Mary E. Buser came to Rikers Island in the early 1990s as a student intern in social work. Returning a few years later, she worked her way up the ladder and eventually found herself in the solitary confinement wing, evaluating screaming, self-mutilating inmates to determine their suicide risk. That job was stressful. She quit. Fifteen years later, she has collected her harrowing anecdotes into a book. It’s a nice, bracing mood-stabilizer if the crisp fall weather has you feeling too cheerful.
Lockdown on Rikers has a marked downward trajectory. The opening chapters make jail sound, if not exactly fun, then at least like the sort of sturdy, structured environment that might be salutary for the truly dysfunctional. By the end, you’re grateful that it’s the end. You may also catch yourself musing on whether you should start a criminal defense fund, just in case. (Oh, you’re scrupulously law-abiding? Your attorney will be pleased to hear that when you call.)
Buser’s cup runneth over with sad tales, but one might be enough to paint the purgatorial picture. That would be the story of the suit.
Rikers Island is a jail, not a prison. What this means is that inmates are, for the most part, not convicts but detainees waiting for their cases to wind their way through the legal system. Most will eventually accept plea bargains, but for the few who persist, court clothes become a concern. Rikers won’t take you shopping for a jacket and tie, and a jumpsuit doesn’t impress a jury.
Keith Bargeman had spent his two years in lockup closely guarding a precious possession: his court suit. This was such a daunting task that suit-owning inmates would sometimes refuse medication if drowsiness were an expected side effect. You have to be on your game to protect a suit in Rikers. One day, Bargeron was pulled away suddenly to meet with his lawyer and returned to find the suit gone. His outburst of anguish landed him in solitary confinement for the next 10 days—and that was it for his court suit.
This is far from the most gruesome of Buser’s stories, but it’s representative in important ways. In jail, people’s lives revolve around concerns that are as personally momentous as they are weirdly artificial. There’s no good reason (on an island lousy with locks!) why securing a single, essential possession should be so hard. But that’s what happens when your life is ordered in every particular according to the whims of distant bureaucrats. Things stop making sense.
Buser herself isn’t the sort to reflect on the Kafkaesque dimensions of her workplace. She is a cog in the prison-industrial machine, just trying to keep her inmates alive, sane, and properly medicated until they can be sentenced. Quite obviously, she views them more as victims than sinners, and gives them the benefit of every doubt. But one needn’t sympathize with her perspective to find interest here. Facilitating mental health at Rikers is such a farcical exercise that her stories read like a social worker’s edition of Ultimate Ninja Warrior. How do you keep a man healthy and well-adjusted when he lives in a hellhole, and your only tools are a prescription pad and sympathetic ear? Work quickly, because you’re on a tight schedule.
In truth, Buser’s virtues as a narrator stem largely from this shallowness of perspective. We aren’t subjected to social theories or utopian meditations on a society without jails, and Buser says very little about race. Readers looking for rounded perspectives on our corrections system may wish to seek out some complementary narratives, such as Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing (2000) or Pete Earley’s The Hot House: Life in Leavenworth Prison (1992). But Buser has made a real contribution to the literature, particularly at a time when our jails and courts are coming under greater scrutiny.
Americans are becoming uneasy about our jail system, and for understandable reasons. For most people, life behind bars ranges from intensely unpleasant to traumatic—which might be acceptable if we were reasonably confident that all inmates (or at least the vast majority) were guilty of something. With jails, however, that is far from clear: Most prisoners have yet to be convicted of anything and a substantial number of them are mentally ill. (Buser tells of chronically psychotic inmates who pass their days locked in mildewed cells, pacing and muttering to themselves.) Public safety is important, but attention must still be paid to the rights of the accused.
The suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder this past spring offers a disturbing reminder of how little “presumed innocent” means for those who are unable to afford bail. At 16, Browder was accused of a mugging and sent to Rikers. For three years—nearly two of which were spent in solitary confinement—he maintained his innocence and refused to take a plea bargain. Ultimately, the charges were dropped and Browder was released, but his experiences left him emotionally disturbed. From a legal perspective, at the least, he died an innocent man.
Who is to blame for such a miscarriage of justice? It might be comforting to avenge this particular victim by raining fury on some racist prosecutor or corrupt politician. But there are no obvious candidates for such a bloodletting: This is simply the sort of thing that happens when the system gets backed up, as it often does. Prosecutors like to go home at the end of the day, and so do judges. In 2013, the average New York City defendant waited close to two years before going to trial, and for those too poor to afford bail, those months were likely spent on Rikers Island.
Recognizing that jails function largely as holding cells for the possibly guilty and the mentally disturbed, we should care about the inmates’ quality of life. Lockdown on Rikers Island is not a policy manual, but we can glean some relevant insights—especially from Buser’s reflections on the deterioration of living conditions in the mid-1990s, when rates of incarceration started to spike. New Yorkers were rightly grateful to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for making their streets safer, but everything comes at a price. Overcrowded prisons are unpleasant places to live where resources become strained and guards get nervous. In her time, Buser suspected that correctional officers issued gratuitous punishments simply because the solitary confinement unit was large and beds elsewhere were scarce.
The good news is that needed reforms are likely to be mutually reinforcing. Improvements in policing and our courts could make conditions more livable in jails by diminishing overcrowding and freeing resources for remaining inmates. Caution is required here, of course: No one wants to sacrifice hard-won improvements in public safety. But some prudent decriminalization measures might help reduce inmate populations without increasing violent crime. Investing more in law enforcement and in courts might also reduce the strain on jails. Over the longer run, such investments could pay for themselves in diminished incarceration costs.
Rachel Lu is studying prison reform as a Robert Novak journalism fellow.
