Jarrod Shanahan - Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage

Captives

Captives

How Rikers Island Took
New York City Hostage

Jarrod Shanahan

First published by Verso 2022

Jarrod Shanahan 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-995-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-055-2 (EXPORT)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-998-6 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-997-9 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

Dedicated to Kalief Browder, New Yorks boldest.

Contents

Introduction:
If You Build It,
They Will Fill It

Obscenity

On the evening of September 24, 1954, a woman locked on the fourth floor of New Yorks House of Detention for Women (HDW) was accused of making an obscene comment toward a guard. Escorted to her cell as punishment, the womanidentified by officials only as a narcotic addictloudly denied the charges, protesting the injustice of her treatment. Her defiant clamor fell on sympathetic ears: other women inside rose to her defense, shouting protestations of their own. In response, the guards shut off the lights for the entire floor, much as one might send a recalcitrant child to bed early. Nevertheless, consigned to the dark, the women took to their cell windows, broadcasting rebellion to other floors of HDW. At least one of those floors joined in, while their message reverberated among people in the bustling streets of Greenwich Village below.

For two hours the women set small fires, clanged their metal cups against the bars, and shouted protests to the unruly crowd that gathered on the sidewalk, until the onlookers were forcibly dispersed by a detachment of fifteen cops. The spirited demonstration inside ended only with the arrival of acting jail superintendent Loretta Moran, roused from the comfort of her home by their direct action, who restored the lights. Flanked

As social anthropologist Orisanmi Burton observes, Jails and prisons seek legitimacy through their alleged ability to impose order on captive populations, thereby defending the order of society at large. Incidents like the rebellion at HDW challenge this legitimacy. By shattering the surface order these institutions must display to the broader society, such production of disorder is therefore a powerful weapon for captive populations. In the aftermath of this well-publicized incident, the local press held the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) to account, prompting it to respond directly to the womens charges of poor conditions in the facility with promises of reform.

For its part, DOC blamed the disorder on persistent overcrowding; a lack of medical, psychological, and psychiatric treatment services; untrained staff; and pervasive idleness in the facilitya familiar refrain from jail administrators, leaning heavily on factors that can only be remedied by increases in their own budgets. A subsequent internal investigation reiterated these findings, to which it added two telling details. First, it was commonplace at HDW for women to be denied basic rights, such as visitation, as they suffered the facilitys abysmal conditions. Second, women classified as narcotic addicts suffered the additional indignity of being forced to wear blue chambray dresses that marked them as a particular class of prisoner. Filling out this picture, the New York Herald Tribune reported that, contrary to DOCs claims that the conflict began in a common area, the unrest had actually begun in a room called the Tank, an added level of captivityand indignityfor women deemed narcotic addicts. Responding to media scrutiny, city officials demanded DOC get the situation at HDW under control. The New York City Board of Estimate promptly pivoted, from pleading poverty with regard to the city jails, to discovering $108,794 in available funds, which was passed along to DOC in hopes it would help calm the facility.

As the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South redoubled following World War II, New York City saw a sizeable influx of African American residents, ultimately numbering in the millions. In New York they faced a Northern variety of segregation: marginalization from employment and housing, and criminalization by police, courts, and jails. The typical prisoner at HDW at this time was black, between twenty-five and thirty years of age, hailed from outside of New York State, possessed an elementary school education, and was locked away on charges of disorderly conduct, drug possession, or sex work for an average of five months. These women were designated second-class citizens from birth and denied adequate housing, employment, and treatment before the law; in turn, they were deprived of their freedom for crimes attendant to daily survival. Perhaps they had believed a better life was in store for them in New York City, but HDW made plain a truth that Malcolm X would argue a decade later: If you black you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South As long as you south of the Canadian border, you South.

The reality of life in New York for these women was consignment to the lowest tiers of the labor force, whether in precarious legal employment or the harsh world of informal economies. In either case, they were subjected to perennial harassment by the cops, who represented the social order that simultaneously exploited their labor and made their daily lives as difficult as possible. Once imprisoned, these women struggled to eke out a dignified existence, packed for upward of three years into a cramped and squalid facility never intended for more than temporary detention.

Surely the conditions inside jails constitute social ills sufficient to justify rebellion, but they are only part of the story. The deeper context in which such uprisings unfold is a broader and more complex social terrain: a racialized social order defined by human disposability and held together by violence. When carceral facilities are thus situated, the question begging explanation is not Why do people sometimes rebel? but Why, most of the time, dont they?

A Monument to Those Who Conceived It

The setting of these dramatic events was a twelve-story facility overlooking Sixth Avenue, resembling an art deco high-rise and marked simply Number Ten Greenwich Avenue. Though nondescript by design, the facility nonetheless stood out. The idea was to make it look not like a jail at all but like a new apartment building, writes essayist Tom Wolfe. In the place of bars there are windows with a heavy grillwork holding minute square panes. The panes are clouded, like cataracts. Actually, the effect is more like that of the power plant at Yale University, which was designed to resemble a Gothic cathedral, but, in any case, it does not look like a jail. HDW was adjacent to the Jefferson Market Court in Greenwich Village, known for lively night sessions revolving around illicit street life, especially sex work. While the jail had become notorious in New York City long before the events of 1954, like many jails and prisons, its life began as product of a hard-fought campaign by Progressive Era reformers, including the local temperance movement and the Womens Prison Association.