'd be shanking people." The stories of the people who have lived and worked at Rikers for the past few decades are described in vivid detail in the new book Rikers: An Oral History. Helmed by New York Daily News reporter Graham Rayman and The City senior reporter Reuven Blau, the book features interview excerpts from former detainees, retired corrections officers, lawyers, reformers and family members who tell an intimate and realistic portrait of Rikers.

Rikers: An Oral History is out now and joining me in studio are Graham and Reuven. Welcome to the studio.

Graham Rayman: Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Listeners we want to hear from you. Have you been to Rikers yourself, either as a detainee or a visitor? What was your experience like? Maybe you had family there and had to visit the remote location, or maybe you've worked at Rikers. We'd like to hear from you too. What would you like us to know about Rikers? Give us a call 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Our social media is available as well @AllOfItWNYC. That is both Twitter and Instagram. We are talking about Rikers today with Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau, authors of Rikers: An Oral History.

Just so people get a sense of the people we're talking about. Graham, what's the range of offenses that could get you in Rikers?

Graham Rayman: You can be arrested on a misdemeanor, which where the sentence is up to a year in jail. There's also a much larger percentage of people who are there on felonies, which could result in state prison time of more than a year.

Alison Stewart: Reuven, what does the current population look like in terms of age, race, gender?

Reuven Blau: It's a great question. It's really fluid. It's about 6000 right now, which, it's creeping up. The Correction Commissioner testified late last year that they expect their population to go up to about 7000. Part of the shutdown plan, they want to reach a target population of about 3300, which during COVID there was this amazing opportunity. They were releasing a lot of people and it actually did dip for the first time in decades below 4000.

Alison Stewart: What about corrections officers? Who are the corrections officers?

Reuven Blau: Yes, so the correction officers, there's incredible ratio compared to other places in the state. It's almost one-to-one. It's a little more, a little less than that but largely it is a very large minority workforce. A lot of Black and Latino people who are working there.

Graham Rayman: Almost half are women. Almost half of the correction officers are women.

Alison Stewart: Graham, how did you decide that an oral history would be the best way to approach this rather than a straightforward narrative nonfiction?

Graham Rayman: When we were both working at the Daily News a few years ago, we had talked about a conventional history but we thought that putting the voices of the people who actually worked there, who actually were incarcerated there first and foremost was a lot more effective way of telling the story. Rather than Graham and Reuven's take from 5000ft up. We wanted the field to be as intimate as possible, as close to the ground as you could be.

Alison Stewart: Yes, the word intimate is what came to me while I was reading the book. Also very raw.

Graham Rayman: Yes, these are very tough stories. There are certainly funny stories in the book. There's moving stories in the book. There are stories of kindness and humanity but yes, these are tough stories and it took a lot. One of the people we interviewed said that he told a story about how he couldn't get to his mother's funeral because there was a bureaucrat screw-up in the jail, his grandmother's funeral. After he told that story, he said, "I know I'm going to have to talk to someone after we have this conversation."

Alison Stewart: People are incredibly candid in the book. For example, one corrections officer on his last day describes a time when a young kid called him-- This has a curse word in it, his white bitch in front of 20 guys. Later he gets the kid alone and he beat him for what he said was four hours, but then he adjusted it to an hour. One formally detained person describes just dealing coke. Reuven, why do you think some of these people were so willing to tell you so much, so candidly?

Reuven Blau: I think a lot of them have never had the opportunity to talk about their experience and to be seen beyond just being the labels of somebody who's an inmate or incarcerated and for the crimes. I think that they just really wanted to share some of their experiences. Graham and I have covered this for a long time between the two of us, at least, in the last 20 years, and we were just shocked by some of the stories even. At some point, you figure you've heard most of it or almost all of it, and stuff came up that I was actually taken aback by.

I interviewed somebody. Her name is Kendra Clark. She actually works for Exodus, which helps formally incarcerated people but she told me the story about how when she was first incarcerated, she was in a bullpen in an intake cell, and a woman came in. They had gotten lunch or dinner, and a woman came in and she had just missed the food. She was starving hungry and the officers were there eating their own food and laughing at her. She was so hungry, she reached between the bars, grabbed the garbage can and took a bologna sandwich out.

She just was like she just couldn't believe how that all happened.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. We are talking about Rikers: An Oral History. Let's talk to David, who's calling in from Westchester. David, thank you so much for calling WNYC.

David: Yes, hi and thank you for taking my call. What I want to talk about-- I had the problem with a relative of mine that was incarcerated, but what I want to talk about is the visitor. Just even being a visitor and going to Rikers Island is very demeaning, and the treatment is not good at all, and the access is very difficult. People are coming from far away. You have to go to a parking lot. You have to wait for a bus. The moment you get on the bus and to get at the building, your status has changed. You're not a free citizen anymore, but you are under suspicion constantly.

When you get to the building, there is no protection from rain. Anyhow. It's a very difficult experience and very demeaning, just that just being a visitor can give you an idea of what can be inside.

Alison Stewart: David, thank you so much for calling. Let's talk to TK from Rockland, who has a similar story. Tk, thank you for calling, All Of It.

TK: Oh, thank you for taking my call. It's a horrible place. It's Devil's Island in the 21st century. There's a feeling of despair. You could smell the fear in the air and like the previous gentleman said, they treat visitors like trash. If you've never been dehumanized, if you've never been felt up, if you've never been disrespected, if you've never had your self-esteem thrown in the garbage, then don't go to Rikers. Not even the visit, because that is what's going to happen to you. You're going to be subjected to all forms of searching, and they're going to touch you.

They're going to talk to you like you are garbage because they don't want you to come and visit anybody. It's so obvious. To think that half of the people there have not been convicted of anything, that's the part that hurts me the most. You got innocent people in there that are being treated worse than are murderers and are rapists, and I want people to think about that.

Alison Stewart: TK, thank you so much for calling. Reuven, did you want to respond to anything you heard from our two callers?

Reuven Blau: Yes, we have a chapter in the book about the visits, and it's just an incredible process. There's a lot of conversation now about the Shutdown Rikers plan, and the cost has now gone up to about 10 billion. One of the things that people who are critical of the plan don't ever talk about is that there's a few things. One of the things they don't talk about is the visiting and how difficult it is and the geography. That unless you move the facilities closer to the courts, which is part of the Shutdown Rikers plan to open four new facilities near the courts, you can't fix it.

It's not something-- because it's like the caller said, there's one bus that goes there. You have to wait and wait for the buses to take you to the 10 or at some point there was 11 individual facilities that are on Rikers as well. It's a whole day long process. We interviewed somebody in the book. His name is [unintelligible 00:09:53] he's a legal aid attorney, and so it's not even just like family. He told this incredible story about how he came in and he was a notary, so he brought his-- with a client, he had to just get something stamped as a notary and they wouldn't let him bring in the rubber stamp.

Even though literally that same stamp was in the law library as well. It's just so random of what they decide to let you bring in or not bring in. A lot of these people come with families and children. They don't know if they can bring extra diapers and toys. It's really difficult to watch.

Alison Stewart: Graham, I got a sense of that, and this may sound incredibly obvious, but that the isolation has allowed the problems to fester and it's also allowed people to ignore Rikers.

Graham Rayman: Sure. Out of sight, out of mind. It's one of the reasons why 100 years ago, they decided to put the city's first large jail in Rikers. Just keeping it away from sight just made it easier to pretend that that population wasn't there. It's far more than half of the people are there pretrial. It's much closer to 90%. The average length of stay pre-trial is over 100 days. Some people are there one year, two years, three years, four years. That's a huge, and often their pretrial period that they are incarcerated is much longer than the ultimate sentence that they're going to get.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Massawa is calling in from the Bronx. Massawa has been to Rikers. Massawa, thank you so much for calling in.

Massawa: You're welcome. Hey, can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, I can hear you. You're on the air. We'd like to hear your story.

Massawa: When I was there in 2004, I was picked up for aggressive panhandling, but they turned it into armed robbery charge because there was a gentleman threatened that they purported that I had a gun or something, I don't know. Anyway, what I found out was that, and it's probably more than then, every dorm, half of them were Bloods and there was a general in charge of each dorm. They usually had one guy, they would beat up and choke out. He would wash their underwear and it was really just a nightmare.

Luckily, I was a little older, so I got in with another guy who was an old timer and he got me a job and I was able to stay out of the dorm most of the day, but it was really a nightmare. Every other day there was a fight, and it wasn't a fight, it was a-- they call it a jump in or whatever. They would wait for either at night or in the day room where the TV was. 20 guys would jump one guy and it was insane. It was so bad. They would search our dorm two or three times a night. They were just busting with dogs.

They have these special task force guards they call turtles because they're all like fired geared out. They come in with dogs. They march you into the day room. You're strip down, you have to be naked, walking past a dog that's basically aggressively looking to bite your groin off with your gonads out, with your hands behind your head. One by one they march you out and all these dogs are [mimics barking dog] and they march you to and they strip down your clothes and everything. That was two or three times a week.

Alison Stewart: On WNYC, my guests are Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. The name of the book is Rikers: An Oral History. Listeners, if you've been to Rikers yourself, either as someone who's been detained or as a visitor, we'd like to hear your stories. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. I wanted to follow up on the gangs, Graham. How has gang culture evolved at Rikers over the past 40, 50 years?

Graham Rayman: Very quickly, in the '70s and early '80s, it was either, it was usually borough-based, Manhattan versus Queens, or it was based around the very large drug gangs that evolved. Then in the late '80s, we started seeing Latin Kings, which is a largely Puerto Rican base gang. In response to that, the Bloods emerged. The Latin kings became so big that the Bloods emerged as mainly a Black gang. It spawned and they spread throughout Rikers and then spread outside of Rikers into neighborhoods all over the city.

They've become the dominant gang in New York City in various definitions of different sets in different neighborhoods, sometimes different sets in the same few-block area. In the book, there's a story by Colin Epsilon. He goes into Rikers in Christmas Eve, 1994, and he intervenes in a fight between some gang members, and another guy. What happens after that is that gang labels him and the fact that he fought against them, follows him from unit to unit over the next two years. Every time he gets to a new unit, he has to either has to fight his way in, fight his way out, or at a certain point, he just starts refusing.

He looks inside and he goes, "Oh, there's some of the members of that gang." That's real and that happened. That can follow you all the way upstate too. It's something that the system has struggled over, whether to house gang members together or house them separately. Currently, they're housing them separately. They're trying to redo the classifications to house them separately and the jury's still out to see how that's going to work.

Alison Stewart: One of the things I thought was interesting, a person in the book named Michael Love described the Latin Kings as being incredibly disciplined and having meetings and incredibly organized in that way. How do the COs react? Because clearly, they see this happening.

Reuven Blau: There's a lot of frustration just on the ground level because they feel that when there is the gangs as one and one gang one unit there, it makes her job much more difficult because there's us versus them. That's why there's this process, as Graham was talking about to commingle. It's been a bit of a disaster so far. There's close to 500 stabbings and slashings last year on Rikers and the city department correction. Just to put that number in context, it was 40 in 2007 and I think about 17 or 19 the year before. It's really gone kind of exploded.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book Rikers: An Oral history with Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. We're also taking your calls. We'll hear more from Reuven and Graham as well as Derek who was an inmate there for about four weeks. He's going to tell us his history after the break. You were listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour are Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. The book is called Rikers: An Oral History. You are my guests as well. Let's talk to Derek, who is calling in from Dumont, New Jersey. Hi, Derek.

Derek: Hi. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air.

Derek: I was in records about six, seven years ago. Anything that I've heard so far is totally on point. There is no hyperbole that is enough to describe what happens at Rikers. It's humiliating for even people who visit you to the most extent like I heard. Just, there's no thought process. I understand that the people who work there are probably overworked, but at the same time at the higher level, there is no thought that goes into what happens to inmates. When I was going up there, I was on a bus full of gang members, I found out when we were in holding.

They put me all the way in the back of the bus with the gang full of people when I wasn't involved in that gang at all. I got jumped for the money in my pocket because you have to bring money to use the phones, at least back then. When I got up to Rikers, they interview you and ask you to identify who did it, which is crazy and that's a death sentence in any prison or jail. Rikers probably more so. It's just, there's no thought into how can you actually take care of the prisoners who are in that process. Just so many other things about that place is crazy.

They don't think carefully about how can they just make sure people aren't getting hurt.

Alison Stewart: Derek, thank you for sharing your story. Did you get into training at all, Reuven, with people? Did that conversation come up, training of COs?

Reuven Blau: The training of COs is honestly bogus. They're trained in a strip mall. They actually had a moment recently in recent history like the NYPD got a new head training headquarters for themselves at an old toe pound and I think in the Bronx or Queens. There was talk at the time to allow DOC, the Department of Corrections to use that as well. NYPD wanted none of it. Here we are in 2023 and they're literally being trained in a strip mall or some areas. I actually interviewed Jacqueline McMicken, who was the correction commissioner I believe in the '80s.

At the time when she started as a correction officer, there was no training at all. It was just like you were buddied up with another CO and they showed you the ropes. There was almost an internship on-the-job internship.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to John from Staten Island. John worked at Rikers. Hi, John. Thanks for calling All Of It.

John: Hi. Thanks for having me. I worked on Rikers for 20 years. I was in maintenance and I was supervisor for the upkeep of the building. Me and all of my crew, we worked around the inmates and we worked around the offices. We basically knew both. I have a lot of respect for the offices, but I think that nothing can prepare you to experience what it's like. I think the preparation they give them is because they fear the situation. It's like they made a habitat for monsters and they only feel that they have to train you to be a monster to go into that habitat.

That's very unfortunate. Some people who go there thrive because they have permission to be the monster that they want to be. That's unfortunate. About 90% of the offices just getting the training that the higher-ups CO works. Unfortunately, the higher-ups never consider that they made the Monster Academy. You know what I mean? They made that situation.

Alison Stewart: John, thank you so much for calling in. Graham, I wanted to follow up what John was talking about. Did you speak to people, any corrections officers who were really trying to do the very best they could with what little they had available to them?

Graham Rayman: Oh, yes. Very much so. There's a lot of conscientious people who work in the system. It is a tough job. There's a sameness to the job punctuated with moments of extreme violence and other stuff. There's also indifference. We talked to gang investigators who said that they would report instances of possible smuggling of contraband by officers or other staff and the reports would go nowhere. These are people, gang investigators who work for DOC reporting this internally and it going nowhere.

Really take into account the mental health component, 40% of the population has a mental health issue. You almost need somebody who's a hybrid correction officer, mental health counselor to do the job correctly. The training just doesn't really cover it. There's some training after they're already on the job, but that's very limited. It's really a specialized job that requires a certain kind of person and a certain kind of personality. Not everyone gets through it. There's one story in the book about a rookie correction officer who thinks that getting a mohawk is going to make him look tougher in the unit.

This is told by another retired correction officer. That officer lasted about six months before he quit. The job is not for everybody.

Alison Stewart: Ed Rosario told you he was a person who was detained there in 1990. Rikers is one of the largest penal colonies in the world and also the city's defacto mental health facility. Why do so many people with mental illness, especially those who need specialized care, end up in Rikers instead of a medical facility?

Reuven Blau: That's a great question. I think it's a broader reflection of society and of New York, especially where over the years there's been a move to institutionalize people with serious mental illness and to move them into smaller group homes. That was the plan. The federal government has not come through with funding for that. As years have gone on, the number of beds has shrunk. On the streets, a lot of times, people with these issues will act out in ways that the NYPD doesn't really know how to handle other than to arrest them.

There was somebody who recently took his own life in Rikers last year. He ended up in Rikers because he was in a hospital ER waiting room and he had a mental breakdown. Instead of going to the doctor, instead of being seen by a doctor, the hospital police staff arrested him, sent him to Rikers. Of course, that's just not the place anyone is going to succeed when they just struggle to understand basic orders. Solitary confinement comes up in a big role in that way. Many people who struggle with mental illness just can't understand just how to participate in just a regular headcount there.

The jail staff for many years just has used the punishment of solitary confinement, to react in that way to punish them.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Michael from Queens. Hi Michael. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Michael: Oh, thank you for having this conversation. I was at Rikers from late 2012 to early 2014. I'll be brief. Two issues. One thing was, because it's a jail and it's transient and you're there to either be charged or to go to court or to be released or various things, you didn't know if someone was there for jumping the turnstile or they were a murderer. Nobody spoke about what they were charged with. It was like a secret. The other thing is I'm a gay man and I was harassed and threatened and I just never knew from day to day what was going to happen.

Again, I was there for two years. A lot of people aren't there because again, they get charged, or they go to court or they go to prison. I was fighting my case, so I was there a long time so I have a lot to tell. The thing about when you're gay and you're constantly harassed is the correction officers were just as homophobic. They never protected you. They just allowed it to happen. If you asked to be put into a section where you're protected, they put you in the same section where they put people that are being punished.

You're put into this tiny little cell with people that had just maybe stabbed someone. It was better to just stay in the general area than ask to be protected and to be put where you're actually being punished. It was a surreal experience. It was like going back to the '50s about people's idea about being gay. It's another world. I can't even begin to tell you the mindset of the people. Not just the inmates, the correction officers. It was just about being gay. It was really, really hard. I'm just blessed that I got through it.

Alison Stewart: Michael, thank you so much for being so candid in sharing your experience. We are talking about the book, Rikers: An Oral History with Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. Before I go to my next question, did you want to respond to anything you heard from our callers?

Reuven Blau: I just wanted to say I just find it fascinating that Brian Lehrer had on Bill Bratton. He talked about Rikers and he said, "I don't understand what the problem is. Back in the '90s, this was great. The population was 20,000. They spent time in Rikers and the number of murderers went down." I just think that every single one of these callers has highlighted how that is just completely a false narrative and talking about their struggles really shows that,

Alison Stewart: We had somebody saying the problem that's not being addressed. It's not policy, it's a management issue. Does that ring truth to what you heard, Graham?

Graham Rayman: Oh, yes. There, there is a management accountability issue. I'll give you an example. There's a story in the book about a group of lawyers who went to investigate the fire safety system in a given jail. They get to the fire safety door through which 300 people are going to have to run if there's a big fire and where's the key? One of the lawyer, John Boston, a retired legal aid lawyer says, "Can we get the key, and can we get it sometime today?" They finally find the key after an hour of searching.

They get through the door and they get to the fire escape, and there's a tree growing through the fire escape blocking the egress for this hypothetical 300 people who are going to go through this door. That tree had been growing. It was about three or four years old, so nobody had checked that fire escape. That's a management accountability issue that the system has. That may be among the more serious issues that that the correction department has to deal with.

Alison Stewart: Reuven, who've been some of the leaders on reform with Rikers?

Reuven Blau: That's a great question. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the supporting of the Close Rikers plan. Arguably, he was almost pushed into it by the advocates, but did support it and has before leaving office started in motion to demolish the jails in Brooklyn and Queens to make room for the new jails. Six months before he left office, he appointed Vinny Giraldi, who was universally known as a reformer and had a lot of intentions to change things up. It was only six months because when Eric Adams took over, he's appointed Louis Molina, who also says that, "I want to make things better."

He's testifying right now in front of the city council about you know, issues that we're having with the LGBTQ unit and a bunch of other things. It's been tough. There's been a lot of talk about trying to get a federal receiver to come in and take over. One of the things that people say in favor of that is there's been years and years of commissioners who come in and they all have great intentions to change things. Nobody comes in and says, "Oh, I want this to be status quo." They all want to make it better. They've all failed and for various reasons.

The supporters of the Federal Monitor coming in, who would be able to start off from scratch and ultimately change whatever rules that exist currently, they argue that that's what's needed because they don't think that the system currently is set up in a way that can lead to positive change.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Rikers: An Oral History. It is from Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau. Thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.

Graham Rayman: Thank you.

Reuven Blau: Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

 

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