Closing Rikers Island and the civic brilliance of underground hip hop
“The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge.” — James Baldwin
“And now I’m like a major threat / Cause I remind you of the things you were made to forget.” — Tupac Shakur
Late in March of 2017, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city had planned to shut down the notorious Rikers Island jail complex sometime within the next 10 years. “Rikers Island is an example and an expression of a major national problem,” the mayor said during a Friday afternoon press conference. He then insisted that the closure of Rikers would usher an end to the era of mass incarceration. Singer John Legend praised de Blasio and echoed the mayor’s sentiment on twitter, calling it a “crucial step towards ending #massincarceration.” The announcement had even elicited a supportive tweet from none other than Jay-Z, who, as one Complex writer noted, had only dispatched 249 tweets since 2008 at the time.
Seven days later, however, on Friday April 7th, Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda received a four-year sentence — which would run concurrently with the seven years he was already serving — in a case that reflects the ongoing civic contradictions of Rikers Island… It was all good just a week ago.
Shmurda was convicted of “promoting prison contraband,” or basically trying to smuggle a weapon into jail. I’m less concerned with the specifics of Shmurda’s case, however, than I am with what the data says about the environment. His was just one of 113 weapons seized during visits in 2015, a figure that spiked to 721 the following year, according to the New York Daily News. A 538-percent increase in seized weapons, particularly at a time of heightened scrutiny, suggests that the state has always had the means mitigate violence but has only recently felt inclined to do so. This potentially implicates the state in a grave crime.
Like most county jails across the country, Rikers warehouses mostly pre-trial detainees, which means almost 90 percent of the inmates are presumptively innocent. While some exceptions might pose a genuine threat to the public, many are held simply because they couldn’t afford bail. The ability to detain someone in lieu of a cash sum already provides the state with immense prosecutorial leverage in the form of plea-bargaining. But when compounded with violence, the jail experience can terrorize an innocent person into accepting a guilty plea.
Most cases in the U.S. end with a plea deal and many legal scholars have noted that our system is almost entirely dependent on plea-bargaining. This is a form of sanitized state violence, where the means of terror helps to achieve a political goal, but those seeking the end have ostensibly distanced themselves enough from the means to facilitate the illusion of a just system. Simply put, jails are institutions of terror. We punish innocent people and even those of us who still confuse punishment with justice would have to admit that punishing the innocent erodes the state’s moral authority — assuming, of course, that the state has any moral authority to begin with. Furthermore, as one of only two states in the country that, until recently, charged 16-year-old kids as adults, New York has long subjected its children to the terror of Rikers Island.
This system essentially martyred Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old boy snatched off the streets of the Bronx by police and detained under allegations as flimsy as those of terrorists who kidnap journalists abroad under accusations of espionage. Browder wouldn’t take the prosecutor’s offer despite brutal assaults from inmates and guards alike, as well as the torture of solitary confinement, in which he languished for almost two of his three years on the Island. He asserted his innocence until the charges against him were dropped. Browder came to symbolize the human cost of our civic failure after Jennifer Gonnerman profiled him for the New Yorker in 2014. Sadly however, he died from suicide the following year. While it feels slightly irresponsible to speculate about Browder’s mental condition at the time, it seems outright dishonest to not suggest that he appeared irreparably traumatized by state violence.
Earlier in 2017, Jay-Z co-produced a six-part SpikeTV series on Browder’s tragic story. The fifth episode had aired just two days before Mayor de Blasio’s announcement to close Rikers. Two days after the announcement, an independent commission would issue a damning 149-page report, which called for the closing of Rikers. Investigative journalists and lofty legal experts had finally gotten through to lawmakers, it seemed.
But press accounts and scholarly research, however invaluable they may be, often echo what rappers have reported for decades. The recent documentary “Rikers: An American Jail,” from the great Bill Moyers, provides perspectives from correction officers and women inmates that I found personally enlightening, but much of the film seems like a more harrowingly detailed version of Ghostface Killah’s verse on “Verbal Intercourse.” Twenty years after Ghostface reported on weaponized mop wringers, sharpened toothbrushes, and boiling water mixed with baby oil, a revered documentarian still had to unearth an anecdote about a face-melting incident in an attempt to adequately convey the inhumanity of this public institution.
Throughout the recent campaign to close Rikers, as the island’s atrocities seemed to reach the press more frequently than ever, I had often joked that Kool G Rap scooped all these reporters almost 30 years ago. I was referring, of course, to Kool G Rap & DJ Polo’s 1987 single, “Rikers Island,” a sober but unflinchingly vivid depiction of life on the island. This joke seems less absurd when considering that Mobb Deep had released “Locked In Spofford” almost two decades before the City Of New York finally closed down the infamous juvenile detention center. While Mobb Deep were originally known as the Poetical Prophets, I’m not suggesting that they foresaw the closure of Spofford, nor that they or G Rap had provided any kind of sophisticated policy critiques. They simply provided a voice for the voiceless long before anyone else gave a shit. But these artists who exposed our civic failures were often painted as super predators craving impunity. In the mean time, people died and lives were ruined. It took Browder’s life and a 149-page report to make us realize what Kool G Rap summed up in one bar; “C-74 adolescents at war.” What kind of civilized people would subject their children to such dystopian shit?
Such a system could only be the work of a people who’d rather not confront difficult things, who’d rather dump more than 300 acres of potentially toxic landfill onto a 90-acre landmass in the middle of the East River, engineering a space of seclusion for what’s largely a socially engineered underclass. Such a system could only be the work of a people who are so deeply dishonest about their history and misbegotten privilege that it would be controversial to condemn the island’s namesake, Richard Riker, for his role in the kidnapping of free black people and selling them to the enslaving south. Richard Riker might be the single greatest historical embodiment of institutional racism, a 19th Century magistrate who used his official position to facilitate and provide a veneer of legality to a human trafficking conspiracy. We’d rather not talk about this. Society might cease to function entirely without a collective oblivion to this publicly funded human sacrifice in which we’re all implicated. The degree to which we’re implicated varies, however, and perhaps that’s why news media gatekeepers had condescendingly dismissed early reality raps as “gangster rap.”
The New York Times reduced Kool G Rap’s observations to mere “Violence and Sexism,” when “Riker’s Island” was rereleased on the 1990 album “Wanted: Dead Or Alive.” The opening lines on the song went; “Well listen to me, you young hoods, this is some advice / You do the crime, you’re payin’ the price.” The esteemed cultural arbiters at the New York Times saw this as some gangster ass shit, I guess. To be fair, one song on the “Wanted” album, “Talk Like Sex,” can understandably be misconstrued as sexist, but that hardly justifies such patronizingly reductive coverage on a prominent platform. Questioning why adolescents were at war in C-74 would’ve been the most responsible journalistic reaction to the song “Rikers Island.” But no one really cared until 2009, when investigative reporter Graham Rayman exposed the horrors of Rikers Island’s teenage unit in the pages of the Village Voice. The Voice’s “Rikers Fight Club,” seems to have sparked the media interest in Rikers Island that has since culminated in the mayor’s announcement to close the jail.
Sadly, however, the Voice has ended their weekly print edition and most of the investigative giants have left the publication. With such journalistic voids, it’s even more important to pay close attention to these absolutely indispensable artists we call rappers.
Capone-N-Noreaga dispatched domestic war reports at a time when the other CNN had enabled society’s blindness to how poverty and institutionalized racism fueled a globally unprecedented prison boom under the public safety-guise of a war on drugs. NORE remixed “Rikers Island” for “40 Island” on his solo debut in 1998, at a time when New York City locked up so many children that they had to reopen the prison barge across from Rikers Island to house juveniles. I was one of those children — white collateral damage, perhaps — and vaguely recall a Spofford counselor pointing at a barely visible dot in the distance of the East River and paraphrasing G Rap in an attempt to provide guidance. “Y’all might be illin,” he said, “Y’all might be wildin’ / but y’all won’t be smillin on Rikers Island.”
