 selected writing From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 6) YOU CAN'T HELP BUT GET SICK
18 February 2007 — "The food at Rikers is totally acceptable," I recently quipped to someone, "when consumed as part of a balanced diet." In fact it is anything but. Lunch and dinner are 'heavy on the carbs' meals with few vegetables, usually served cold with uncooked elements. Stale bread accompanies most meals. Vitamin C is seen rarely. Portions are inadequate, leaving you hungry between meals. An example daily menu would look like this: Breakfast Scoop of porridge, cereal, or grits, or small cereal packet. One third of a cup of bad coffee, a half pint of milk, 2 packets of sugar. Apple, orange or banana included sometimes. Lunch
Dinner Scoop of oxtail, beef, or chili stew or chicken patty. Or more hamburger patties. Scoop of tinned green beans. Most likely some or all parts of the meal are cold. Cup of flavored juice-like product. I've never eaten so badly, and so consistently badly, at any other point in the 38 years I've lived. I am going to get sick again. I can feel it happening.  A lot of the detainees on Rikers are people who cannot afford bail like myself but at a whole other level of poverty[1], and many are homeless. This means that there is no money being put into their correctional facility account by relatives or friends outside.Basic primary health care products—soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and shampoo—are scarce and detainees without funds do not have the option of purchasing these products during the weekly trip to the Commissary. The lack of means to keep yourself clean has serious implications in a dorm room situation where many of the detainees are here for the "three hots and a cot" respite from winter streets. This segment of society already suffers a higher than average rate of illness. In a closed environment, with other problematic conditions, the percentage of ill inmates is therefore higher than average. Even during the worst periods in the war zone of Palestine, and there were some very bad times between 1994 and 1998, the subsequent Second Intifada notwithstanding, I was never suffering from skin ailments. Here, three weeks into Rikers, I began to develop eczema on the backs of my hands and wrists. Looking at that, and knowing there was nothing that could be done about it, was very hard to cope with. Looking at what a prisoner must go through to get medical attention on Rikers Island, you have to be completely desperate to seek help. You have to give your jailers 24 hours notice, signing up on a "Sick Call" sheet. At the point the visit to the Medical Clinic is announced the following day, seemingly at a random time decided by your dormitory's Corrections Officers, you are led to the clinic. This might happen during a meal. At the clinic, you will wait in a bullpen/cage with 15 other detainees for hours to hopefully get seen by a doctor, who might show a vague interest, if you're really sick. On the other side of your appointment, it's back to the cage to wait for a Corrections Officer to escort you back to your house. Having experienced the clinic during intake processing at Rikers, I have never got to the point where I was willing to further stress myself out that much, even though I have been sick with some kind of flu for most of my time here. The absolute legal minimum and—I am confident—many points below that bare legal minimum of mandated human care is the reality being practiced on Rikers Island. Several of the old timer inmates have used a familiar international humanitarian legal phrase to describe their treatment here — 'cruel and unusual punishment'. From the terrible food, cold dorms, and inadequate provision of primary healthcare products, to the formulaic medical and psychiatric interviews that take place at the main Medical Clinic, human rights are not respected here. People held involuntarily in a State facility need to not be cold, hungry, and sick because of obvious lacks in basic care offered.
Often, these comments are delivered as screams in your face. The female C.O.s were some of the worst in that regard. During one circular trip to the Manhattan Criminal Court from Rikers Island for a court appearance, I saw three Correction Officers in a jail cell kicking the crap out of one prisoner who had taunted them. Two of the C.O.s assaulting the prisoner—who was no doubt mentally ill—were women. This scene took place in jail cells one floor beneath where the judges sit on their benches in the court. People seem to forget that prisoners are constitutionally "presumed innocent" until they are found guilty in a court of law. In the first three weeks I have been here, I spent two sick, including the current week, and one hovering on the edge of illness. The source during the first week was understandable, given the dirty concrete floor bed for the first three nights and lack of blanket for the first five. Week two I bounced back a little, and the third week has become about the unhealthy environment and cumulative effect of the bad food. It's not as if diseases keep themselves to detainees only. The lack of primary health care products increase illness which passes easily between detainees and Corrections Officers and others on the outside who have contact with the prisoners, such as visitors.
The self-defeating primary healthcare crisis at Rikers is a perfect example of how the penal colony is destructive to society in general. Jail poisons the lives of an 'undesirable' segment of society while enabling us to forget about them by removing them from our gaze. And the poisoning is very real. A trip to the courts in Manhattan can mean a 18-hour journey starting at 4:30AM, through endless hours spent in holding cells at all points in the journey, handcuffed in buses, without adequate food or water. For three minutes in court.[2] This was an important step for me to undertake to get bail reinstated, even though it was reinstated to $8,000, something I can't manage. So there will be further trips to try to get them to bring it down next. Your trip to the moon may be rewarded with a baby step. It's important to get out. Everyone says that your chances of defending yourself from within jail are poor. One friend made the calculation that it was better I stay in Rikers and spend the money on a private lawyer. But with no contact with private lawyers bar theoretical 21 minute phone calls twice a day that I never saw implemented for anyone, a lengthy process to get a short video conference for which you would be cycled through a 4-hour process for 15 minutes of face time, or a hugely expensive physical visit where you get strip searched and dressed in an orange jumpsuit for your visitor. Forget e-mail, faxes, or figuring out the maze in the crowded, loud Law Library. Your lawyer might as well be on the moon. I can't blame the friend. I wouldn't have understood the issues unless I was going through them now. But bail is critical, as it gives you the space and means to fight your case. The lawyer is all well and good, but in the end they rely on you for information. If you're sick or barely reachable on phone (incoming calls are not permitted on Rikers Island) then your defense efforts are terribly hamstrung.
I can actually earn money outside, which will stop the current overall bleeding. This Catch-22 is what effectively disenfranchises the detained poor from adequate legal representation. Courts and trials are hard enough. Adding incarceration to that already full slate, with its accompanying issues of illness, mental and physical stress, the constant threat of physical and sexual violence, and we're in a bad place all round. I'd choose bail and my own resources to help a legal aid lawyer, over incarceration and a private lawyer any day. After all, there's no point in "securing justice" if what crawls out of the cage at the end of the process is an abandoned, beaten shadow of itself. And that's the very real danger in all of this. I can feel jail destroying me, changing me. GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 7) Endnotes 1. Check out this woman, incarcerated in the woman's jail on Rikers Island. Her bail was $1. (Since released. Check out another $1 bail guy here) [Back to where you left off] 2. Life in jail while court processes are going on is a seamless and traumatic whirlwind of 4:30am wake-up calls, long waits in bullpens on Rikers before being handcuffed to random people (sometimes very scary people), being shipped off the island in mobile cages (prison buses), getting put in bullpens at the Manhattan end for indeterminate periods of time, eventually getting led to a small cage behind the court, then getting led into court handcuffed where a guard yells at you if you dare to look back at friends who have turned up. Three minutes later after some more date setting and "we have no deal" stalling by the ADA's office, and you get to go back the same way you came, via multiple bullpens in Manhattan, eventually a bus to Rikers, more bullpens when you get there—sometimes lasting for hours before being let back into your house/dorm. Forget meals. You might get an ugly peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the Manhattan courts. Bullpens are not particularly spacious and can hold up to 100 people at one time, meaning that no matter how exhausted you are, you literally cannot lie down to sleep. The longer the round trip, the more frustrated and psychotic the people around you became, leaving you in a state of constant stress and hyper-vigilance as you wait for violence to erupt or bored and abusive guards to play with you. Watching the guards was like watching zookeepers who hate the animals in their care. There is no timetable, which left you entirely disoriented. And the exhaustion from a round trip carries on to the next day. So it is compounded by multiple trips. I took the round trip (initially not by choice, later by increasing desperation to get out before something terrible happened) to the Manhattan District Court six times while in Rikers, each time an expedition ranging from nine to eighteen hours long. These trips took place on January 31st and February 8th, 13th, 15th, 20th, and 22nd. I only know these dates because I was able to research them after my release. When you're inside the system, especially when you are ill and exhausted, there is no way to keep track of such things. When you are in jail, prison movies and courtroom TV dramas are revealed as the worst kind of bullshit. [Back to where you left off] GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 7) |
