Holy shit, the mother of all 'This is how it is inside' pieces, just great (but fucking sad) reading all around from all perspectives: the CO's, the prisoners, the visitors, etc.


"There was this one inmate who actually has a baby by one of the officers. They brought her to the segregation unit, and she had bruises on her body because another officer physically assaulted her. He spit on her from outside her holding cell. She’s a problem inmate, but that didn’t give him the right to hurt her and spit on her. If we spit on them, we would get another charge. So why are they allowed to do that to us if we can’t do it back?"


"I think the real inmates at Rikers are the COs, because they have a lifelong sentence, you know? One of the COs told me his entire childhood he spent waiting for his dad to get out of prison. He would get out of prison and go back. And now the guy is a CO in jail. So I was like, “Why would you do that?” And he said, “Well, it’s good health benefits.” I’m like, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, you have to feed your children, right?”

"Something happened two days ago. The guy overdosed on BuSpar — a mental-health medication. And they just stood there not doing nothing, man. I went to speak to the guy and his eyes were like in the back of his head, so I woke him up. He ran into the wall. He pissed on himself and fell down. I ran over to the officer, and he went and got the medical staff. They took fucking like 30 minutes to get to this guy, man, and they’re right here! They didn’t want to even touch him. I had to put him on the stretcher and everything. That’s not my job, I just did it just to help him out"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/inside-rikers-island-interviews.html