Violence out of control at Rikers Island prison in New York

It is 6:27 p.m., Saturday, February 10, at Rikers Island prison in New York, when six inmates of the Bloods gang rush on Jean Souffrant and beat him. The guard had made the mistake of inflicting punishment on one of their number awaiting trial for attempted murder. The assault, recorded by surveillance cameras, gives an idea of ​​what is happening on Rikers Island. Because we do not enter Rikers.

1.6 km prison island² is cut off from the world, connected by a bridge to the district of Queens. You can barely see the barbed wire around it when you land at La Guardia airport. In France, we know of her that she was the place where Dominique Strauss-Kahn was imprisoned after the assault, at the Sofitel in New York, of the maid Nafissatou Diallo, in 2011, and that it is the theater from the Serie The Night Of, which tells of the incarceration of a young Pakistani wrongly accused of murder.

“It’s not just Rikers problems. Rikers is the problem: out of sight, out of mind “

Exaggerated, the image that the cinema gives of this New York Alcatraz, inaugurated in 1935? Michael Jacobson, who ran the New York prison system in the late 1990s, judges that the TV series “Overdramatizes”, but he does not want to defend the prison, “Because it is a bad, terrible place”. Irrecoverable, in fact. “It’s not just Rikers problems. Rikers is the problem: out of sight, out of mind “, he explains.

“Preys and predators”

Michael Jacobson participated in a commission that advocated, in spring 2017, the closure of the second US prison, which accommodates 7,250 of the 9,000 prisoners in New York City (55% black, 34% Latino). The city’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, pouted at the costly and complex project, which will take nearly ten years, but has ended up rallying to it.

“You cannot fix the mass incarceration system. We must put an end to this concept ”

The February 10 assault and the publication of a damning report four days later only increased the pressure: the violence in Rikers is out of control, up 60% in 2017. The guards suffer four assaults a day, gang attacks have tripled, 123 detainees had to be sent to hospital, compared to 5 in 2016. Due to his dangerousness, Rikers is no longer allowed to accept inmates from outside the city. Conclusion: we must close, and quickly. “You cannot fix the mass incarceration system. We must put an end to this concept ”, says Jonathan Lippman, former chief justice of New York State and chairman of the Rikers commission.

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