Susceptible at 16

Christian Hernandez
Christian Hernandez
2 min readMar 19, 2017

The odds working against NYC teens could send them to adult-serving prisons.

The view inside an adult-serving prison-complex, a sight many children witness prior to becoming recognized adults. Source: Wikimedia.org

Young people in New York start to have the odds stacked against them as early as age 16. Like Kalief Browder, these children are left to slip between the cracks of a system working against them.

In 2010­­, 16-year-old Browder served an adult sentence on Rikers Island for supposedly stealing a backpack. He nor his family could afford his $3,000 bail, resulting in him spending 1,100 days incarcerated — awaiting a trial that never came.

On June 6, 2015, after attempts of going back to school and getting his life back on track following his release, Browder hung himself. He was 22 at the time.

“This is not like one case that happened,” said Jay-Z in an interview with Democracy Now! “This is happening to a lot of people, you know, especially places where I come from ― inner boroughs and Marcy Projects and the Bronx and Brooklyn and all these places.”

With the release of TIME: The Kalief Browder Story, a documentary broadcasting on Spike, many people are revisiting Browder’s life and becoming acquainted with the problem he and many other children in NYC know all too well.

For more information about what people are doing to bring about reform, visit:

Children’s Defense Fund — New York

Raise the Age

Correctional Association of New York

--

--