Is Kalief Browder’s Story a Case for Reform or Abolition? (Part 2, “The Island”)
“Is Kalief Browder’s Story a Case for Reform or Abolition?” is six part series following the episodes of “Time: The Kalief Browder Story,” in which the politics, realities, and necessary conditions of prison abolition will be considered in relation to Kalief Browder’s case and the greater context of the criminal justice system in America. This series will also discuss prison reform efforts under way and how they can reduce the harm of the system, or potentially reinforce or reinvent it. You can read the first installment here.
“Given the parallels between prison and slavery, a productive exercise might consist in speculating about what the present might look like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease system, had not been abolished.” — Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete
“Right now, in the shadows of Wall Street, in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty, in the shadows of the skyscrapers that run the world media, is an island — there is no distinction between minors and adults, there is no protection against assault — where teenagers are being treated like they were in slavery right now.” — Reverend Al Sharpton
The first quote above, from Angela Davis’s seminal Prison Abolition text Are Prisons Obsolete?, outlines a critical exercise in exploring the need for a prison abolition movement. The second quote, offered by Reverend Sharpton, appears in dialogue with the exercise outlined by Angela Davis. Sharpton, utters this quote in “The Island,” the second installment of SpikeTV’s Time: The Kalief Browder Story. Like many other advocates, scholars, and incarcerated people, Sharpton recognizes the haunting similarities the modern prison industrial complex has with previous institutions of racialized social control and labor exploitation.
As we consider whether the reform movement or the abolition movement are the pathway toward dealing with cases like Kalief Browder’s and with mass incarceration more broadly, it is important to center the moral and ethical implications, as well as the societal impact, of the current system. If we had just “reformed” slavery or the convict leasing system — two systems our history books tell us were abolished — do we really imagine that those systems today would look and feel substantially different to those impacted than our current systems of incarceration? The 24,000 incarcerated people who went on strike against the “exception clause” of the 13th Amendment, suggest that the relationship between chattel slavery and prison slavery is an enduring one.
“The Island” focuses on the issue of violence on Rikers Island. Violence in prisons and jails is one of the most important issues for both reformists and abolitionists, as the inevitable and understandable question of “how do we deal with violence?” is central to both our current punitive criminal justice system as well as any efforts to change it. Violence leads many people to incarceration, violence is used as a justification for policing and imprisonment, violence is used to justify the torture of solitary confinement and violence results back out of all of these circumstances as well. In the wake of the Vaughn Rebellion the violence of those incarcerated is used to discuss corrections officer union concerns, rather than addressing the much more serious grievances of incarcerated people. The use of violence as a self-sustaining justification for racialized systems of control is as old as racialized systems of control themselves.
Prison Abolitionists will often argue that incarceration doesn’t allow society to adequately deal with violence, because it ends the conversation. The violence of the state is given impunity, whereas individuals who are convicted of what the legal system deems a violent act are criminalized and locked into a violent system. By the time these same individuals return to society — if they are allowed to — violence and torment while in the custody of the state will represent a significant portion of their life experience.
Reform efforts often problematically focus around sentencing reform for non-violent offenders, and building newer more updated prison facilities, but recently there has been a revival in scholarly and policy efforts to focus on how we define and sentence violent offenses as well. There has been a recent acknowledgement that in order to make the necessarily drastic reduction in prison populations, we need to reconsider how we sentence violent crime. Most experts agree that shorter sentences have a more rehabilitative impact than longer ones. However, what reform efforts often miss is the fact that for many — perhaps for the majority of American society — retributive punishment is central to their understanding of justice. This means that for many, without much contemplation or philosophical reflection, prefer a system which enacts violence upon those the state defines as criminal.
“Rikers Island is named after Richard Riker. Richard Riker was the chief magistrate in charge of the court system of New York City. The spider at the center of a web of bounty hunting rings, kidnapping escaped slaves, even children, kidnapped and sold into slavery.” — Jacob Morris, New York Historian
Corrections officers discussing violence in the episode, engage in the disgusting practice of comparing teenage inmates to animals. This dehumanizing rhetoric, draws haunting parallels to chattel slavery. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography notes, along with numerous other slave narratives and abolitionist texts, demonstrate how similar rhetoric was used to justify the violence and torture of the enslaved by white slave owners with ideologies not drastically different than those expressed by corrections officials. While it was often livestock or domesticated animals that were used in the justification of chattel slavery, it is not surprising that for incarceration — ostensibly a system of control rather than a system of labor — those most invested in the maintenance of the violent system resort to categorizing humans in terms usually reserved for wild predatory animals.
Former Corrections Officer, Gary Heyward describes adolescent offenders as “uncontrollable.” Darryl Bryant states “adolescents were notorious for breaking each other’s jaws.” At another point Bryant later describes corrections officers as “lions” and the inmates as “hyenas.” Bryant also refers to two corrections officers, who in his view are not taking drastic enough action against incarcerated teens, as “sheep.” Bernard Kerik, a former commissioner of the department of corrections that oversees Rikers, states “Rikers Island has a predatory population. They’re usually the younger inmates. Those inmates fight, stab, slash, they light people on fire when they’re sleeping.” While there is certainly some truth within some of their descriptions of their own experiences, there is also clear bias communicated toward these incarcerated teenagers with no articulation of the circumstances that create these behaviors. The violent behavior is not discussed systemically, or as resulting from any environment circumstances, but attributed to the nature of the incarcerated teenagers.
Of greater concern than the inclusion of this racist rhetoric — after all it at least paints a legitimate picture of the mentality of the average corrections officer toward Rikers Island’s 95% Black and Latino population — is the tacit legitimacy Time grants to the voices of corrections officers throughout the episode. Although they verify the existence of certain circumstances and abuses within the system, they also demonize the prisoners despite the fact that most, if not all, of the corrections officials interviewed are guilty of enacting fascist violence upon the very people they vilify.
It is important to know for instance, Gary Heyward, one of the primary guards used to discuss Rikers and its inmate population has a documented history of corruption, sex trafficking, extortion, selling weapons to inmates, and profiting off of his own corruption by writing a book detailing his exploits as a CO. Another former Rikers CO, is overheard describing corrections officers using inmates as enforcers so that other inmates can be beaten or killed without implicating the CO in the crime. Former Commissioner of Rikers Island Bernard Kerik, who spent four years in prison for corruption, is also given a platform to provide what many viewers will see as authoritative testimony on the subject of Rikers, inmates, and incarceration.
Two young men who were incarcerated on Rikers Island at the same time as Kalief Browder, are thankfully given a brief opportunity to rebut the on-camera testimony of the corrections officers, noting their own familiarity with the racist rhetoric used to dehumanize incarcerated youth. Sutha Taylor, currently incarcerated at Five Points Correctional Facility, states that the term “Animalescents” is used by the CO’s and eventually becomes adopted among inmates as well. He notes with some incredulity, “animals, like that’s what they called us, animals.”
Turray Bynum a former inmate on Rikers Island states, “Oh, he’s an animal. Oh, he’s a menace to society because he fought police, because he slashed somebody. That’s not how you should look at it. I’m in a negative environment and this is how I survive, by catching infractions, by fighting, by slashing, by jumping, by getting jumped these are the things I had to go through.”
It is critical to the argument for either reform or abolition that we consider the factors within environments — both in jails and on the outside — that contribute to violence or that are violent themselves. Poverty is a form of state violence — a failure of the state to redistribute wealth and resources to those in need — that is frequently the antecedent to “violent” acts by those who are faced with choices that impact their ability to maintain housing, maintain water and electricity, buy food, and access health care. These conditions force decisions that at times involve actions our society has deemed criminal.
The conditions of the prison and jail systems and the structuring of their (monetary, social, political) economies for the limited inmate freedoms (commissary, phone time, food, potential access to contraband) inherently propagate violence. As formerly incarcerated prison reform advocate, Ismael Nazario lays out, “The Program” requires inmates to give up their commissary, their phone time, food, and follow the rules of “The Program.” If incarcerated people fail to “get with the program,” they are given “violations,” subjecting them to brutal beatings at the hands of multiple other inmates. Declining involvement in “The Program” also means that those who are “with it,” will repeatedly enact violence upon you, since the ultimate goal of the program is the extortion of whatever limited resources incarcerated people may access.
Nazario also describes the action of putting inmates “on a bus,” meaning they get beat so viciously that the jail deems it necessary to move them to another housing unit where the cycle will start over. As a result of declining to “get with the program,” Kalief Browder was jumped and moved so many times on Rikers Island he lost track. Kalief expressed to his brother Akeem that he couldn’t understand why the corrections officers allowed him to be beaten up so many times.
The “vast majority of correctional officers allow [‘The Program’] to go on,” according to Nazario, and in fact are “actually a part of ‘The Program’ as well.” While the episode doesn’t spend a great deal of time on this aspect, the reality is that despite the difficulty in proving cases of corruption against corrections officers, numerous corrections officers have been convicted for running these extortion schemes and for bringing prisoners deadly weapons in exchange for extorted money. These practices by corrections officers contribute significantly to the amount of violence and the deadliness of the violence that occurs on Rikers Island.
“The Program,” as it is described in the episode certainly alludes to correction officer involvement, but doesn’t get into the extent to which the corrections officers actually manipulated “The Program” to their own financial advantages. “The Program,” is a well documented system within Rikers Island of corrections officers “orchestrating the beatings of teenage inmates,” as NY Times reporter Isolde Raftery once wrote. Certainly “The Program,” also served purposes to the gangs that developed with Rikers Island, but those social dynamics are much more complicated. The battle over limited resources, the quest for power in a situation with so much powerlessness, and critical importance of protection in an environment that posses so much danger all make the decision to “get with the program” or not, one that ensures violence either way.
Janaé Bonsu recently wrote in her piece, “A Strike Against The New Jim Crow:”
Just as prison workers don’t enjoy the rights other workers expect, neither do workers in street-based survival economies. Both kinds of workers are subject to unsafe, coercive, and even violent working conditions, and often get harassed with little or no chance of legal redress. And the drug and sex trades in particular funnel disproportionate numbers of poor black people into the legal system.
As we consider prison abolition and the rhetoric of “violence” levied at incarcerated people, or black people in “free” society, it is critical to interrogate whether there is safe access to the economic system and social economy necessary to survive. Kalief discusses being fought by eight or nine people over phone time. Jay-Z corroborates this practice, discussing friends of his who were killed over phone time on Rikers Island, something that has been documented in rap lyrics since at least the early 90's, even if such stories are notably difficult to find in mainstream media. When children who have not yet been convicted of a crime face violence or potential death — overseen by sworn officers of the law — as they’re attempting to reach family, legal support, or media how can we place an expectation of non-violence upon them?
“There’s no life at all in there. Nobody wants to hear you. You’re like an unheard voice.” — Kalief Browder