Is Rikers Island part of New York City? Geographically, the jail sits on a hunk of landfill where the Long Island Sound narrows into the East River, just before you reach the Hell Gate, a narrow strait whose penchant for wrecking the ships, bodies, and plans of mariners prompted the hardening of Hellegat, a Dutch term of murky derivation, into its more evocative Anglicization. A narrow bridge from the mainland, reachable only by bus, reinforces the sense of apartness, the sense that one is crossing a threshold. The geographical history of New York City is the story of the knitting together of island territories, of making movement feasible. Rikers is different. Rikers exploits the capacity of islands to act as barriers, as machines to arrest the movement of people, to reduce human abilities. In the years following the Bolshevik seizure of power, revolutionary Soviet architects referred to their projects as “social condensers,” buildings designed to facilitate the transformation of byt, or everyday life, in the direction of comradeship and cooperation. Rikers acts like a negative condenser: Instead of magnifying the conditions for a life in which we might combine our powers to grow together, it magnifies the conditions for premature death.
Walk down any street in New York and there’s a good chance someone you see will have been tortured. Not by regimes far away, but by the one that educates your kids and picks up your trash. The United Nations defines as torture solitary confinement lasting longer than fifteen days. In isolation, without the feedback from others we use to define the boundaries of our selves, the psyche begins to dissolve. Kalief Browder, who was imprisoned on Rikers Island for 1,000 days without a trial for a crime he did not commit, spent 700 of those days in solitary confinement. Unable to recover from this psychic assault, Browder committed suicide in 2015. For Browder, and for countless others whose names you likely do not know, Rikers did not remain on the island. It followed him back to his neighborhood and took up residence in his home, in his mind.
For many New Yorkers, Rikers Island might as well be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. That they never have to think of it if they don’t want to is not an indication that the jail is a marginal phenomenon, incidental to the real life and the real politics of New York City. Instead, it indicates a reality that grows stronger with each cheap mental trick one employs to repress it. The reality is that Rikers is much more a part of New York City than, say, Radio City Music Hall, the Flushing Meadows tennis center, or the Guggenheim Museum. Rikers is the spiritual center around which these places revolve, the institution that makes all others possible. Grasping why this is the case means grasping how New York City, like the United States, is consecrated around the exclusion—which is to say the death—of Black and brown people in ways that go immeasurably deeper than mere economic exploitation. It also means feeling one’s way around the shape of a monstrous disavowal of the ways in which the comfort of some is secured by the torture of others, as well as the ways in which this apparatus of torture we have built in the heart of the liberal city always and inevitably spills out from behind those crumbling walls.
RIKERS, it becomes clear from Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau’s Rikers: An Oral History (Random House, 2023), makes poets out of people who would never think to call themselves that. In the book, which consists of bits of interviews arranged into thematic narratives in the style pioneered by Studs Terkel, prisoners, wardens, guards, relatives, lawyers, and lovers doggedly bend the limits of language in an attempt to assimilate, to encompass, to get a handle on an institution whose sublime perversity scrambles all ordinary attempts to use language as a tool to make it livable, to bring it home in a way that does not collapse the psyche. Just as Rikers breaks social logic, it breaks the language we use to spread and share that logic. And so it becomes a machine for the generation of metaphors. Some informants reach for the temporal: The jail is a “dungeon,” an outpost of the “medieval” in a supposedly modern city. Others opt for the sensory: “The level of chaos, the level of dirt, just the squalor,” stammers a stunned reformer.
This is a machine that produces paradox and circularity. Experimental techniques and unlikely combinations abound. Familiar phrases (“health care”) come to seem like cruel oxymorons, while new combinations emerge, ones that in other contexts make no sense. Another reformer takes a stab at defining the place—something like “functional dysfunction,” he hazards. Reading the book, I find myself enlisted, contributing more utterances to this stew of language—“active neglect,” my brain involuntarily spits out. Over and over, respondents find themselves compelled to violate the conventions of ordinary speech to maintain any hope of characterizing an experience that is nonetheless real. Sometimes, the dull rhythm of repetition is what’s needed to evoke the Ouroboric futility of incarceration in New York City. When they take you to court, Ervin “Easy” Hunt explains, they “put you in a bullpen, put you in a bullpen, and put you in a bullpen.” This “bullpen therapy” produces an agony so acute that detainees plead guilty to crimes they did not commit in order to escape it. “If I had not been part of that time in my life, that round and round and round and round and round, what kind of person would I be today?” Hunt wonders. The metaphors keep coming. Describing a first landing on the island, another former resident explains: “and then you go from the holding pens to Rikers Island, and this is where we were corralled.” Corralled: “That’s a good word,” he reflects.
“The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves,” wrote James Baldwin in his 1971 open letter to an imprisoned Angela Davis. “Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals.” Baldwin’s comment marked two important truths. One, that the coercion and dehumanization endemic in this country’s prisons, of which Rikers Island is but a spectacular example, are less ends in themselves than components of a broader apparatus of racialized social domination that no concrete wall, no segregated island, can or is meant to contain. “The jail is everywhere,” as Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept assert in the title of their just-published collection from Verso Books, and this is not an unfortunate accident, but a political necessity.
Just as Rikers breaks social logic, it breaks the language we use to spread and share that logic. And so it becomes a machine for the generation of metaphors.
The other reality captured by Baldwin’s comment is that a key technique in fortifying these relationships of domination—in which Black and brown people are consigned to worse jobs, worse houses, worse food, worse schools, worse health, worse pain, and early death—is the establishment and maintenance of conditions, through a process of what can only be called active neglect, that erode crucial psychic boundaries on which others rely to organize minute-to-minute experience in ways of which we can hardly be conscious—that is, until these crutches are stolen and smashed. “Penned,” “corralled.” These words are not chosen capriciously. Rikers, it becomes clear from these testimonies, is a device for excluding Black people from the political community and indeed the human community, from what Mary Douglas, in a later preface to her 1966 book Purity and Danger, called “the local consensus on how the world is organized.” Rayman and Blau’s book demonstrates that the objects of this assault, as well as its shock troops, grasp these political stakes with an acuteness that often slips through the fingers of right-thinking, liberal New Yorkers. Were it not clear to them, the entire effort—the billion-plus budget of the New York City Department of Correction, the $11 billion spent on police, and the $550,000 per year spent to house each resident of Rikers Island—would be for naught.
What is unmissable in Rayman and Blau’s book, if you don’t look away, is the prevalence of shit. It suffuses the experience, the memories, the language itself. “The toilet didn’t flush, but people were still using it” is one woman’s first memory of the jail’s reception cells. Smell is the sense memory that former residents—captives, if we wish to be both honest and precise—report with the greatest frequency and most ineradicable intensity. “The first time I went there,” observes another, “the stench of urine and feces and body odor was gagging.” Yusef Salaam, a New York City Council member who was one of the Central Park Five, detained for years for a rape they did not commit, recalls: “I can’t really describe in words this horror and this horrible feeling coupled with that horror, but it had a lot to do with the smell of the place. We’re talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one.” Former resident Eddie Rosario, reaching for metaphors to describe Rikers to those who haven’t been there, says “it’s almost like a hangover, like the worst you ever had in your life.”
Not just shit, but other substances—blood, urine, snot—fly everywhere, out of control, across these pages. “Every time his heart beat, a stream of blood came out of him.” People are crammed into holding cells for days, in violation of every known statute, sleeping on piss-soaked floors because there are no beds, no room on the benches. In solitary confinement, desperate and traumatized detainees perform symbolic acts that make the Viennese Actionists look like Bob Ross. These are substances that are supposed to stay in your body or, if they leave it, to do so only in carefully managed fashion. As anyone with a passing interest in psychoanalysis knows, learning to control your shit is a basic condition of entry into society. The significance of such achievements is indicated by its irrepressible, if coded, emergence in colloquial language: How many times have you wished someone would just “handle their shit”? Then ask yourself: What does it mean to be kidnapped and bound in an environment where the physical and social infrastructure for controlling these things has been carefully, systematically dismantled, where people who are already suffering are made to endure a forced return to the pre-Oedipal? Cast in these terms, punishment in this city acquires a depth and intensity that is difficult to grasp for anyone who hasn’t seen it up close.
The other metaphor that emerges clearly from these pages is that of the machine—an automatic, preprogrammed device that takes in one thing and spits out another, its operation insusceptible to redirection by its prey. The language of machines suffuses the recollections of survivors. The legal system, according to one, is a “conveyor belt,” a phrase that connotes the inexorability of process and outcome as well as the futility of trying to affect it with abstract norms like justice or truth. “So much of what I learned in my civics textbooks turned out not to be true,” recalls a prominent reformer. Guards intone similarly: “Never listen to the shit they teach you in the academy, because the shit ain’t real.” The language of structure and device, of the iron cage, both material and imaginary, saturates the parlance of those who have spent time on Rikers. New residents are quickly made aware of “The Program,” a political arrangement where loosely organized gangs of inmates are deputized by guards to discipline newcomers in exchange for a kind of petty sovereignty in the jail. If you don’t get with The Program, novices quickly learn, you are going to get hurt. Many such unwritten rules emerge from the pages of Rikers, secret instruction manuals for the series of machines that secure an outcome so certain that it can only have been desired.
“If I had not been part of that time in my life, that round and round and round and round and round, what kind of person would I be today?”
The components of such machines emerge, in numbing repetition, from the stories collected in this book. Rikers is a machine for the destruction of boundaries, for scrambling the fragile categories that, one hopes, help organize life outside the walls. A machine to concentrate abjection. A machine for the destruction of bodies, through violence that is both fast and slow. A machine to concentrate and compound addiction, insomnia, mental illness. A machine for the production of fatalism and resignation—of submission, of learned masochism. A machine to increase the specific gravity of predation in the emotional ecology of a city. A machine for the destruction of solidarity. A machine to arrest movement, thwart connection, to reduce human abilities—a disabling machine. A machine for strange reversals of value—a place where cigarettes become precious and bodies cheap. A machine for the production of false guilt, of shame coerced and carefully nurtured. A machine for generating surreal, indescribable excess. A machine for the disorganization and dispersal of unwanted communities. A machine for producing sadism—joy and laughter in the suffering of others. A machine to produce lies and disavowal. A machine for generating ideology—imaginary, self-serving accounts of reality, treasured all the more insistently to the degree that they depart from and conceal that reality.
Rayman and Blau do not draw such conclusions directly. They decline to generalize, or even to intervene editorially beyond selecting and arranging the testimony of others, rendered in the messy colloquialisms of concrete experience. The stories in their book, though, gesture unmistakably toward the place where the concrete meets the abstract, where the subjective bleeds into the structural. What are we to make of the story where correction officers refuse to feed a starving detainee and then taunt her by munching on takeout, chortling as she stretches her hands through the bars, trying to pull a garbage can close enough to scrounge scraps of half-eaten bologna? Or the one told by a retired correction officer, who uses his real name, where he describes with a chuckle giving himself the “retirement gift” of flushing a Black man’s head in the toilet? “I liked my job,” he reflects. “It was me.”
Stories like these point to a final manifestation of Rikers-as-machine. The jail—in its exaltation of personal authority rooted in violence, its careful cultivation of a corps of sadists known as the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, and the way it quarantines the casualties of neoliberal New York, at whose feet all its problems are laid and on whom it becomes permissible to inflict nearly any kind of violence—is a machine for producing fascism—one built, maintained, and operated by liberals. This only sounds like a paradox if one’s notion of fascism remains ensnared in its phenomenal expressions, if fascism means accents and jackboots instead of responses to crisis, techniques of domination, and what Theodor Adorno called “the reproduction of some against others.” In his book Late Fascism (Verso, 2023), Alberto Toscano emphasizes that “fascism’s relations with both liberalism and freedom are far more tortuous and less comforting than their assumed antithesis suggests.” Grasping this requires putting aside “our knee-jerk identification of fascism with a monolithic, bureaucratic state and its opposition to liberalism in all its forms.” It also means paying attention to those militant scholars, usually Black, whose analysis and experience reveal “the specific light that the prism of race—of racial domination and racial capitalism—sheds on the nexus of fascism and democracy” and the ways that this can trouble what we might prefer to regard as an “absolute antithesis” between fascism and the politics that have made so many in this city so comfortable. Finally, it requires attention to the ways in which fascist subjectivities—the capacity, latent in all of us, to derive joy from the forceful subjugation of others—prepare the terrain for fascist solutions to social crises. As a former Gambino family associate who spent time on the island drolly reflects: “There’s a thin line between police and gangsters.”
Assimilating these principles and accepting the firsthand testimonies collected in Rikers should force a realization—that during the post–fiscal crisis era chronicled in this book, New York City carefully maintained an outpost whose practices, attitudes, and political outcomes can credibly be described as fascist. Rikers Island is a place where the mildly democratic state and the relative rule of law recede, leaking their capacities and responsibilities into the black box of personal domination—a place where the bureaucracy gives way to the street gang. It is a place where novel techniques of torture and sadism are developed and tested and where the torturers organize openly to demand the right to unlimited torture, more often than not receiving hushed deference from the polite mainstream. It is a place where smug platitudes about progress—the attitude, shared by so many of us, even those who think we are wizened, that we have left certain barbarisms behind—are revealed as pathetic self-deception. It is a place where the Hobbesian principle—“the war of all against all”—is deployed not as a description of the world but as a governing ethos, a disorganizing tactic meant to ensure that what anthropologist Orisanmi Burton calls “the long Attica revolt,” a protracted period of organizing and rebellion through which Black prisoners shed the self-hatred lamented by Baldwin and directed their anger toward those who were actually hurting them, was replaced by a situation in which that aggression could no longer strike its rightful target and would again be turned inward. And, most broadly, it is a place where the exclusion of a group of people who cannot be successfully accommodated by contemporary capitalism is secured—where they become marked and proscribed. Rikers, more than any other place, is the site where this exclusion from the political community is achieved and, through the profound dehumanization that is the jail’s governing ethos, hardened into self-fulfilling prophecy.
RIKERS CHARTS A NADIR, the period between the long Attica revolt and a recent swelling of reform energies, the latter borne of patient organizing work paired with outright rebellion. The scale and durability of these reforms remain in flux, a matter for the ongoing contest called politics. While the series of uprisings that culminated in the George Floyd Rebellion have undoubtedly forced meaningful transformations of consciousness, whether they have fostered the capacity to mount long-term, sustained disruption as well as the ability to deliberate, decide, and implement something like a unified strategy remains the province of ongoing organizing work. Rikers Island must be shut down. This is incontrovertible. Still, the necessary complements to such a shutdown—abolition not merely as absence, but, as the militant scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has always insisted, as “presence”—can feel crushingly far off in a moment that seems to offer, in the words of Toscano, “a seemingly endless horizon of austerity, stagnation, declining living standards, increasing inequality, accumulation by dispossession, organised abandonment and a repressive hardening of the state against any challenge or alternative.”
This hardening, this ongoing mutation of the state in the direction of unadorned plunder and unrepentant incoherence, is reflected in the mayoralty of Eric Adams, a product of the institutions and the era recounted in this book, a “great little man” whose worldview is an authentic expression of the rank-and-file cop and correction officer, a man whose vision of politics is rooted in the private trading and personal domination that suffuse places like Rikers, a representative of a world where making it means parking your truck on the sidewalk and forcing any “haters” who protest, as Adams is so fond of repeating, to become “your waiters at the table of success.” (Adams is frequently compared to Donald Trump, but to my mind the figure he resembles most closely is the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, to whom the epithet “great little man” has been attached by Jeffery R. Webber.) As I write these words, Mayor Adams, whose new legal defense fund was organized by a lobbyist for the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, has faithfully represented his constituency by vetoing a bill to ban solitary confinement in city jails—a veto overridden, for the time being, by the city council. What of the city’s current plan to close Rikers and redistribute its caging capacity to new, supposedly humane jails placed throughout the five boroughs? As Jarrod Shanahan demonstrates in his book Captives (Verso, 2022), all previous efforts to reform the city’s jail system by redesigning it have come to little in the face of broader political conditions that demand the neutralization of large swaths of the city’s population so that smaller swaths of it can enjoy its luxuries. Or, as Bernard Kerik, a roguish figure who has been both commissioner and inmate and who functions in Rayman and Blau’s book as a kind of cynical negative of an abolitionist, distinguished from his more polite colleagues by a willingness to occasionally state basic truths, puts it: “You’re going to take the same fucking people and the same fucking policies, and you’re gonna move them?”
Rikers is a machine for the destruction of boundaries, for scrambling the fragile categories that, one hopes, help organize life outside the walls. A machine to concentrate abjection. A machine for the destruction of bodies, through violence that is both fast and slow. A machine to concentrate and compound addiction, insomnia, mental illness.
What are these broader politics? The imperative that still structures this moment was articulated, in concise embryo, in the impolite words of municipal administrator Roger Starr, who in 1976 urged the deliberate depopulation of Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods through an effort he called “planned shrinkage.” “Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?” Starr reasoned. As historian Joshua Freeman pointed out in his 2000 book Working-Class New York, while more rhetorically cautious liberals professed abhorrence for Starr’s rudely candid proposal, they in fact pursued a slower, less frank version of it. Unlike the industrial city that had preceded the crisis, the New York that emerged from it had little real need, from the perspective of capital, for growing numbers of nonwhites for whom there were not enough jobs, and for whom the welfare state could no longer profitably grow, but whose growing political assertiveness made them doubly troublesome. The reaction to Starr’s faux pas demonstrated that explicit appeals to race were no longer politically feasible in the urban North. But other solutions were possible. Criminalization of the consequences of mass unemployment provided a basis to heed Starr’s imperative—to remove these people from the political community. Once established, this proscription could be broadened, made to extend beyond the formal term of incarceration, both legally, in the form of job and voting restrictions, and less visibly, in the mass psychic trauma that emerges from Rayman and Blau’s interviews. As The Bronx shrank, Rikers grew. Mass incarceration is the shape taken by white supremacy in its post–civil rights guise, providing those in power, as white supremacy always has, with a reliable sorting mechanism to determine who will eat and who will not in a society whose basic credo is to refuse to provide a minimum standard of well-being for all within it. Gilmore again: “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” Or, if you prefer, the Bronx rapper Fat Joe, who, despite his protestations, comes across in Rikers as an acute social critic: “I’m telling you I was born in Rikers Island.”
Other blunt voices show up in Rikers. Lawyer Ron Kuby, who has spent his career defending the oppressed: “The worst thing is we, as a society, don’t care. We have never cared…. Liberal New York City—we want these people, who are ‘these people,’ not our friends and neighbors, put away from us. The ‘good’ people.” Liberalism, in contemporary New York, requires the delicate nurturing of concentrated zones of fascism. We imagine it is contained within the walls, sequestered on the other side of a river no one can traverse. It is not. A set of lies, a monstrous disavowal of the humanity of other people is necessary to preserve the fiction that Rikers is somehow not really part of New York—that it has little to do with your kid’s birthday party in Fort Greene Park, the economic health of the theater industry, or the dessert course at your favorite restaurant. But Rikers is it—what it all means. It becomes, as Richard Seymour has said of Gaza, “the symptom of the world.” It is the place where the osteoporosis of liberalism bursts into view, where the brittle line that separates it from fascism bulges and cracks. The place from which the exception that is becoming the rule radiates its painful, blinding glare.