Graham Rayman - Rikers: An Oral History

Theres only one way to get on Rikers Island and one way to get offa narrow, forty-two-hundred-foot-long bridge spanning a part of the East River. At the ribbon cutting in 1966, Mayor John Lindsay called it the Bridge of Hope. Forty years later, in 2006, the rapper Flavor Flav dubbed it the Bridge of Pain.

Purchased from the Rikers family in 1884 for $180,000 (about $5.1 million today), it began life in the nineteenth century as a motley assortment of jails and workhouses, or debtors prisons. Using fill from the construction of the Manhattan street grid, the city expanded the island from 87 acres to roughly 415 acres.

It was also a massive garbage dump. Residents of Hunts Point in the Bronx could smell it from their homes a mile away, and Upper East Siders could easily see the flames from the burning of mountains of trash. Enormous clouds of rats populated the dump to the point where they challenged dogs, and humans, for control of the island.

Even today, Rikers remains landfill to a depth of roughly ten feet, based on borings conducted in 2009. They drilled a bunch of holes and all ten feet were garbage, mixed sand with pieces of glass and brick, pieces of woodeverything you can imagine that would be thrown away as materials from a construction site was in there, explained Dr. Byron Stone, research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The first jail at Rikers, in the modern understanding of the place, was born in the spirit of reform. In July 1928, seven years after Vincent Gilroys broadside, the city fathers unveiled their plan for the Rikers Island Penitentiary. The New York Times described it as a model prison that would correct the evils of the past.

The inscription, placed in 1933, read, Those who are laying this cornerstone todayhope that the treatment which these unfortunates will receive in this institution will be the means of salvaging some lives which would otherwise have been wasted.

As the decades passed, this purported icon of penology became a forbidding place indeed. Detainees were thrown or jumped from the upper tiers to their deaths, so those floors had to be closed.

Violence ruled.

And over time, it became known by the jailed as the House of Dead Men.

But the city stuck with Rikers as the place to leave the people society had deemed worthy of incarceration, the vast majority poor and of color. It was out of sight, hard for visitors to reach, closed, and foreboding.

For some of the hundreds of thousands of souls who have made the passage over the past five decades, a trip to Rikers may be the first time they will sleep somewhere away from home. For others, its their only chance for a bed and a warm meal. For some, it might be the place where they find themselves fighting for their lives. And still others may never make it out. The memories of their first day on Rikers are ingrained in the minds of the people who worked, visited, and served time there.

Its an experience no one forgets.

GRACE PRICE, detained 2011: They literally arraigned me at midnight. It was me and three other people on the bus to Rikers. There was this little crackhead lady falling asleep on my shoulder on the way across the bridge. She was nasty, but I just let her sleep there because it somehow made me feel like I was actually in control of my situation.

COLIN ABSOLAM, detained 1993 to 1996: Going back and forth on those DOC buses over that bridge was traumatic. The bridge is very narrow, and youre caged up, shackled. If the bus happened to go off that bridge and fall into the water, everyone would die. I mean the correction officers would get out, but youre in a cage. They would have to open the cage and get the shackles off. There wouldnt be enough time to do that before you drowned.

GRACE PRICE: The guards on the bus were horrible, and I just kind of sat there quietly sobbing. The guards hated me for that because they dont like to hear a hysterical woman.

YUSEF SALAAM, detained 1989 to 1994, Central Park 5 case: I cant really describe in words this horror and this horrible feeling coupled with that horror, but it had a lot to do with the smell of the place. Were talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one. And one of the first encounters I had with somebody coming up to me while I was inside the holding cell, they were asking me to check out my watch, and I didnt realize this, but they were trying to steal the watch from me.

And I remember [the Central Park 5 co-defendant] Antron [McCray] saying, No, dont let them check your watch out, man. You know what Im saying? Like theyre trying to get you, this is a trick, you know?

DONOVAN DRAYTON, detained 2007 to 2012: I was nineteen years old. Id never been through prison before. Ive been through some difficult things, but walking into the unknown and not knowing whats waiting for you, its one of the scariest things. And once you actually get inside and see how its running and operating, the environment and all the chaos, youre just like, Wow, this is a whole nuther world.