Rikers Island Jail Complex: The Use of Social History to Inform Current Debates on Incarceration in New York City
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | JARROD SHANAHAN,JAYNE MOONEY |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12380 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12380
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 286–304
Rikers Island Jail Complex: The Use
of Social History to Inform Current
Debates on Incarceration in New York
City
JAYNE MOONEY and JARROD SHANAHAN
Jayne Mooney is Associate Professor of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal
Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA; Jarrod
Shanahan is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Governors State
University, Illinois, USA
Abstract: Rikers Island is the main jail complex for New York City. At its height in the
1990s, 22,000 people were incarcerated there. Having attracted national and interna-
tional condemnation, it is regarded as one of the city’s biggest failures: a magnet for
scandal and controversy. In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged that the complex would
be closed within ten years with smaller ‘state of the art’ jails built to replace it. Our research
explores the social history of Rikers from its origins to the present day, in a bid to provide
a more nuanced understanding of the island and incarceration in New York City, and to
engage with ongoing debate on the future of penal reform.
Keywords: jails; New York City; penal reform; Rikers Island; social history
Rikers Island is situated in New York City’s East River, between Hunt’s
Point in the Bronx and La Guardia Airport in Queens. It is a mere eight
miles from the Empire State Building. It houses what is quite literally a
penal colony consisting of nine separate jails, including a women’s facil-
ity (Rose M. Singer Center), a juvenile facility (Robert N. Davoren Cen-
ter), numerous facilities for men awaiting trial (the largest, the Anna M.
Kross Center, covering 40 acres of land), and a facility for men serving
short sentences (Eric M. Taylor Center). The complex at Rikers is a widely
misunderstood institution, often described as a singular facility when it is
an expansive network of facilities, and often confused with a prison when
in reality it functions as a county jail, with pretrial detainees accounting
for an estimated 80% of the population. These are people not convicted
of any crime and hence formally innocent, who have either been denied
bail or, as is true for the majority of cases, are simply unable to afford it.
The structural racism of American society, coupled with policing practices
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2020 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 286–304
that enforce and reproduce it, ensure that the vast majority incarcerated
in Rikers are black or Latino, with 56% never having graduated from high
school (Department of Correction 2019; O’Donohue 2014).
Rikers has long been a magnet for controversy and scandal. In the early
1990s, protests by those incarcerated there and their families erupted over
conditions (Curry 1990; Hevesi 1994). The level of violence was said to
make Rikers the most dangerous penal institution in the US. While the
‘war on drugs’ and ‘on the poor’ ensured that the complex assumed for
a time the dubious title of ‘the world’s largest penal colony’ (Wynn 2001)
with a population of over 22,000. Although the numbers have reduced
dramatically in the decades since, Rikers remains a blighted fixture on the
landscape of New York City. Its very name brings to mind the exponen-
tial growth of the prison industrial complex in the age of neoliberalism,
and the attendant policies and practices of coercive social control that have
arisen amid capital flight from living-wage occupations; the reduction of
state investment in welfare provision and the social fabric, and its diver-
sion towards prison construction (Gilmore 2007).
The ‘need to do something’ about Rikers escalated following a 2014 De-
partment of Justice report that found the island’s ‘culture of violence’ to
violate the constitutional rights of those in the custody of the city’s De-
partment of Correction (Department of Justice, Attorney’s Office for the
Southern District of New York 2014), and the publicity over the suicide of
Kalief Browder, who as a 16-year-old boy, had spent three years in Rikers,
mostly in solitary confinement, for allegedly stealing a backpack. The New
YorkTimes has, over the years, consistently exposed ‘The hor rors’ that ‘keep
coming at Rikers’ (Editorial Board 2015a), calling for ‘Ending the Rikers
nightmare’ (Editorial Board 2015b). Hardly surprisingly, the report of the
Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incar-
ceration Reform (2017) – known locally as the Lippmann Commission after
its chair,the Honorable Jonathan Lippman – described Rikers as ‘an inter-
national symbol of despair and damage’,1and called for the complex to
be closed and replaced by smaller ‘state of the art’ jails in each of the bor-
oughs of the city; a plan that was to be endorsed by Mayor Bill de Blasio
who pledged that this would occur within ten years.
Befitting the island’s role as a symbol of mass incarceration in the US,
the debate over its closure and its precipitating scandal are by no means
local matters. Instead, the Rikers story is simply a particularly extreme case
of a national reckoning with the historical injustices of mass incarceration;
its legacy of upholding and reproducing structural racism and the harm
this arrangement has caused to working-class communities across the US,
especially those of colour. This is, in part, an exciting moment, for radi-
cal critiques have broken free from the cozy echo chambers of policymak-
ers and criminological discourse and entered the public realm via works
like Michelle Alexander’s (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, and the May 2019 interview in the New York Times
Magazine with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2019) entitled ‘Is prison necessary?
Ruth Gilmore might change your mind’. In this interview, Gilmore, a
City University of New York professor who has been active in the prison
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