The Island
A history of Rikers.
By Kay Gabriel
The Nation
May 19th, 2022
esperation, decay, and violence are far from exceptional for Rikers. The island—which hosts eight of New York City’s jails and the nearly 6,000 people caged in them—has become synonymous with ruinously brutal carceral practices and inhumane facilities. But by the summer of last year, the chaos and disorganization of the Covid-19 pandemic had degraded living conditions considerably for the island’s prisoners. A delegation of state elected officials, visiting the complex to document the crisis in September 2021, witnessed prisoners in desperate conditions: floors strewn with garbage and human waste, vermin infestations, sick prisoners abandoned without access to medical care, an attempted suicide. A mass sick-out policy—wherein thousands of guards simultaneously coordinated taking medical leave—had badly intensified the situation: New York City’s phenomenally well-resourced jails, where correction officers significantly outnumber prisoners, appeared to be badly understaffed. By year’s end, 16 people had died in the custody of the city’s Department of Correction (DOC), some from medical neglect, some from suicide, all while the city’s jail population crept up to pre-pandemic levels and vaccination rates among prisoners remained alarmingly low.
The jail complex represents such an affront that it is currently slated to close by the end of 2027, though this closure is contingent on the city’s construction of four new skyscraper jails. So it’s ironic that, as anti-jail organizers often say and as geographer Jarrod Shanahan firmly establishes, Rikers itself has its origins in a liberal attempt to reform the city’s preexisting carceral facilities and practices.
Shanahan’s new book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, traces in detail the competing political agendas that produced Rikers, following the history of the city’s jails from the 1950s up through the end of Ed Koch’s mayoral administration. Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing question—why did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States?—by asking, and answering, several others.
How and why did New York City begin to confine its captive population to a formation of rock and landfill floating in the East River? Who was this population, and how did it transform from majority white at the opening of the Rikers Penitentiary in 1932 to majority Black and Puerto Rican by the 1970s? How and why did the city turn to arrest and detention as a means of disciplining this population, rocked earlier and harder by the effects of deindustrialization and unemployment than the rest of the city? How did the city’s correction officers acquire the massive political power they currently enjoy—able to undertake unauthorized work stoppages without the repercussions that successfully keep nearly all other public employees in New York State in check? And what does this history of failure and its human cost tell us about the fate of future efforts, however humanely intended, to reform New York City’s jails?
Captives in that sense is more than a history of Rikers: It chronicles the transformations of finance, industry, race relations, and political consciousness that made the jail complex possible in the first place. Shanahan documents the tumultuous second half of the 20th century in New York City—the fading glow of the New Deal; the rise of Black Power and the New Left; the near-total exit of the city’s manufacturing capital, and the subsequent capture of the political apparatus by the banking and real estate sector; the imposition of austerity policies following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s—from the standpoint of the city’s jails, as well as the people warehoused within and fighting to get out of them. “Rikers absorbs the symptoms of social problems the city is unwilling to address at their root,” Shanahan argues. By following the history of the city’s jail system, including but not only its most infamous outcropping, Shanahan makes it possible to see in greater clarity the social relations and competing political trajectories that defined the fate of postwar New York City.
In particular, Shanahan documents two opposed but mutually reinforcing traditions: the liberal reforms that he calls “penal welfarism” on the one hand, and the more straightforwardly punitive agendas that over the course of the 1960s congealed into the law-and-order coalition on the other. Although these traditions “remained two distinct visions of the postwar order,” Shanahan’s project in a sense is to demonstrate the major role of liberal reformism both in creating the Rikers Island complex, with its perpetual state of humanitarian crisis, and in advancing the law-and-order political consensus that ultimately dominated city politics for decades. In a grim, ironic reversal, penal welfarism created much of the physical and political infrastructure of the city’s carceral apparatus and also fueled the development of the coalition that would eventually reject jail reform in full.
