Nothing Can Truly Prepare You for Your First Time Behind Bars

Since 1964, the predominant site of city time for men in New York City has been the C-76 building, short for its original city budgetary designation as “Capital Project Number 76.” Alongside its numeric designation, C-76 was first dubbed the New York City Reception and Classification Center, then the Correctional Institution for Men, and is known today as the Eric M. Taylor Center (EMTC). Among COs and inmates, it is usually called “the Six building” or simply “the Six.” The grounds of this low-slung facility sprawl horizontally across thirty acres on the southwest side of the island, near the primary staff parking lot and the mouth of the bridge connecting Rikers to East Elmhurst, Queens. Its facade is brick dappled with shades of beige and brown and punctuated by steel-framed windows, slatted with seven panes of grubby glass that open obliquely, like vents, with the laborious rotations of an inmate-operated hand crank. C-76 is comprised of three sections, the North Side and the South Side, which opened in 1964, and the Annex, which opened in 1970. The North Side contains two floors of traditional cell blocks, four in total, boasting 136 cells. This is the kind of special accommodation afforded to “protective custody” inmates like Lil Wayne, who spent eight months there in 2010.

The vast majority of the building’s approximately 1,850 beds, however, are spread across twenty-eight rectangular dormitories, massive open rooms with stationary single beds, connected to the main building only on one side. This so-called chevron design gives the building the distinct aerial shape of three Ks, with two joined back-to-back by the number eight. These dormitories are identified by a number from one through twelve, denoting distinct three-story structures emanating from the building, along with the level (lower, main, or upper). 12-Main, for instance, is stacked between 12-Lower and 12-Upper, and overlooks 11-Lower, 11-Main, and 11-Upper across a disused courtyard. From many dormitories and passageways of C-76, prisoners may gaze at the Manhattan skyline, the comings and goings of nearby LaGuardia Airport, and the vanishing point where the Buono Bridge connects Rikers to the freedom of the outside world.

C-76 is a building of long corridors of polished tile, concrete, and glazed block, connecting dormitories with a high-school-style cafeteria, cage-lined infirmary, institutional chapel, visiting area, mailroom, disused recreation gymnasium, basement barber shop, and other spaces for sustaining and reproducing the jail. The hallways are streaked with a red line on either side, creating a narrow passage close to the wall, to which inmates are supposed to confine themselves. When moving in supervised groups, they are instructed to cling to the right-hand side of the hall, a behavior that quickly becomes second nature. Multiple checkpoints, complete with metal detectors and sometimes locked doors, stretch the passage from one end of the jail to the other, though these are often abandoned and most inmates are free to roam the halls without restraints or accompaniment, provided they can account for their destination if asked.

“If you grow up in the projects and the public school system and then go to Rikers Island, it almost feels like no big deal. It feels like, oh, we know this setting. I’m willing to bet that the same architect designed all three things,” explains hip-hop artist Fat Joe in Rikers: An Oral History. Fat Joe would absolutely win that bet, at least when it comes to C-76: its architecture firm, Brown & Guenther, also designed a number of public schools and housing projects in the Bronx and throughout the city. This is also a common sentiment expressed by those familiar with the island. “It wasn’t until I worked in a jail setting that I realized the … colors on the walls were the same colors used in the hallways and stairwells in the projects,” writes former Rikers CO C. René West. “A color I would call institutional gray, drab yellow, or drab yellow and orange colors. The floor areas in jails are very similar to the lobby areas in many of the project apartment buildings; and the inmate’s housing areas have the same tiles on the floor.” Working as CO, West came to suspect that the message this architecture sent to inmates from New York City’s housing projects was, “Welcome home.”

The lion’s share of city time at C-76 plays out in its dormitories. The dormitories of its Annex, typical of the facility, measure 72.5 by 50 feet, and feature space for sixty-four beds. At the entrance to the dormitory sits a narrow hallway gated on both sides by heavy doors meshed with weathered iron. The so-called A gate leads outside, while the “B gate” leads into the house. This hallway contains a storage closet and the COs’ private bathroom, both of which are usually locked. Situated on one side of the entrance hallway is the day room, a small metal- and plexiglass-enclosed common area open in the daytime, where inmates can watch television, play games, eat meals, or, in some dorms, simply sit at a proper table and chair. On the other side is the bathroom. In some houses, semi-opaque plexiglass and metal grating provide only partial privacy for the inmates’ bathroom, showers and all. At the mouth of this hallway is the COs’ station, commonly called “the Bubble,” an enclosure best compared to a toll booth. There the so-called A officer engages with inmates from behind plexiglass, fielding requests for razors, ibuprofen, toilet paper, and permission to leave the dormitory, along with episodic romantic attention, while the “B officer” holds court at a small table set up just in front, on the floor of the dorm.

Beyond the Bubble and into the depths of the dormitory stretches Broadway, a six-foot-wide corridor bisecting C-76’s rectangular barracks. On either side of Broadway sit rows of rusted iron bed frames, four to each side, situated roughly three feet apart and bolted to the floor. Their harsh surface is evenly dotted with ventilation (or drainage) holes; a low lip around its perimeter keeps the mattress in place. Narrow aisles branching off Broadway create sections of eight beds apiece, with roughly five feet in the middle, which often becomes social space with an explicit sense of community, including hostility to outsiders. In some houses, a low divider provides a modicum of privacy between the heads and feet of respective beds, but there is in any case little privacy to be had in the dormitories where city time is served. “Here is the somber monotony of a world created to lock up everything with security, suspicion and certitude,” wrote former Rikers chaplain Pierre Raphael, “to put everything in boxes and pigeonholes, far removed from every kind of fantasy or initiative.”

C-74: The Robert N. Davoren Center

David spent most of his time at C-74, the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), which has primarily functioned since its 1972 opening as an adolescent facility. Though just across the street, C-74, which dwarfs C-76, stretching across fifty acres to its immediate east, might as well be a world away. Like C-76, it is a building of chevrons and long corridors, and from the outside, largely resembles C-76: three stories of nondescript brick in “warm buff color” and endless rows of steel-frame louvered windows. This facility has two central wings, emanating in an obtuse V shape from a cluster of support facilities, thirteen-hundred feet in each direction. When it opened in 1972, RNDC counted 1,080 cells and a single dormitory. In the early 1980s, DOC added 300 beds in three “module” (or “mod”) dormitories that stretched across the chevrons, along with 108 cells.

RNDC is generally known as “the Four building” or simply “the Four.” But, confusingly, the chevron-shaped wings projecting from the main hallway are known in C-74 jargon as “buildings.” Thus, an inmate in C-74 may speak of “the Six building,” meaning the chevron-shaped wing of C-74 bearing this number, only to have the person he is speaking to interpret this as C-76, which is another facility entirely. The same problem arises with “the Five building,” as this is both a wing in C-74 and a nickname for AMKC, or C-95, another facility on Rikers. To avoid this confusion, inmates in C-74 who are acquainted with the problem will sometimes refer to the other two facilities using the “C,” as in “C-76,” rather than simply “the Six” or “the Six building.”

Each “building” in C-74 has a north side and a south side, designated by those names. They each have three floors, meaning that people in C-74 speak of housing units such as “6–Upper North,” or “6–Upper South,” “4–Main South,” “4–Lower North,” and so on. The two arms of the V-shaped main RNDC structure itself are likewise referred to as “North Side” and “South Side,” despite their intersecting at an almost- right angle. The North Side contains buildings 2, 4, and 6, and Mods 4 and 6. The South Side contains buildings 1, 3, and 5, as well as Mod 5. The 1 building was closed during David’s time in C-74, and housed no inmates. The mods are essentially giant two-story trailers joined to the main hallway by a short corridor with a gate. The mods contain four dorms of approximately fifty beds — Mod 4–Lower North has forty-eight beds, and Mod 4–Lower South, fifty.

Most of the spaces designed for functions other than warehousing humans can be found at the crux of the North Side and the South Side. Here, a three-way intersection is closed off by a series of gates operated by a CO in a plexiglass control booth, from which a red light can be seen flashing during C-74’s daily occurrence of “alarms.” This booth affords a view down both main hallways as well as toward the shorter hallway from which emanate the DOC staff area, social-services office, clinic, visiting floor (including a blind-turn staircase that has allegedly been the site of many stabbings and slashings over the years), Intake, and kitchen. The North Side, where David was held, affords access to the kitchen, or “KK,” mail room, chapel, and upstairs gym, the staircase descending to the “Peace Center,” downstairs gym and yard, video-visiting/remote-court center, office of the captain on duty, commissary, and mess hall. The South Side hallway affords entrances to the chaplains’ offices and the law library.

We learned that rules and policies were selectively enforced, and often just made up, depending on the day and the CO in charge.

Surfaces are largely the same in C-74 as they are in C-76: the walls in the main halls are made of the same glazed block, coated in eggshell enamel. The floor is also polished concrete, and also bears a bright red line running parallel to the wall with a few feet’s worth of distance between the two, across which inmates are instructed not to walk when moving to and from the housing units. The walls have a handful of uncaulked seams large enough for rats to crawl through. They bear the occasional feeble attempt at inspiration via thoroughly uninspiring murals: a child behind barbed wire reaching for an enormous butterfly, a formerly incarcerated man going to college and becoming a suit-toting professional, and even an abstract splatter-paint work. Every seventy-five feet or so on the walls of the main hallway, a warning appears, stenciled in black block letters:

ATTENTION ALL INMATES

DONT SUBJECT YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS TO ARREST

BY ASKING THEM TO SMUGGLE

DRUGS OR CONTRABAND INTO THE FACILITY

C-74’s buildings contain cell blocks, not dorms, but otherwise strongly resemble the wings of C-76. The mods are completely different from the buildings. Entering Mod 4 from the main hall, one passes through a double door that can be locked, but rarely is, and then immediately encounters a barred black metal gate. Beyond this sits “the bridge,” the empty landing-like space in front of the Bubble and between the two dorms on either side. An inmate must get the attention of the Bubble officer, usually by yelling “On the gate!” or simply “Yo, CO!” to get the gate open, as it is controlled from inside the Bubble.

The outer surface of the Bubble is equipped with a small black scanning device so inmates can scan their ID wristbands upon entering or exiting the dorms. The door to each dorm has a plexiglass window, perhaps two and a half feet square. Entering the dorm, one finds the day room straight across, along with the “day room corner” section, a stretch of perhaps ten bunks in the front of the dorm, running from the entrance to the day room along the concrete block wall separating it from the main space of the dorm. There are also two small columns here, which provide some relative degree of privacy for certain bunks and from certain angles — about as good as privacy gets in this environment.

The columns, like the walls of Mod 4, are clad in rough white plastic paneling, likely PVC, held together at regular intervals by flat white plastic seams and round button-like fasteners, a sort of tamper-resistant plastic rivet. This is a far cry from any surface in C-76, or the original C-74 structures. The windows, too, are remarkably different — unlike the louvered windows present elsewhere, these are actual sliding windows with heavy-duty metal screens and diamond-pattern metal grates, commonly referred to as “bars.”

Turning away from the day room to look down the length of the dorm, one finds the bulk of the sleeping space: one line of bunks along the inner wall, which separates the sleeping space from the bathroom, and another along the outer wall, prized for its windows. One bed in particular, “the corner bed,” sits in the far corner of the outer wall and the short end wall capping the length of the dorm. This bed is unanimously accepted as the dorm’s best real estate, as it has no neighbor on one side, as well as two windows.

On the opposite end of the real-estate social scale are the “Broadway beds”: a double row of bunks running head-to-toe down the middle of the dorm, between the two lines of wall beds. “Sleeping on Broadway” is largely reviled because one has practically no space to call one’s own. The mod bathrooms offer slightly more privacy than those in EMTC, but only thanks to the inmates’ creative reappropriation of the environment. Yet as a rule, personal space is all but nonexistent. This is the case because city time is a world of forced sociality, whether the inmate likes it or not.

Remembering Our Numbers

It was a bout of short-stay incarceration that inspired Jamaican musician Toots Hibbert to pen the song “54–46 That’s My Number.” In it, Hibbert reflects both on his own experience with incarceration and on the profound realization that, at the exact moment he is singing, someone else stands in his state-issued shoes. “54–46 was my number,” Hibbert croons, “right now, someone else has that number.” As our own experiences with city time recede into the past, and increasingly take on the contours of a strange and awful dream, we must emphasize that the subject matter of this book is being lived by real people as we write, and, barring the creation of a liberated society free from human cages, as you read it. Every morning the lights come on, and every night they go off. All the while, the boundless complexities of human sociality play out within the harsh confines of grubby concrete walls. Rikers Island is, after all, a 24/7 operation. Short-stay incarceration most often sends people back to the streets within a few months, but city time never stops.

Intake

City time begins with intake, when the new inmate is processed into the jail. Intake is found in many institutions, including workplace training for new hires in almost every occupation and orientation for new students at universities. The particular type of orientation that takes place in jail, however, is characterized by the surrender of legally recognized freedom, the inculcation of a new set of statutes and customs to replace those in the outside world, and, above all, the violent compulsion — usually just below the surface, but sometimes overt — to accept one’s place in this new order.

Sociologist Erving Goffman evoked the medieval concept of civiliter mortuus to describe the intake process as the moment of “civil death,” when a person forfeits the formal rights of an ordinary citizen and becomes a prisoner. New arrivals undergo a process of “loss and mortification”; they are stripped of their outside possessions, including their street clothing and personal grooming equipment, are issued a number that will be more significant than their name, and are issued Spartan institutional clothing and grooming supplies to replace those they use on the outside. Also lost is the emotional comfort that comes from items representing free life on the outside. “The admission procedure can be characterized as a leaving off and a taking on,” Goffman writes, “with the midpoint marked by physical nakedness.” The free person is thus stripped down, literally and figuratively, and established as an inmate.

Central to intake is what Goffman calls “the welcome,” a process in which “staff or inmates, or both, go out of their way to give the recruit a clear notion of his plight.” Beside the supposedly practical matters associated with intake — searching for contraband, ascertaining medical history, providing a uniform, outlining the rules, and so forth — there is an equally if not more important process of communicating to newcomers that they are now living in a place where they are insignificant and powerless. Inmates are made to understand that most of the liberties even a working-class person can enjoy on the outside are suspended, and that they should therefore follow the rules and avoid causing trouble in order to simply survive. This message has many carriers: the harsh architecture and filthy neglect of the intake pens, the humiliating process of the strip search, the endless waiting and unapologetic inefficiency of the whole process, and, of course, the verbal instructions and advice offered by COs and inmates alike.

In our experience, while COs may inform new arrivals of what is expected of them, mostly through threats, insults, or scarcely comprehensible commands, the inmates themselves take a more active role in orienting newcomers to the social setting where they will cohabitate. The first process is the institutional intake, the official mechanisms through which newcomers are taken into the facility, in Goffman’s words, “to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operations.” But equally important, and largely neglected by Goffman, is what we call the social intake, in which other inmates acculturate and acclimatize the newcomer to the de facto social order structuring inmate life.

Given that we both had the privilege of posting bail, and thus began our city time directly from the outside, this is how our narrative is framed. From what we gather, however, the intake process is similar for those already housed on the island prior to conviction, including the forfeiture of street clothing and other small benefits of innocence in the eyes of the law, and the new inmate’s subsequent processing into the distinct world of city time.

“Because I Said So”: Institutional Intake

The judge is clad in a black robe and ensconced in polished wood paneling, just like on television. But in real life, the scene is much shabbier. It is hard not to notice the run-down furniture, dirty windows, and wrinkled vestments of the judge sneering down from a bench propped up higher than everything else in the courtroom save for the bold, gilded words embossed above the judge’s head: “In God We Trust.” Beside the judge’s venerable bench sits an ominous door leading from the contrived civility of the courtroom to the world of human cages. Burly COs clad in unnecessary bulletproof vests patrol this portal, ferrying captive people from the jail, a world of unvarnished violence and neglect, to the courtroom, where brute force appears cloaked in the highest Enlightenment ideals.

By the time we crossed this threshold, we had eyed it with morbid fascination in dozens of grueling and often pointless court appearances. Passing through this door, we began our city time. We started out in a set of “pens,” the colloquial term for cages of different sizes, often filthy and lacking basic facilities like sinks and toilets, where prisoners languish for hours on end at nearly every step of their movement through DOC custody. Jarrod was shuttled into a small, dilapidated cell with a disused bathroom overlooking Manhattan rooftops. The CO processing him was training a trio of cadets, and used Jarrod to demonstrate the proper methods of searching a detained person for weapons. He explained that they should always be polite and respectful. “Some court officers make fun of me for being polite to prisoners,” he added, “but my philosophy is you say please — once.” The cadets nodded eagerly.

We were questioned at length about our professions, medical histories, and gang affiliations. The COs processing Jarrod, a Latino man, and two Black women, joked that it was not too late for him to join a gang before he got to Rikers. “Now is a good time to get covered,” one of the women told him. Jarrod asked if they had a form for that. The man threw up gang signs with his hands while the two women laughed. Meanwhile, the man chewed on cherries, throwing the pits on the floor. One of the women yelled at him, saying he was feeding the mice. Picking them up would be the responsibility of inmates bused in from Rikers Island.

This process was a rush from one filthy pen to another, with broken toilets, clogged sinks, and nowhere to sit or lie down without great discomfort, just to wait for hours on end before being transported to another. As we lost track of time, it dawned on us that it no longer mattered. We were patted down and asked the same questions over and over again as we changed custody from one cluster of COs to another, slowly making our way to the ground floor of 100 Center Street, through a series of elevator rides in which we were commanded to face the back wall. Amid the squalor and stale air of the sunless pens, and the still more dismal gloom of detained men headed to Rikers and the state prison system, a small, home-printed sign hung over one guard station bearing the words, “The worst prison of all is fear of what other people think.”

Jarrod was escorted toward the bus by an East Asian male CO. A white male CO playfully shouted, “Why are you messing with the white guy?” Jarrod’s escort replied, “I have to, for our numbers. It can’t just be Black and Latino guys in here!” Such banter between COs sometimes uses the inmate as the butt of a joke, but usually ignores the inmate altogether. In transit, COs often stopped and talked among themselves as if we were inanimate objects — a sentiment further betrayed by their frequent reference to us as “packages.”

Reaching the ground floor at last, we entered a short corridor leading into a foul-smelling outdoor loading dock stacked high with clear plastic trash bags containing unfinished detainee meals, allowing a narrow path alongside an idling DOC transport bus for us to board. These buses resembled heavily armored school buses, with metal grating over the windows, one row of double-seater pens along the left-hand side, and another row of single cages along the right. Jarrod traveled with a group of women from the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail on Rikers, who had been transported to 100 Center Street to work. “Hurry up and get us on the bus before a rat jump out!” one commanded the CO overseeing their transfer. The overpowering smell of garbage boarded the bus along with the passengers, and never left.

Worn and rusted metal doors and locks jangled incessantly as the bus bounced around the sinuous Lower Manhattan streets. Outside, New York City street life went on as usual, with nobody paying particular attention to what is, after all, a very common sight. Jarrod was transported in June, and the heat was stifling. The bus crawled across gridlocked Chinatown streets for upwards of fifteen minutes, making its way east to Bowery in stop-and-go traffic, only to loop around and return to the loading dock in a similar crawl. One of the COs had forgotten something. “CO, turn on the air conditioning!” one inmate yelled. Laughing, the CO replied that there was no air conditioner, and while the women had “grounds for a civil rights lawsuit,” they would have to wait until its success in court to get their justice. The atmosphere was convivial. These were people who clearly spent a lot of time with each other.

Jarrod’s bus crawled through the Lower East Side in search of the elusive “better way” across Manhattan in midday traffic. There was much grumbling by inmates and COs alike, including one woman exclaiming, “Where are all these people going at two o’clock in the afternoon?” — a phrase Jarrod had heard hundreds of times in his years of work as a New York City truck driver. At last the bus reached the United Nations building and entered the Midtown Tunnel to Queens. The bus then traversed a maze of industrial streets heading toward East Elmhurst. David’s driver, in contrast, opted for the Manhattan Bridge and made much better time.

A noxious smell hit Jarrod’s nostrils, and one of the women on his bus exclaimed excitedly, “Oh, we home!” an instant before the bus turned the corner and revealed the entrance to the Rikers Island Bridge. The bridge itself is a mile-long span with a slight elevation in the center that jolts passengers momentarily off their seats at the midpoint. Meanwhile, on the right sits LaGuardia Airport, so close to Rikers that its runways practically touch the island, with Citi Field, home of the Mets, looming behind it in the distance. “We’re home!” other women on Jarrod’s bus reiterated, cheering, upon reaching the other side of the bridge.

The intake area at C-76 (“Intake”) features much of the same dirty and decrepit pens one finds throughout the chain of custody in the city’s punishment system. Jarrod was uncuffed and herded into one pen with a putrid, unflushable toilet and a sleeping man whose tray of food, stripped only of its meat, was being devoured by a swarm of flies. A gentle sea breeze wafted in through windows covered in rusted iron grating and overgrown with greenery on the outside, emitting the smell of salt water, vegetation, and morning dew that permeates the island’s windows to battle in vain with the odors of sweat, feet, piss, shit, burps, farts, and bleach that otherwise dominate the atmosphere.

Next, we turned our money over by feeding it into an electronic machine that resembled a MetroCard dispenser, got photographed, and turned over our civilian clothing, including our shoes. We were then ordered to strip to our underwear and hover above a BOSS chair, which looks a bit like a drugstore blood pressure machine but can supposedly identify metal contraband stored in the anus and mouth. We were then led into a small booth, open on one side, and told to remove our underwear and squat down, exposing our anuses. The male COs who oversee strip searches at Rikers fiercely guard their masculinity by performing shock and revulsion at the sight of male penises and anuses, which must in reality be quite routine sights to them after only a few days on the job. The muscular, heavily tattooed white male CO inspecting Jarrod barked an inaudible command, which Jarrod incorrectly interpreted to mean “spread your ass wider.” When Jarrod did this, he learned that the CO had meant the opposite. “OK! OK!” he shouted, as if in great physical pain, “You’re done!”

The visual inspection of the anus does not actually reveal any contraband unless the new arrival has been very careless in stashing it, and is thus far more about the performance of guard vigilance and inmate subservience than anything practical. Sociologist Harold Garfinkle called these rituals “status degradation ceremonies,” performances in which the subordinate position of a class of people, in this case newly arrived inmates, is inscribed and repeatedly emphasized. Incidentally, these searches are notoriously futile at Rikers; we were both reproached by several men in the intake dormitory for knowingly turning ourselves in to custody without contraband stashed on (or in) our bodies. (Jarrod did not disclose that he had in fact smuggled a flashlight into the facility in a pair of reading glasses, for the purposes of reading after lights out.)

After the strip search, we received “greens,” ill-fitting forest green jumpsuits stamped “DOC” in six-inch white letters across the back, and so-called Air Patakis, flimsy, flat-bottomed Velcro shoes with no arch support. Generally speaking, Patakis run large, and all the clothes run small. Nothing really fits.

We got dressed and were ordered to escort ourselves to the clinic down the hall. It was an introduction to the fairly lax transport practices at C-76, where inmates are sometimes allowed to simply roam the halls unescorted. A befuddled Jarrod was dispatched to the clinic with no escort. He knocked on the door repeatedly, until someone on the other side shouted, “Come back later!” Confused about how to proceed, he just sat down on a nearby bench. When the door finally opened, Jarrod was greeted by a Black female CO loudly berating a crying man in a cage: “He’s crying like a little boy,” she taunted, “and he a grown-ass man!”

The C-76 clinic is a cramped office reminiscent of a food stamp processing center or drop-in center, worked by the same kind of civilian bureaucrat one would encounter in one of those spaces, and overseen by COs posted up near the door. We had our vitals taken, underwent a perfunctory discussion of mental health, and were asked about dietary restrictions. Almost as a joke, Jarrod remarked that he was a vegan, and to his surprise, was sent a few cubicles down to a thirty-something Jamaican dietician with a big beard and large golden necklaces, one of which was the scales of justice. In the background, a professional shoplifter debated with the nurses whether his trade was morally wrong. Hearing this, the dietician remarked to Jarrod, “Who makes those rules? Who says ‘Thou shalt not steal?’” He paused, before answering: “The rich! They say ‘Thou shalt not steal’ so we don’t steal their things, and ‘Thou shalt not kill’ so we don’t kill them! They don’t follow those rules, only us!” He shook his head, and Jarrod followed in kind, before they both went on with the business of inmate intake at a facility where the poor are held captive at the behest of the rich. At least Jarrod was promised some vegan food.

David got his first glimpse of DOC’s disorganization during his initial clinic visit. He was paired with one nurse who asked him a battery of questions about medical conditions, addictions, and so on, and then asked him to step into a bathroom and provide a urine sample. When he came out, he was paired with another nurse who asked him the exact same questions. A few days later, he was sent to the clinic again, only to repeat the entire process because his blood and urine samples had apparently been misplaced.

After processing in the clinic, we were returned to an intake pen. More waiting. Jarrod was, at last, issued his ID card and taken to the intake dormitory, where he received a flimsy and uneven rubber-coated mattress, two sheets, a green plastic cup, toothpaste, a toothbrush, a towel, and a small bar of soap. When David served his sentence a few years later, the DOC had switched from ID cards to ID bracelets, which he was cautioned to wear at all times. When he was finally moved from the holding pen to the intake dormitory, a CO unlocked a hallway closet as David and two other transferees waited beside him, fumbled inside for a moment, and then began throwing flaccid vinyl pillows, mattresses, sheets, and horse blankets onto the floor in front of them. One of the three had been to Rikers before; he immediately scooped up the least deflated-looking mattress and pillow. Though the other two were issued cups at this time, the CO could not find one for David. “Sorry, man,” he said as he locked the closet, “just ask the floor officer in the morning.” It ultimately took three days for David to get a cup.

This command over daily life becomes so powerful that many COs become accustomed to dictating the very nature of reality.

Musician and New York City counterculture leader Ed Sanders, who served city time at Hart Island in 1962 following a sit-in at the Atomic Energy Commission, recalls his own intake: “We were processed into the citadel. We were given some stiff black shoes, loose jeans, blue shirt, towels, and thick green overcoat. Never in my life had such a negative rush of immediate boredom stormed my soul.”

The Incomprehensible Order

One’s first time entering a massive caged dormitory filled with captive men can be quite overwhelming, and is a crucial moment for the new arrival. “When you walk into a house on Rikers Island, it’s all eyes on you…. Everybody lookin’ to see if they know you from somewhere … to see if you a rat, gang member,” explains one formerly incarcerated YouTuber. “I noticed the garbage in various corners of the huge room,” recalls Marcos Perez, who served city time in the early 2010s. “The steam from the bathroom carried the odor of numerous people relieving themselves. Further in, people sitting, standing, talking, and arguing…. Then the silence and attention turned toward me as I slowly walked in, looking for a bed of my own.” So too did we take in this intimidating setting as much as possible, without appearing doe-eyed, before making our way to the harsh bedframe that would serve as home base for navigating an unfamiliar and threatening terrain.

In the days after our arrival, we received the second half of the institutional intake, in which we were instructed by demonstration how the facility was to be run. We learned that rules and policies were selectively enforced, and often just made up, depending on the day and the CO in charge. Jarrod had a very difficult time getting a copy of the Inmate Handbook, which is supposed to be made available to every new arrival. While David was later able to grab one from a stack in Intake, during Jarrod’s time, they were scarce in C-76, and men who showed up to the 11-Lower dormitory with the handbook saw it confiscated as “contraband” by COs who were sick of hearing that they violated inmates’ rights. A common motto within the DOC describes the job as “care, custody, and control.” One CO during Jarrod’s time, a Black woman who spent much of the day bellowing obscenities at any inmate looking in her general direction, spelled out exactly what this means on Rikers: “It’s called ‘care, custody, and control’: I don’t care, you’re in my custody, and I’m in control.”

The COs’ rule by belligerent force begins immediately and constitutes the most visceral aspect of institutional intake. Those arriving at a new house are often berated by COs for their personal hygiene, humiliated in front of other inmates with a variety of schoolyard taunts, and warned in harsh tones to do what they are told, not cause any trouble, and basically “shut the fuck up,” as some COs were quick to command. Questions of any kind about how the house functions are generally treated by COs as a major inconvenience, or else eyed suspiciously. COs are commonly instructed that nearly every request from an incarcerated person, including asking for basic amenities like toilet paper, is likely the beginning of a complex process of seduction that will lead the CO to ruin. When David, newly arrived, asked a CO how to sign up for a clinic visit, she responded with disgust that he was “a real smart-ass” and simply walked away. On a more basic level, the freedom to not care about inmates’ basic needs, except when the spirit moves them, is a coveted part of Rikers COs’ daily work. Accordingly, they made it clear from the onset that regardless of what was said on paper, they did not have to lift a finger to do anything for an incarcerated person, unless they damn well wanted to. This applied to daily schedules, which were hopelessly opaque. The times for elective daily activities like sick call or law library were not announced in advance, and often conflicted, with no warning or recourse. Inmates, for example, had to decide if going to sick call, their daily chance to (maybe) see a doctor, was worth possibly missing their daily trip to the yard, if it was called while they were out. And if they missed sick call because they could not hear the announcement over the impossibly loud dormitory noise, it was their fault for not paying attention, and they might have another chance to get it right tomorrow. Everything was called abruptly, as inmates who had been waiting around for hours were suddenly summoned with excited shouts, belittled for taking too long, and threatened with being left behind. This false urgency, coupled with vast stretches of dead time, whether at the behest of a CO’s whim, or the jail’s lumbering bureaucracy, called to mind the old military adage: “Hurry up and wait.”

With no efficient system in place for addressing the dormitories, COs simply bellow commands on the spot, and become incensed when they are not immediately followed by inmates who often cannot even hear them. Meanwhile, the COs very publicly prioritize small talk among themselves, often loud and without concern for being overheard, over the needs of inmates, however pressing. “At first their carefree banter seemed to have nothing to do with me,” recalls Michael Walker, “but then I got it in my head that they were ignoring me on purpose — like they wanted me to feel unimportant.”

Though DOC policy calls for daily orientation sessions to be conducted by COs for all newly arrived inmates, neither of us ever saw or even heard of such a thing at Rikers, nor had anyone we met while incarcerated there. On the contrary, most of what we learned about the institution from COs we gleaned not from their explicit instruction but by watching them operate. As Gresham Sykes argues, “The incomprehensible order or rule is a basic feature of life in prison.” This was also observed over a century ago by New York City political prisoner Carlo de Fornaro, who served eight months of city time on Blackwell’s Island in 1910. “As there are no written rules, and nobody informs us of all the unwritten rules on our entrance here … this apparent forgetfulness is really meant to give the warden and the keepers an unchallenged power of persecution over suspected and unruly convicts.” More recently, longtime federal prisoner Michael G. Santos recalls remarking to an uncooperative guard, “Living in the unknown is just part of being a prisoner. Isn’t it?”

When pressed for explanations, COs most often default to a parental “because I said so.” They do this partly because it is simply easier for COs to bark commands than explain themselves, which enables them to tailor their work to whatever is easiest and most convenient for them, inmate needs be damned. It also derives from the COs’ quasi-military structure, in which those who interact with inmates mostly fall at the bottom of a harsh chain of command, and receive similarly unqualified orders on a last-minute, need-to-know basis. In this sense, COs simply extend this hierarchy to their relations with inmates, rudeness and all. But their refusal to provide information is also more fundamental. As Sykes argues, “Providing explanations carries an implication that those who are ruled have a right to know — and this in turn suggests that if the explanations are not satisfactory, the rule or order will be changed.” Refusing to explain themselves is both a symptom and a source of COs’ unchecked power.

This command over daily life becomes so powerful that many COs become accustomed to dictating the very nature of reality. When Jarrod took a urine test in the clinic, the CO told him to place the cup on top of the blue trash can, and pointed to a red trash can. Jarrod hesitated for a split second, looking at the can, and then at the CO. “Put it on the red trash can!” the CO emphasized, as if he had said that the first time. Flummoxed, Jarrod complied, and received a look as if to say, “Was that so difficult to understand?” Similarly, Jarrod was dispatched to the mail room, and having not received mail for several days, hastened to make it there within a matter of minutes, only to find nobody inside. Upon his return, he was told, “You must have taken too long to get there.”

This attitude in particular is the cornerstone of the longstanding practice among Rikers COs of covering up their own transgressions, including violence against incarcerated people, by getting their stories straight with their coworkers, and converting their lies into institutional truths through the alchemy of paperwork. A 2014 Department of Justice investigation into adolescent facilities at C-74 and C-76 found systematic embellishment of paperwork, sanctioned up and down the chain of command, to routinely cover up incarcerated people’s injuries and make COs’ wrongdoings, and even the formal processes in which COs must explain their uses of force, vanish through the invocation of bureaucratic word magic.

“Officers were always told not to start shit outside their jail,” recalls former Rikers CO Gary Heyward, “because when it comes down to writing reports and coming up with lies to cover your ass, you’d rather they come from officers from your jail that you have a bond with, that you trust.” Former CO C. René West recounts being instructed by a senior officer on how to fabricate disciplinary write-ups, or, in the institutional language, make them “more juicy.” “When he was finished making my report ‘more juicy,’ it was a completely different scenario. A small curse like ‘fuck you bitch’ turned into a threat to kill my mother, rape me, or to visit me once he was released.”

In his first week, David was told by an officer in the Bubble that he could not leave for his visit because there was “an alarm.” When he asked what that meant, she frowned and impatiently told him, “Ask your fellow inmates, sir.” About a month into his sentence, David tried to give a small load of laundry to the institutional laundry services. The CO scowled and turned away, saying, “Can’t you just wash it yourself?” Incidents like this are emblematic of a CO mindset based around abdicating the responsibility they are hired to take on, especially the “care” portion of the department’s motto, and becoming indignant when asked to fulfill it. Most new arrivals, therefore, are left to rely on other inmates.

“This Is Jail”: Social Intake

Jarrod was struck by how often inmates stated the obvious fact that they were presently located in jail. “This is jail!” was a popular refrain in a number of situations. It could refer to the lingering surprise that one had transitioned from free life to being incarcerated: “This is jail!” uttered incredulously. Lil Wayne notes in an early entry to his Rikers diary, “I traded a coffee pack for a pack of noodles. Damn … I’m really in jail!” It could be an imperative, a reminder that the setting called for steely resolve: “This is jail,” meaning “toughen up.” It could be a simple, dismissive statement of fact, almost like a shrug: “This is jail,” so what do you expect? Above all, it was the affirmation that this was a social setting with particular rules different from those of the outside world. “This is jail,” and you had better behave accordingly. This sentiment figures prominently in social intake, the process by which inmates instruct the new arrival in the written — and largely unwritten — rules structuring daily life in the facility.

Former Rikers detainee Russell “Half ” Allen dramatizes his own experiences with social intake at C-74 in the novel Gladiator School. “Listen kid,” an old-timer named Mr. Thomas tells the young Half as they exit the DOC bus on Rikers, “I want you to stay focused and stay to yourself. You didn’t come here to make friends. You do your time, and you get your ass home. That’s the plan, you understand?”

For those who come from neighborhoods and other social settings with considerable overlap with Rikers, or have previous experience with incarceration, learning the ropes in a new facility is a matter of parsing out minor local differences, such as the governing rules of a particular building or dormitory. For this, there is a vibrant network of communication, publicizing local knowledge throughout the facility. As one incarcerated man tells rookie CO Rakin Mohammad in the novel Across the Bridge, written by former Rikers CO Steven Dominquez, “Word travels quick here, big dawg. Rikers isn’t as big as you think it is, especially for a person like me who comes in and out of this bitch.”

For inmates like David and Jarrod, whose prior knowledge of jail life was largely restricted to popular culture and anecdotes from other non-traditional inmates, much of the social world is mysterious. Yet it is urgent to learn it as quickly as possible, at the risk of making a disastrous faux pas. A codefendant of Jarrod’s who was locked up at C-76 before him described it as “an endless hermeneutic” in which almost every social interaction and daily activity comes with a set of structuring norms that are invisible, and initially bewildering, yet necessary to decipher and observe.

Jarrod’s social-intake process began before he even boarded the bus. Waiting in line at the city courthouse on the day he was to begin his sentence, Jarrod sparked up a conversation with a young man who claimed to frequent the island, and who broke down his time strategy: “Don’t look at the calendar, don’t look at the clock.” Such pithy proverbs are plentiful throughout the system. Shortly thereafter Jarrod received another from an inmate with experience in both city and state facilities. He explained that the key to navigating the push and pull of macho posturing in the jail is presenting a stern front while actually practicing benevolence and kindness to those around you or, in his words, “being nice, without looking like a bitch doing it.”

Jarrod also benefited immensely from the insights of a codefendant who wrote a step-by-step guide explaining what Jarrod could expect. It began, “I think it’s safe to say that it won’t be nearly as bad as you’re expecting it to be. If you just stay within yourself, stay thoughtful and humble, you’ll be perfectly fine.” This kind of firsthand knowledge, which really only comes from word of mouth, proved invaluable in mitigating the fear that accompanies uncertainty in such a hostile setting. David was put in touch with a number of formerly incarcerated activists, including Jarrod, before his sentence began. Though all offered useful advice for serving time, David found that nothing can truly prepare a person for the first time behind bars.

The most important part of social intake begins in the dormitory. Among the first instructions new arrivals get from their fellow inmates is a rundown of the hygiene standards, often emphasizing the prohibition of naked showering and the necessity of covering oneself while using the toilet. These commands echo throughout the intake dormitory. Another early lesson revolves around use of the dormitory’s telephones. While these are technically free for anyone to use any time they are turned on, lines of gang affiliation and other soft-power dynamics structuring dormitory life often dictate otherwise. Socks placed on phone receivers communicate the presence of these rules, and it is incumbent on the individual to figure out what they mean. The results of ignoring or disobeying them could be violence, or at least public humiliation signaling vulnerability.

Other house rules may govern the maximum state of undress permitted in the dorm, who can touch the TV and when, who can open the windows and when, who can sleep in which bed or “section,” where to walk in order to avoid disrupting what little privacy is available, and even how to use the Cambro drink dispenser for ice cubes or beverages. Inmates also share information about the personalities of individual COs, which rules are enforced and by whom, what kind of tacit agreements exist between them, such as the proper protocol for smoking without getting in trouble, and scheduling information like when the house goes to commissary. Often enough, all of this is readily communicated by one or more inmates who pull the new arrival aside to tell him the ropes. If the arrivant is lucky, this will be somebody known to him from another house or the street. If not, as the reader is likely aware from popular culture, overenthusiastic interest shown by a stranger could be the sign of a predator.

Accordingly, we were both warned to refuse any act of generosity shown by strangers upon our arrival. Leaving nothing to chance, we both insisted on offering objects for trade in exchange for the first items we wanted — writing utensils, relatively worthless commodities in the jail economy — lest we be ensnared in a web of extortion. David flat-out refused another inmate’s offer to give him a couple of packs of ramen noodles until he could go to commissary. In all likelihood, with the benefit of hindsight, the people who offered these items were probably just being nice. It is much more common for sentenced men on Rikers to share food and hygiene products with each other, even with new arrivals, than might be assumed. This is not to say that extortion and other forms of predation do not exist but that most people David and Jarrod met were simply trying to make the best of a bad situation, and were willing to help others when they could.

Since city time is often served in multiple locations, beginning with the intake dormitory and then spread across any number of houses with different de facto rules, social intake never really ends. Even a seasoned inmate arrives at a new house in need of basic information. Upon transfer, Jarrod was pulled aside by a few inmates and politely yet firmly told, “This is a work house. We keep things quiet here, and don’t want any trouble.” This sentiment was repeated, almost verbatim, by the dormitory’s COs. This was no coincidence; Jarrod soon observed how a compact had been reached, under which COs overlooked minor infractions (smoking, for instance, was constant and almost always ignored) in exchange for a quiet and orderly facility. In this house, open belligerence toward staff and other inmates, which might be a path to shotcaller status in a more chaotic dormitory, was frowned upon. People looking to make good names for themselves by causing a conflict were more likely to turn the whole dormitory against them than win its respect.

The first bed David picked was empty, but as soon as he put his belongings down on it, one of the men next to it let him know that he might want to move: it was a “hot” bed, and had contraband stashed in it. David settled on a bed across the dorm next to a thirty-something Black man he did not know, and two Black men he had been with in the intake dorm the day before. Jarrod arrived in the intake dorm and soon realized he had an entire section to himself, even as the rest of the dorm was getting crowded. He later learned that shortly before his arrival, two inmates serving short “skid bid” sentences had quarreled in this section. One shoved the other, who fell, hit his head on the bed next to Jarrod’s, and died. Before the week was out, however, the bed in question was the scene of a lively game involving bouncing a marble-like Fireball hard candy off the metal, trying to sink it into one of the frame’s ventilation holes. Soon it was taken by a new arrival, and the stigma forgotten.

The designated intake dorm, 1-Upper, was a chaotic place because its population was always transient, meaning that no enduring power structure could ever be built. Both inmates and COs told David that incarcerated men generally spent as little as two days but no longer than two weeks in 1-Upper. David arrived there near midnight, and just picked a random bed in the near-empty dorm. There was nobody running the dorm, and nobody had much of anything, having just arrived from the street or another facility. There were no books, nothing to write with or on, and no commissary food or hygiene products, since no one had been able to go to commissary yet. The other inmates there quickly learned that David was a first-timer, and helped him learn the ropes. One guy demonstrated how to tie his sheet around his mattress properly so it would stay put. Another showed him how the phones worked and offered him a phone call.

Once David arrived in his first long-term dorm, and settled in next to his acquaintances from the intake dorm, some inmates immediately offered him commissary food while others explained how the phones and the bathroom worked. One man in his section, a Puerto Rican in his fifties, offered to hook him up with “the best jail job there is” (in his opinion, the bakery). “Write your number down here, and I’ll talk to my boss,” he said. David, not yet in a jail mindset, confusedly asked the man if he meant his phone number. The man sucked his teeth and shot him an incredulous look. “No, man — your book and case number!”

The same man also enthused over how David had chosen a good bed, because it had a view of the moon at night. After nightfall, he squinted and pointed a finger up at a white disk above the neighboring wing of the building. “See?” he told David. “The full moon!”

It was a searchlight.