 selected writing From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 2)
GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY: SWALLOWED BY JAIL 11 February 2007 — After a month in Bellevue Hospital, where I had already experienced incarceration[1], news came through the system's grapevine that I was to be arrested on the same day I was to be released. Despite the passage of time, and a month of medication, the system was not done with you just yet. The crushing disappointment was too much. I spent the afternoon in the 30th Precinct in Harlem listening to cops talking[2] about the new overtime-based salaries, as they left my transfer to Central Booking to the last possible, prime, overtime moment. The New York Post reported this year that changes in the ways salaries were paid to the judicial, police and correctional branches of the government had accounted for a 25% increase in salaries between 2005 and 2007. One of the detectives who arrested me was being paid over $120,000 a year. The detective who happily took me to Central Booking at 10pm after a slow day at the precinct for us all, was similarly benefiting. The changes presumably explain why so many of my police, judicial, and correctional processes took place at night. The court took place well after midnight. Rikers Island processed me overnight. The machine has adjusted well to the loosening of its financial shackles. It's the same machine however.
Manhattan's Central Booking facility and the accompanying "Tombs" jail date back to 1838 and, although the structure has been replaced several times, the ambiance of the basement prison doesn't seem to have changed that much. Long, oppressive stone corridors and heavy iron gates set the tone, a gothic backdrop for a motley collection of late night drunks and brawling tourists, nervously waiting to be swallowed into the earth. Handcuffs dig deep. The junkies sleep where they sprawl. Undercover cops, "UCs", were everywhere. Anyone harboring any idea that they can magically recognize undercover policemen would be well advised to disabuse themselves of that notion entirely. No patterns can be discerned in that Matrix.
Deeper into the catacombs. Searches. Cops shouting at us.  "Stand here!" "On that line!" Everyone being led there bemused and stunned, some very familiar with the process. Medical "screening", obviously solely to fulfill legal responsibilities but functionally pointless and cursory. Finally, the "tombs" themselves, the cells. 15 foot by 15 foot. Spit and piss on the cold concrete floor, hard wooden benches too narrow to sleep on, and of course no blankets. No stall walls to the toilets. Get used to your smell. Shit in front of your cell mates. 24/7 strip lighting.
 I spent two sleepless days and nights inside this cell until my exhausted body fell, dog-like, onto the concrete for a few hours of unconsciousness. Zombies inhabit these spaces. I met a 60-year-old man and his son who had been there for three days. They looked dazed.I hallucinated at times. I made up stories from the shape of paint chips on the ground. One looked like my dog, Roo. I imagined walking him. D.H. Lawrence's short poem, "Self-Pity", says: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself And I did not. The state I found myself in was beyond self pity. Parts of my self simply died to endure what was happening. I prayed a lot. There was nothing left to do to stop imploding. I was about to spend a very weird 70-80 hours in a kind of turbulent, jet stream peace.  In the Tombs, they make you beg for toilet paper. Evidence of "innocent until proven guilty" does not exist here. We are all treated as if we were guilty. The male or female corrections officers who eventually respond to your desperate calls will be sure to remind you that you are "in jail", as if toilet paper was a treat. It was deeply disturbing to witness this behavior in other human beings.There are no clocks on the walls. You are not informed of any timetables. You can feel yourself getting sick. Court is coming, judgment is coming... sometime.
I made a very costly[3] averaging mistake when talking about income that set my bail at an impossibly high $8,000. I signed some papers. And then I was handcuffed, led out into a cold, dark parking lot, and put on a bus to Rikers Island. In common with my experiences over the preceding days, I was never told explicitly where I was being taken. Rather, you get to work it out yourself by overhearing the guards talking to each other. Informing you what is happening next is not on their radar. Not knowing what is next is the norm in jail. It's hard to explain how disorienting and scary this is when it's happening to you. The change was a relief. The sight of the ferryman over the River Styx would have been a relief at that point. After two nights and days on a phlegm-covered stone floor, with no blanket, the promise of a bed was all that mattered. How naive of me. Another night on a stone floor and another day awake in a holding cell were all that waited.
Predominant design media: metal. Seat cushions: metal. Ergonomics: square metal. Ambience: metal. View: metal grille. Accessories: metal handcuffs, uncomfortably rear-cuffed for this journey. Induction into real jail properly introduces you to the concept of "pens" or "bullpens" that temporary holding facilities such as the Tombs contain. In a real jail, pens perform the function of holding groups of prisoners between mass processing actions such as ID photographing. Mass intakes of detainees involve shuffles through several of these pens over many hours. Hurry up and wait. It was more piss-stinking concrete and little sleep as we were photographed, stripped naked and searched, surrendered "contraband" (cash, belts, pens, etc), and had our hoods slashed — to deny anonymity to any inmate who tried to slash or stab another and deny warmth to the rest of us. I had never been strip-searched before. It was all people ever said it was.[4]
This marked night three of virtually no sleep since I had been taken to the Tombs at night. I managed an hour or so, falling exhausted. The more tired you become, the pain of sleeping on the concrete floor mattered less—at least for an hour or so, until you were less exhausted and the hard floor woke you up again. There were no blankets for us.
Eventually, after much of the day, we were led through a parade of doctors and medical staff for a series of legally required questions that no one cared about the answers to. I was stuck with a TB test needle without any announcement, even after declaring that I had already taken the lifetime antibiotic treatment for it. That would hurt like hell later. I was asked if I wanted a flu shot. After thinking where I had been sleeping the last few days and where I was heading, I consented. I was given the shot, then asked to sign something saying I had read a form that I had not been given. I pointed this out. The nurse tried to misread the text in front of me, to me—as if I couldn't read—to speed the process. I didn't care anymore. She didn't care. Neither of us cared anymore. I signed. I point out all of this because my experiences are not the exception. They are the norm. I would like to believe that there are people out there to whom this means something. It is said that societies are judged on how they treat their weakest members. Prisoners and the mentally ill, stripped of all rights and control of their life, are in a terribly vulnerable position. Is how we are treating them making our world better or worse, safer or more dangerous?
As night approached, finally a dormitory room with a mattress but still no blanket, four days and three nights after my arrest. It was a cold winter, I was sick at this point, with a raging case of flu coming on. I would be faced with the choice of enduring uncomfortable hours in pens to wait for disinterested doctors, or braving it out in the dormitory in a bed. At this stage, literally more exhausted than I had ever been in my life, I chose the latter. After a couple of days, I managed to secure a cup and a blanket. With the cup, I mixed boiled water and orange peels for vitamin C and tried to sleep as much as possible. When I slept, I had normal dreams of being in another situation, then woke up to bars and (often) chaos. It was like hitting the floor. Waking was often extremely traumatic. The moment of realizing where I was was like a punch in the stomach. In this system, regardless of what you have done or not done, you are presumed and treated as guilty until proven guilty. If you have a problem with that, the corrections officers in your dorm will be sure to remind you that "you shouldn't have come to jail". GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 3) Endnotes
1. In Bellevue, I was definitely "incarcerated" by any definition of the word, even though this state institution goes by the name of "hospital". I was not in an open ward, I was not free to leave, and I was barely "treated". Like Rikers, this hospital could not find me a blanket for the first five days I was incarcerated. And it was winter. I wish I could have recorded the conversations I had with staff there on the blanket issue. This was no "hospital" by any definition any of you reading this would hope for if you ended up there. I even went to court during my time there to attempt to get released. "This hardly ever happens," the patient legal advocate told me, but I had to try. I was midway though a web design contract that I was in danger of losing and had been informed by Bellevue, a few days into my time there, that I was being billed—while uninsured and held against my will—$1,400 a day. You have to love America. The psychiatrist assigned to me—"Dr. N"—testified in the court (conveniently located in the Bellevue complex) that I was "definitely dangerous" in her opinion and, as I had been warned, the judge listened to her. I lost the contract and Bellevue subsequently sent me a bill for $37,777.17. "Do no harm?" Fuck you very much. During the entire month I was held in Bellevue, I had less than three hours of contact time with Dr. N or any other psychiatric staff, and most of these three hours were spent with a medical student that Dr. N pawned me off on. $37,777.17. It was disturbing to see how arrogantly a medical professional—so very literally holding every aspect of your life and welfare in their hands with zero context—was prepared to assert that they knew what was going on with me, without having actually spent any meaningful time with me before coming to that diagnosis. $37,777.17. Apart from on this rather obvious point of the way she conducted my diagnosis, Dr. N violated my medical rights in several other ways—prescribing me medication without discussing it with me first and upping the dose several days later—again—without discussing it with me. It was only after I spoke with another doctor, after I had left Bellevue, that I learned that she had prescribed me a drug that has a high danger of inducing diabetes. $37,777.17. When I pointed out—during the first time I was suddenly expected to participate in the twice daily medication rounds without any warning—that I had not been informed that I was even being prescribed drugs, staff were surprised, but several told me (including Dr. N herself later) that if I refused medication I would not be released. $37,777.17. She later reversed her opinion that I was any danger to anyone and recommended that I be released on my own recognizance. After extremely politely arguing that point with her for a month as she walked by in the corridors every day—not looking at me very studiously—she couldn't even come up to me at the end of this nonsense and announce that obvious and unavoidable judgment. There is no basic human decency or accountability in this world when it matters. If there was, I wouldn't need to be writing this shit. $37,777.17. That's thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven dollars and seventeen cents. [Back to where you left off] 2. "Salivating" would be a better word than "talking". [Back to where you left off] 3. "Costly" because it made the difference between spending a few days in jail versus spending close to a month in jail. [Back to where you left off] 4. On 4 October 2007, the New York City Department of Corrections conceded that "tens of thousands of nonviolent inmates taken to Rikers Island on misdemeanor charges had been wrongly strip-searched in violation of a 2002 court settlement, and were entitled to payment for damages. As many as 150,000 such inmates have been searched at Rikers Island since 2002, lawyers for the inmates said... The policy was kept in place despite a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling in 2001 that strip-searches of misdemeanor suspects were illegal, unless officials suspected that they were carrying contraband..." [Lead lawyer Richard D.] Emery charged in his papers that department officials "repeatedly resorted to lying to cover up deliberate indifference to the continued practice of humiliating detainees by forcing them to strip naked in groups." (Source: "City to Pay Damages for Strip Searches", by Alan Feuer, New York Times, October 5th, 2007). As of April 10th, 2007, I am part of that class action lawsuit. During one dorm search, later on in my experience on Rikers Island, prison guards threatened to force us—already in underwear—to strip completely and stand "with your pecker against the guy in front of you's ass" if we either talked or didn't move quickly enough to a designated area against a wall. That and the image of the NYPD detective who took me to the Tombs, taking camera phone footage of a drunk who had passed out standing up, was somewhat disturbingly reminiscent of Abu Ghraib. [Back to where you left off] 5. There was an obvious 'live and let live' atmosphere at Rikers Island on some levels but the line between 'police and thieves' was blurred even more than this. At the end of April 2008, the New York Times reported that "Seven current or former New York City correction officers were arrested on Thursday on charges of taking bribes and trying to smuggle illegal drugs to prisoners at Rikers Island..." (Source: Rikers Officers Face Charges Involving Drugs and Bribes, by Bruce Lambert, New York Times, 25th April 2008. [Back to where you left off] GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 3) 
more from this section  • DOCUMENT: Department of Homeland Security: "Occupy Pittsburgh Threat Assessment" (Friday, October 14th, 2011)  • Mike Bloomberg's Political Cleansing of #OccupyWallStreet (Friday, October 14th, 2011) • RNC 8 back in court for hearings (Monday, May 10th, 2010) • Pittsburgh G-20 Legal Update: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, March 15th, 2010) • The 2010 Olympics and Repression of Independent Media: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, February 15th, 2010) • Israel & the Goldstone Report: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, February 1st, 2010) • Egypt and Gaza: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, January 18th, 2010) |
...the nigelparry.net recommended web hosting | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[ top of page | selected writing | home ] Content & design ©1995-2010 Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net.  |