 Want an e-mail when there's something new? Join the e-mail news list today! selected writing From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Series Epilogue) EPILOGUE I was finally bailed out of Rikers Island on February 23rd, by an old friend, Ken Harper, who flew in from Colorado. Paying bail for someone is a process as fraught as that which goes on inside the walls, out of sight. Ken got a taste of what was going on that evening.
The computer at the Rikers Island bail office, across the bridge from Queens, had me listed in the computer as "sentenced"[1], which of course was impossible, as there had been no trial or any admission of guilt. So there were delays. As you can see from the above sheet, bail was only finally able to be paid at 5:07PM on February 23rd, already over 24 hours after I had been told in court that I could pay bail and leave immediately, and over 24 hours after a friend had first tried, to be told that "the documentation hadn't arrived."
It was yet another long trek through medical and regular bullpens on the island. The last person I saw on Rikers who I knew was another guy from my dorm—a large black guy called "UN" who had just got the word "POWER" tattooed on his shoulders a few days ago by the guy in the next bed. He had some sage advice: "Yo shellshock—stay out of the Middle East, nigger." After the jail psychiatrist signed their final forms ("No I still didn't feel like hurting anybody, nor myself, but I might be tempted to if y'all don't get me the fuck out of here. And no, the only voice I'm hearing is the one of that strange tutu-wearing roasted chicken that has been singing to me in my dreams"), I was returned to the intake bullpens. I was DNA-ed[2] in the intake area and, after an excruciating wait of another hour during which C.O.s taunted us with "I think there's one last bus coming tonight but you might need to wait until tomorrow", I was finally driven in a prison bus from the Island, over the bridge, to the exit center in Queens. We were not handcuffed for this journey. I had told Ken not to bother to wait after hearing via a phone call that he had posted bail at 5pm, as it would no doubt take hours. I was right. On the city bus to the subway, the only other prisoner released at the same time told me that the previous time he had spent on Rikers Island—for several months—was far easier to bear than this jail time, which was only for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it just works that way. "Hard time" is a very subjective experience and bears no relation to the actual passage of time. It had been a completely exhausting two months for me too. I was sick and tired. A homeless guy interrupted my thoughts as he tried to beg from me. "Dude, I just got off Rikers" I told him. "Oh! Sorry man! You have a good night" he said, and took off. I didn't ask him if he'd ever seen the inside of "The Rock". I didn't need to. THE SCUM OF THE EARTH, THE REFUSE OF THE WORLD* Walking out on the streets of New York—"free"—I felt irrecoverably hobbled and totally caged by the two-month-long omnipresent expression of hatred by the New York mental health and criminal justice system, and by the people who had incited, approved of, and ultimately worshiped that system as it carried out its dark task on my soul.
Everything was transformed into a big bleeding violation. Even my sense of privacy of thought was totally violated—the State had a copy of every digital file I owned, and therefore had access to every private thought expressed in writing, or to friends over e-mail, from the last decade. I knew that this was no big deal on the question of whether their haul would give them any 'incriminating material', but it was a very, very big deal to have your thoughts quite literally in the hands of the police, especially having already been a victim of political violence in the Middle East. The State they began with as their instrument of revenge physically kidnapped me, placed me in a situation where my life was under threat on a daily basis, and finished this off with a violation of my home, private life, and reputation that left me living with profound post-traumatic symptoms identical—I later confirmed—to those experienced by rape victims. In their misdemeanor charges, I had literally and ludicrously been accused of "threatening" and planning to "harm", "kidnap" and "rape" them (apparently these are standard formulations for harassment charges).[3] Yet the State, apparently, was not a satisfactory enough tool of revenge. Months after I was released from jail and living 1,200 miles away they also felt it necessary to circle through the Arab community into which I had poured almost two decades of my work and life, telling people I was "dangerous" and a "predator". The irony, of course, was that they had just done to me what they had baselessly claimed I was planning to do to them. By this point, there was no doubt in my mind who was truly dangerous in this story, who the predators were, and which one of us had been made into prey. How to begin to process such a big lie?  There is no way they could have got as far as they did the police without resorting to gross exaggeration and lies. And they were way stretching it. One early version of a charge sheet I heard read out in court quoted some lyrics I had sent someone. As it was being read out, a woman in the court gallery behind me inadvertently gasped out loud, with a wistful quality to her voice, "Oh! That sounds like poetry!" It was totally fucking surreal. I needed to get as far away from them and NYC as possible. But I had a house to empty out first. As I walked out into the city that first night I realized—behind the curtain that all the smiling couples and other Friday night revelers around me still trusted in—that this civilization, its government, and its civilians had been revealed as accomplices in something utterly sinister. The next day I tossed my prison clothes in the garbage, bought a new cellphone to replace the one the police seized, and went with three friends to empty out my home into a Manhattan storage unit.
After what was left of my stuff was safely stored, I rang my landlady, apologized for the lack of warning, booked a flight home, and gratefully left New York behind. My safe place was an artists' cooperative 1,200 miles away in Minnesota, a community where I had lived in close contact with people for 4 years. How it ended On November 26th, 2007, I was finally done with trips back and forth to New York at a final court appearance. The verdict? No criminal record.[4] For webmasters wishing to link to this journal series, the permanent link is http://nigelparry.com/from-ramallah-to-rikers-island/ Related Links Endnotes 1. Similarly, the NYC court system database had me listed, at one point, as having committed a "felony" instead of a "misdemeanor". Kafkaesque doesn't begin to cover it. [Back to where you left off] 2. "Getting your DNA taken" means getting ID-ed thoroughly so the prison administrators are sure that they are releasing or transferring the right person. [Back to where you left off] 3. At one point during the trips I was forced to make to New York for subsequent court dates, I got word of a threat of violence towards me from men that these women had incited. The hypocrisy was beyond belief. With what I had experienced first-hand of the criminal justice system, I knew it would just take a single phone call and lie, and I would be shipped right back to that graveyard of forgotten souls floating in the dirty waves off the Queens shoreline. As a result, during all of the mandated court appearances (primarily to set dates for more court appearances), I made sure to have a witness/bodyguard with me 24/7, every time. It really was that ugly. E-mails had been and would be circulated on public discussions lists, saying the same, by people who had never even met me—libeling me on the basis of a third party's claims that they never even bothered to verify. In one I read, from an Arab arts organization's public e-mail list, the only accurate piece of information it contained were my organizational affiliations. One colleague and former roommate took it on herself to send out a another letter, on the internal e-mail list of a another nonprofit Arab organization that we both worked for, claiming—utterly falsely—that I had "harassed and threatened her". It was beyond disgusting, and those heading the organization who reined her in immediately—recognizing their liability—then proceeded to compound the issue by covering up what she had done, pretending it had never happened even though every one of the 10 or so people from the organization who I wrote to half a year later all remembered receiving her letter. I knew exactly who had received a copy of the e-mail because I both received a copy myself, and she had put all the recipient addresses in the "To:" field. :-) The organization later fired me—citing fallout from the criminal charges that they had helped create—and gave the website I had built for next to nothing as a favor to another design company, who promptly removed my design mark from the site's pages and replaced the author meta tag in the site's code with their own design firm's name and a copyright mark. The colleague and former roommate had left a message of concern on my cellphone when I was in Bellevue hospital. As I never even spoke to her before she sent out the e-mail a couple of weeks later, beyond leaving a simple "thank you/please visit" response message on her voice mail, her subsequent claims were bizarre and spoke both of personal revenge for a relationship I ended and her very bad personal judgment. I have two more years before the statute of limitations runs out in New York for me to take her, and the organization that covered up her deed, to court for her vicious libel that cost me friends and clients. The difference between me and them is that I will be telling the truth if I choose to get my 'revenge', if you can call it that. False friends and fake victims. One of the two prosecuting me for the e-mails I sent during my breakdown had repeatedly encouraged me to share the strange dreams I was having prior to the breakdown—"Let me know if you get anything"—only to prosecute me for sharing them later. Apart from immediate friends, not one single person from this community for whom I had poured my life out for two decades bothered to write to me, ring me, or ask for my side of the story. It was a severe lesson about the fragility of social networks. I have wondered since whether I had wasted what has amounted to half of my life helping a community in trouble, a community that couldn't return the favor on the one occasion it mattered. Wow. Psalm 73:16-17 says "When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny." [Back to where you left off] 4. Final tally: Thirteen court appearances in total, six while held in jail. Five of the pointless, date-setting, 3-minute-wonders took place after I had moved 1,200 miles away to Minnesota, necessitating expense, and weeks of interrupted life and work. Of course, having seen how the criminal justice system operated and what it was capable of, every trip back to New York literally felt like I could be re-arrested and thrown back into the island dungeon. My lawyer warned me that nothing was ever certain. Way to exist for an entire year. Whatever the people who visited this upon me were thinking, I do not know. But what I do know, for myself and how I choose to relate to the rest of humanity, is this: revenge is a dish best served never or never. COURT DATE CHRONOLOGY 1. 27 December 2006 2. 26 January 2007 3. 31 January 2007* 4. 8 February 2007* 5. 13 February 2007* 6. 15 February 2007* 7. 20 February 2007* 8. 22 February 2007* 9. 6 March 2007 10. 1 May 2007 11. 25 June 2007 12. 19 September 2007 13. 26 November 2007 * While inside Rikers [Back to where you left off] *"For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world." (1 Corinthians 4:9-13, NIV) more from this section  • Unreasonable Search and Seizure (Sunday, June 1st, 2008)  • From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 1) (Tuesday, April 1st, 2008) |
      
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