Rikers

I'll ask my three guests, each of whom is immersed in issues of criminal justice and incarceration, if what happened to Robert Hinton at Rikers couldn't also happen at a smaller jail in any one of our five boroughs.

Johnny Perez, who you met through the film, now directs the U.S. prisons program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

He serves on the New York City Bar Association's Correction and Reentry Committee.

Stanley Richards is the executive vice president of the Fortune Society, which helps people re-enter successfully into society.

He's a member of New York City's Board of Corrections and serves on the independent commission, which last year, recommended closing Rikers.

Michael Jacobson also serves on the commission.

In the late 1990s he was New York City's Correction Commissioner, and he was president of the Vera Institute of Justice before joining the City University of New York to help create the Institute for State and Local Governance.

Welcome.

So, Michael, what's your answer to the question, couldn't what happened to Robert Hinton happen at a smaller jail?

Yes, but I think you need to do two things in tandem to keep that from happening.

One, where there's a lot of public discussion, actually closing Rikers, getting off opening smaller, more humane, more well-designed jails in the boroughs.

But that in and of itself won't do it.

What you also have to do simultaneously is work on changing the organizational culture of how corrections officers and staff does their job.

What are the guiding principles?

How do they think about corrections?

And ultimately, it has to be a system that's based on the notion of human dignity.

When I think about what makes Rikers Rikers, right, you know, talks about, you know, the culture.

For me specifically the culture of violence that happens at Rikers Island I had not seen it anywhere else, and I've visited jails all over the country.

When you think about what makes Rikers Rikers, right, the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, you know.

And then you -- you couple that with the fact that four smaller jails, right, increases -- increases transparency.

Therefore -- and therefore accountability where people have more access to their family -- What do you mean transparency?

Transparency means that it's really hard to find out what's going on inside of Rikers Island sometimes.

Right now, one of the reasons that Rikers is Rikers is because it's so far away.

It's kind of tucked away somewhere.

By putting it right inside the city, by making it visible, by making it more accessible not only to the family members but also to treatment centers and other reentry organizations, right, that in itself increases transparency.

You know, and -- and again, once, when we see, where we see increased transparency, we also see increased accountability.

We can't fix a problem that we don't know that's happening.

Well, I think there has to be a fundamental shift in terms of the way correction officers view their work and the tools that they're given to go about their work.

Part of what we put in the Lippman report was a number of things.

Recommending the closure.

Recommending the closure of Rikers.

One, we recommended, we got to create diversion programs, really looking at using that resource of incarceration only for those we feel like we cannot manage safely in the community.

But for the majority of people, they could be managed in the community underneath -- where they're receiving services, where they're engaging -- with resources that they need to get a job, to access housing, to get into treatment, mental healthcare.

Being able to do that, diverting them from the jails.

Then the second thing we need to do is, the department needs to change their approach to corrections.

Like, how do you do, what is their role in corrections?

Right now, it's care, custody and control, and I think that has to shift to, "We are correctional professionals where we are providing care, custody, control and support so that people don't come back to Rikers or jails."

So, Michael, how -- how does a smaller jail create change for, in the culture of the Department of Corrections, the officers who Stanley's talking about?

Well, I think a couple of ways.

But it's also true that a smaller jail alone won't completely change the culture.

You have to do more work than just build and design smaller borough jails.

Although as both Johnny and Stanley are saying, it's incredibly important to have jails in the boroughs and not on Rikers.

In and of itself, that increase in accountability and transparency is hugely important.

I mean, Rikers is a penal colony that no one can see.

And that's not good for inmates or -- or staff.

I mean, this is a public service that taxpayers pay $2 billion a year for in New York City, and they have to see it.

They have to know what's going on.

But the other answer to your question is that, in addition to not just smaller jails, but well-designed jails -- jails that have light, that are designed in a very humane way -- will go only so far.

As Stanley is saying, you have to do work through training, through recruitment, through fine-tuning who's assigned to what kind of jobs.

To start to change the organizational principles of how correction professionals do their job, how they see their job, what the principles of their job are.

That is hugely important work to move from here to there.

You know, I'd like to add to that.

You know, I served 13 years in prison, and I'm gonna tell you, I've met correction officers who act one way in one prison.

And when you see them in another prison, they're completely laid back.

How so?

What's the difference?

Because of the norms that's happening within the facility.

And what, and I'm gonna tell you right now today in my current role, when I talk to, you know, correction officers who are about to start working on the island, they talk as if they're about to go into war, because of the -- the symbolism and the -- and the ideology of what it even means to work on Rikers.

Like, you're going into the battlefield.

And what do we do on a battlefield?

We attack other people.

We protect ourselves.

It's like this, we, you know, there-- there's no compassion on the battlefield.

You know, the culture of violence is embedded within those walls, right?

When you go there, you automatically expect that certain things are gonna happen because of where we're at.

And Rikers is sort of like that.

When you go there, you kind of expect that certain things are gonna happen because this is Rikers.

Or what it's become to be known as, you know?

You know, I always say, "Hurt people hurt people."

And when you have an institution that everything about that institution is -- minimizes who p-- the people that are detained there are, minimizes those that have to work there.

When you have those kind of institutions, you get just what happens.

Hurt people hurt people.

But the other thing we're saying is that, we need to change the way correction officers both view themselves and their work, and we need to change the way they get trained.

Right now, 40% of the folks who are on Rikers have a mental health diagnosis or a mental health con-- concern.

Are we training our officers to deal with that population?

Probably not.

What we need to do is be looking at, okay, who's in our jails and how do we train the officers to be able to work with them?

Right.

In a perfect world, you wouldn't have these folks in a jail or in a prison.

So, in -- in nations that have the sort of best practice and best sort of stuff, the Scandinavia, the countries like Germany -- you know, they have a separate, forensic mental health system.

That once there's a diagnosis of someone who is charged with committing a criminal act of a mental health condition, they're diverted to another system entirely.

Differently trained professionals.

Correct.

It's essentially, it's -- it's a health sys-- it's a forensic health system.

So that's a missing piece of our system, and ultimately, I think, and this is not just a New York issue.

This is a national issue.

Ultimately, you have to think about having different sorts of systems other than incarcerated systems.

You want to divert as many of these folks from incarceration as you can, you know, because incarceration in and of itself can make you crazy.

Right?

And it usually will exacerbate, you know, any issues you have coming in.

So, if you don't have to be there, don't be there.

Be supervised in the community, at home, in some community facility.

You're talking about nonviolent crimes and lesser mis-- Correct.

But you're, in the end, you're gonna have some folks with mental health issues.

And I think that then goes to what Stanley's talking about.

You need a different kind of training, maybe even a different sort of qualification for officers who deal with that.

Because, you know, there's all sorts of reasons for violence, but you can imagine, for correction officers who are used to working in this paramilitary environment, you know, giving an order to someone to move, and then someone not doing it.

Well, there may be 100 reasons you're not doing it, but one is, you may be mentally ill. And it's not that you're sort of disobeying a direct order or disrespecting an officer.

It's a symptom of mental illness.

Even those sorts of things, you have to have trained professionals.

And it does -- it does inevitably make the job of a correction officer much harder, much more difficult, and they should be highly trained, well-paid folks.

This is a hard job.

I hear you, but all of us have heard these complaints -- fears of everyday people who say, "But I don't want incarcerated people in my backyard, and I don't want people with mental illness in my backyard either."

I think a lot of their fears is unrealistic and not based on any facts, When you think, when I talk about people who say, "Well, we don't want these folks in our backyard," you know, I think about how we live in a society that likes to "otherize" and tries to push people away, especially those who are most impacted and most vulnerable instead of pushing us, or drawing us up closer, you know?

What we're talking about is building jails in the communities from which the people who are arrested in those communities will be housed, where they can get their fair share and their fair day in court and be held accountable for whatever they did.

And we should then say, as we get a smaller system, a smaller criminal justice system when we're spending $2 billion, how do we take the savings from that and reinvest in those communities?

Because the reality of it is, the communities hardest hit by crime and incarceration are the poorest, are the margin-- most marginalized communities.

And we need to really address that.

And so, the question I would say is, what is our reinvestment to those communities?

I think it's important to realize, especially when you're talking about a jail, and Rikers has almost 60,000 admissions a year.

These folks are from our communities.

That's where they're from.

These are our sons and daughters, our children.

They live in our neighborhoods.

Most of them are there pretrial.

That is, they're not convicted of anything.

Like, they're already here.

They're our neighbors.

And what you don't want is to have people go there and come out worse.

And why would you want someone to come back worse than when they went in?

How do detainees talk to their lawyers at Rikers?

It's very difficult.

Lawyers hate going out to Rikers.

Right?

It's an all-day affair.

It's sort of a miserable process.

And so, what a lot of lawyers do is wait till their clients get taken down to court, another miserable process to get people from Rikers, down to court.

Cross that one bridge.

Well, you have to wake these folks up early at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

I mean, it really is a horrible process that, if you have to make 10 or 12 court appearances for your case, which is not at all unusual in New York, it's not great.

And so, they try to catch their clients at the courthouse when they're on a trip.

It's one of the many advantages.

If you had borough-based facilities near courts, it would make seeing your attorneys, your families, your support networks so much easier.

So it's very difficult.

You wake up about 4: 00 in the morning, you know.

You may or may not have toothpaste.

You may be able to use a shower or not.

But you're put inside of another larger bullpen, which may -- it may have 20 to 50 men in there who are also going through the same thing.

This is all before 5: 00 in the morning.

You get fed a cold breakfast, and then you wait for the correction officer to come chain you up, you know.

And you're basically shackled at the leg to another person.

You're shackled at the waist.

You know, and then you wait.

You wait for a long time or what feels to be a long time, and you finally get to court about 8:00, 9:00 in the morning.

And then you wait.

You know, you wait, you wait, you wait.

You may see your lawyer, you may not see your lawyer.

You know, you might not see your lawyer until you finally get out there in front of the judge, you know, when the lawyer just asks you a quick question.

And you have to be able to answer it.

If you even have, you know, the mental capacity to do so.

And I can tell you, you know, I spent from '86 to '88 going back and forth to court on Rikers Island, over 2 1/2 years, ended up getting sentenced to nine years.

And in all that time, I went to court about once a month, I've never seen my lawyer out on Rikers Island.

The only time I'd seen my lawyer, when I was standing in front of the judge for the three minutes.

Once they take you out from the bullpen, you stand in front of the judge, they look at their calendar.

They say they're not ready.

They look for a date.

They give the date.

They say, "Adjourned."

And you're back inside.

You don't get to talk to your lawyer.

You don't get to plan -- That's the first time you saw your lawyer?

When you were standing in front of -- My lawyer never came to see me on Rikers Island.

There was never time when we really sat down and we talked and we strategized and we talked about my defense.

So, going through all of this, you know, no wonder people plead to crimes they don't commit.

No wonder that people take copouts that say, "Well, you know what?

Let me just, I'll take any amount of time that I need to get just to get out of here now, just to get out of here today."

And for me that was true a lot of different times.

And if you look at Kalief Browder's story.

Kalief Browder, who committed suicide after being held for three years.

That's right.

That's exactly what they were attempting to do.

They were attempting to drag it out so long that he would plead.

And he actually said "I'm not gonna break down and plea, because I didn't do it.

I'm not gonna break down and plea."

And they actually put him in front of a judge and she was called "The Closer."

And she was the one who -- They would put people before her to try to get them to do plea deals.

And if you've been in long enough, and you're tired of going to court once a month, twice a month, getting up at 3:00, spending all day in cells, it's called "bullpen therapy."

Sending -- Spending all day in bullpens.

You get tired enough, you just say, "You know what?

I'll take the plea."

And the thing is, you don't want to go back.

So, you say, "Yes, whatever's gonna get me out of here now."

Now I tell you, I used to -- I tell you, you know, I used to go to sleep plugging tissue in my ears because I was afraid that roaches would crawl in my ears.

I used to hang my commissary off the ceiling because the rats would get to it, you know.

And, you know, we live in a city where there's rats and you stomp your feet and they run.

On Rikers Island, you stomp your feet and the rats are not going anywhere.

Like, "We live here too."

So, you know, when you think about, you know, you take the structural environment.

And then you take the psychological warfare that goes on not only every day that you go to court, but just every day just being on Rikers Island, it's pain.

It's psychological pain, it's physical pain, and we'll do anything to make the pain stop, even if that means plea bargaining to an exuberant sentence that is unfair and unjust, just to get off of Rikers Island.

What about families coming to visit you?

How does the remoteness and isolation of Rikers affect...?

I tell you, every time my mother had to come visit me on Rikers Island, she had to take a day off from work.

So, she's automatically losing money just to come to see me.

And then when she finally does get into the ri-- Rikers Island, it'll probably take her eight to nine hours to actually even get on the visiting floor.

I remember one particular time, my mother waited eight hours to get in Rikers Island.

She would not leave the line, because she didn't want to lose her place.

So, she couldn't even use the bathroom.

By the time she sat down, the correction officer came to the, to our table and said, "I'm sorry, but your visit is over in 15 minutes."

And she's like, "I just got here.

I've been on line for eight hours."

He said, "I'm sorry, visits are over at 8:00.

You have -- There's nothing I can do.

This is, you know, this is our policy."

And I think about, not only what did that do to me, you know, going back to my cell angry, disappointed, feelings of hopelessness, you know, as a 16-, 17-year-old, but also for my mother.

Because that is a traumatizing experience having to visit somebody not only in jail but specifically have to visit someone on Rikers Island.

And when I was out there, one of the things -- my father came out to see me once.

And I said, "Don't come back."

I didn't want my family to go through that.

They have to travel -- I'm from the Bronx -- They had to travel from the Bronx to Queens.

Then you have to go through the search process.

Then you have to wait for a facility bus.

Then you get to the facility.

You go through another search process.

It just takes a whole day to go visit a loved one.

And I felt like, my father and my family did nothing to deserve what happens to family members when they come and visit.

So, I said, "Don't even bother to visit."

This is a hugely important issue.

And those kind of connections, those kind of family connections are not just emotionally important at the time for someone who's in.

But again, all research and common sense will say, those sorts of connections are incredibly important to sort of long-term sort of recidivism reductions not coming back.

You know, maintaining those kinds of relationships is amazingly important.

And again, if you have a place in the borough near transportation, near downtown where you can make it easier for family members to come, it's important beyond the obvious emotional connections.

And what we hope is that by building smaller, more technology-based jails in the communities, that we offer both the officers and the detainees a space that allows for accountability, allows for healing, allows for access and resources, so people can change their lives.

What we're really talking about is shrinking our criminal justice system, so those who really don't need to be there shouldn't be there.

And those who have to be there can be there and be held in humane facilities.

Does the isolation of Rikers affect the reentry into society?

Is it harder because of what happened at Rikers to get back in?

Absolutely.

Here's what you need to do in order to survive in Rikers.

You need to forget about everything that's on the outside.

You don't count days.

You don't count weeks.

You don't count months, because it'll drive you crazy.

So, you have to forget about everything that's in the community.

You have to focus everything about what's happening in the facility.

The officers who will be nice, the officer who are -- will be aggressive and abusive.

The inmates who have power.

How do you move in the facility?

How do you get access to what you need?

All your concentration is about survival while you're incarcerated.

When you get out, there's no planning about, "What do I do when I get out?

How do I get access?"

We've gotten much better.

At Fortune Society, we have a discharge planning program where we work with people on Rikers and transition them back into the community.

But for the most part, people don't just turn on what it takes to survive on Rikers and then turn it off when they come home.

That on button is still on.

Jonathan Lippman, the chairman of your commission, I think he once told me that it takes $30 million a year just to move inmates, detainees, prisoners from one place to another.

What about the total cost of Rikers?

And how will that be affected by smaller jails in four or five boroughs?

Well, that's one of the biggest pieces of this, of the report's recommendations is that right now Rikers Island, where it costs roughly about $300,000 a year to house someone there, and it also when you look at the total number of staff has the highest staff-to-inmate ratio I believe of any system in the world.

So on the one hand, it's hugely resourced.

On the other hand, it's sort of full of these problems.

But what that does get you when you can imagine a new world of a system half the size as it is now, which is what we're recommending, plus a system of smaller, more efficient jails, is that you actually get huge savings.

So, the commission estimated that even though the new facilities would cost a billion to $1.1 billion a year, we estimate you'll save about $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion a year in staffing and operational cost.

That's a lot of money to potentially reinvest in all sorts of community-based programs that can even further increase public safety.

And the human cost, right?

You know, like we like, you know, we talk dollars and cents because it makes sense to us.

But sometimes also thinking about it in terms of like humanity and how, you know, the families that have been impacted by the people, by, you know, by having their loved ones that's incarcerated, by everything that goes on, on Rikers Island, and having stronger family ties, that in itself, you know, is a reinvestment back in the community.

And when you think about that I can take, for the amount of money that we spend per person per year at Rikers, I could take my 17-year-old daughter and send her to Harvard for an entire full ride, you know?

So again, like, we have to also think about the human cost about this thing.

And then not only that, but also the likelihood that people will be able to come back into a society with their families.

The human toll is that you decrease someone's capacity to feel, someone's capacity to emotionally engage, and you decrease someone's capacity to be successful when they reintegrate back into the community.

The more you show people or you treat people like they are caged animals, people learn how to live like that.

Let me ask each of you, play architect for a moment.

Is there one design that you would suggest, one principle of design that you would suggest that would improve a jail?

I'll tell you, I would make, if I had the magic wand, I would make, well, one, I wouldn't even call it a jail, because that in itself, right.

I would definitely rename it.

But also, it would be as similar as, you know, what life would be like on the outside, you know.

And what that means is that there's grass, there's vibrant colors.

You know, there, the cells may be structured in such a way or the rooms may be structured in such a way where to have contact with other people who are also being detained or, you know, going through their own trials and tribulations.

It would smell a whole lot differently.

It wouldn't smell like Lysol or whatever disinfectant they use.

You know, and more importantly, I would have meaningful human contact with everyone, not only the people who are there being detained but even with the correction officers, even if we even name them correction officers.

We can reimagine the entire thing.

I think the important thing to think about when you're thinking of design is that, design follows program.

Right?

There's no design in and of itself.

You really have to imagine, as Johnny was saying, how is this jail going to work?

What are you gonna do inside the jail?

Are you gonna have meaningful contact between officers and inmates?

Are you gonna have pr-- programs of all sorts, education programs, health programs, mental health treatment, work training, et cetera?

How do you do that?

How do you deliver it in a way that makes sense?

You want to have a facility where people sort of live together.

There's some sense of actual community.

They eat together right there.

They sort of function as neighbors.

That there's programs available, either right in that space or right over there.

They're interacting with correction officers regularly, so it's not a changing cast of characters who you don't know.

But all that follows what you're gonna do when you're in.

In addition to all the architectural principles of, make it light, make it normal, make it less noisy.

You have to combine the two, and when you do, you get a very, very different place than you do now.

That's exactly right.

And I would say a design principle is humanity.

So, looking at how all of the elements of the jail facility interact with each other and interact with the people who are using it.

So, as Michael said, light, color, furniture, movement, accessibility, community.

Those are all the things we need to be thinking about when we talk about design.

Because that's what communicates both to the officers who have to manage the jails, and the detainees who have to be there while their day in court is being processed.

So humanity has to be at the forefront of everything we build into our new facilities.

There are people of the old school, "lock them up," who are gonna be listening to you, and they're gonna be saying, "Oh, they've cre-- cre-- they've committed an offense against society, and they're expecting to go to a three-star hotel when they are incarcerated?"

I hear that all the time, and my response to that is that, you know, for me, I'm not -- I'm not arguing that we should not be holding people accountable for their actions.

What I'm saying is that we should treat them humanely in the course of holding people accountable.

That's one.

Two, oftentimes, we look at an individual's behavior without looking at the system that influenced the behavior of that individual.

So, for example, I think about this client who was released at dead smack of winter, 20 degrees with no coat right from Rikers Island.

Right?

He's released without no medication.

He's being ver-- he's very symptomatic.

He goes, he steals a coat, gets arrested.

In the courtroom, everyone would say, "Well, this guy's a criminal.

We can't let him out.

Look, he just came out of Rikers Island, he's already stealing a coat."

No one asked the more systemic question which is, why is he being released without a coat?

And you know, at Fortune Society, we say "treat people the way you want to be treated."

Anybody watching this, all you have to do is ask yourself, "If my loved one, if my brother, my sister, my father, my uncle was arrested," I'd want them, I want him to be held accountable, but I also want him to be treated fairly.

I'd also want him to be detained in a place that doesn't diminish him.

I also want him to be detained, if he has to be detained, in a place that is a place that he could rebuild his life.

First of all, we're talking about a jail here.

So this shouldn't be about punishment.

These are pretrial detainees.

These are people who've not been found guilty of anything.

75% of the people at Rikers right now have not been... Right.

So, punishment should, punishment isn't an issue here.

Right?

The only reason anyone should ever be in a jail pretrial is because beyond, you know, any reasonable doubt, you're a severe flight risk or you're a severe threat to public safety.

If none -- if those two things aren't true, you shouldn't be in a jail.

But then, one of the reasons the best systems in the world are the best systems, and they are not in the United States.

We are not a nation of best practice in this area.

But when you, you know, talk about Scandinavia or some of the European countries.

It's because the way they see this is, the punishment is that you've been sentenced.

Let's not take jail at the moment.

You've been sentenced to prison.

That's the punishment.

That is the punishment.

You've been taken out of your community.

You're away from your family.

You're essentially living in this environment where, you know, your movements are incredibly constrained.

But once you're there, there's no need to heap on punishment on top of what really is the most severe punishment, which is you're now in a place that you can't leave.

Was the Lippman Commission hopeful when it finished the report and the hearings and recommended the closing of Rikers?

Very hopeful.

So much so that our work is continuing.

We're actually reconvening as a group to figure out, how do we support and encourage and motivate local government as well as state government to implement the full set of recommendations coming out of the Lippman Commission?

Because remember, we made a series of recommendations.

One is reducing the population.

Two is, what to do by closing Rikers and building the jails in the community?

And three, what do we do with Rikers Island itself after we close those jails?

We have 400 acres of land.

What do we do with that land?

So we're still gonna be working together to figure out how to fully implement the plan.

Stanley Richards, Michael Jacobson, and Johnny Perez, thank you very much.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Thank you.