By MEGHAN GUATTERY
If you were given 15,000 inmates to house anywhere in the world, where would you put them?
More than likely, your answer would not be on a 413-acre island, smack dab in the middle of the East River, surrounded by over 8 million civilians.
Nevertheless, that is exactly what the City of New York did when it purchased Rikers Island in 1884, and from day one the media has shed an ignominious light on Rikers Island Correctional Facility.
In the June 29, 2015, issue of New York Magazine, through a 17-page feature, journalists from The Marshall Project reexamined Rikers, ultimately answering the question posed by the non-profit’s Features Editor, Raha Naddaf:
“What does it actually feel like to be one of the people inside of that place that we’ve heard such terrible things about?”
THE MARSHALL PROJECT
“Our mission is to create and sustain a sense of urgency about criminal justice in America.” – The Marshall Project mission statement
No matter how faithful they may or may not be, news organizations claim to pride themselves on accuracy, fairness and impartiality. To this, The Marshall Project is no exception.
Just as common among these outlets is day-to-day coverage of criminal justice matters. This is where The Marshall Project begins to differ from a typical news organization — as its coverage is solely based on criminal justice.
However it is not what but how this organization covers these stories that makes it unique.
The American criminal justice system has certainly been the subject of ample criticism over its years. But rather than sticking to the run of the mill news articles, the writers at The Marshall Project invest their energy in time-consuming investigative projects, personal narratives profiles and in-depth contextual pieces, just to name a few.
With their organization’s values in mind and its founder’s words ringing in their ears, eight of these writers set off to find just about any and every person they could find to talk about the ever-chastised island.
RIKERS
“The place is just one of the seven circles of Hell and is just a completely inhuman, completely corrupt, horrible place.” – Beth Schwartzapfel
Rikers does not exactly have the cleanest rap sheet; the controversy and scandals are never ending — from segregated “gay housing,” to strip searches and most recently and infamously for it culture of abuse and neglect.
For this project, Alysia Santo and Eli Hager were the only Marshall Project reporters with the opportunity to interview on Rikers. However many of the other contributors — including Beth Schwartzapfel, a Marshall Project staff writer — have their fair share of experience with the island, as previous assignments had brought them to the island.
“I had a pretty strong sense going into it, which did not change, that the place is just one of the seven circles of Hell and is just a completely inhuman, completely corrupt, horrible place,” said Schwartzapfel.
From what Marshall Project staff writer Maurice Chammah had heard, Schwartzapfel wasn’t too far off.
“All of the media reporting that I had read led me to think that it was this extremely brutal and abominable place where basically no one was happy … there’s tons of people, and they all have to live there — whether they’re there for a week, a month or a year,” said Chammah.
Prior to this project, and with this image in his head, Chammah took a trip to the island to cover piece for Thanksgiving. What he saw was a completely different side of the stereotype formed by the outside world. Once on the island, Chammah found inmates participating in a cooking program, basting over 100 turkeys and preparing sides to send to the elderly and needy families.
“I think during that few hours I saw these essentially nice, older inmates having a day cooking turkeys and being generally warm and excited about getting out … they had managed to get some moments of calm and peace, and they had seemed to have sort of made their peace with living at Rikers,” said Chammah. “I don’t think that I had realized how much of that has to go on among the many of thousands of people who live there.”
With solitary confinement now restricted punishment to only adult inmates (those 22 years of age and older), Rikers is among the many facilities attempting to find innovative alternatives to the confinement.
“They have this program called CAPS, clinical alternative to punitive segregation, which is basically for people who either have done something wrong that would normally land them in solitary or are at risk of doing something that could land them in solitary, but whose misbehavior is caused by mental illness,” said Schwartzapfel.
Inmates who are eligible for this solitary alternative participate in intensive therapy, counseling sessions and even stress-relieving, energy-exerting games of Ping-Pong.
“They kind of do the opposite of solitary,” said Schwartzapfel. “They sort of engage people and try to address what the underlying behaviors are that might cause somebody to act out in jail. Rikers is such a shithole … still I thought that it was a really cool pilot — a tiny, little attempt, in this monolithic, horrible place — to do something light.”
THE INTERVIEWS
“No reporters are really knocking on their door and saying, ‘Hey, juvenile offender, tell me your story.’” – Raha Naddaf
Through months and months of effort, the team of reporters conducted countless interviews, reaching out to everyone from public defenders and barbers to bus drivers and psychologists.
Only thirteen were published.
Among the reporters on the piece was Dana Goldstein, a freelancer, who was assigned to interview a doctor for the project. And while it seemed as if it might be a dead end, it was through this interview that Goldstein heard about Dan Selling, former executive director of mental health for city jails.
“I got Selling’s email address from the doctor, but he didn’t respond to my emails,” said Goldstein in an email. “Eventually I found the phone number of Selling’s private therapy practice online and called him many times until he called me back. This whole thing took about six weeks.”
After reaching out to the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the New York City public school teachers’ union, Goldstein also interviewed 44-year-old teacher Peter Sellinger.
“[The UFT] needed some convincing, as the conditions at the Rikers schools are dire and they worried about coverage that wouldn’t be sympathetic to the issues teachers there have to deal with,” said Goldstein. “I had a long running relationship with the UFT as a reporter, so I was able to gain their trust on this and get [Sellinger’s] phone number and email address.”
While prior relations and honest reporting can make communicating with sources monumentally easier for a journalist, that is not always the case.
Even with Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte, an advocate for transparency, at the helm, getting onto the Island and into the facilities was no easy task, and was especially difficult for the New York Magazine photographers.
But after a back and forth battle with Rikers administration, New York Magazine photographer Ashley Gilbertson was able to gain access and obtain the bone chilling images scattered throughout the spread.
At first glance, the justified text so perfectly aligned down the page and wrapped around these images does not exactly give the feel of a typical article. Quotation marks are few and far between and, aside from introductory deck heads, attributions are even sparser.
As-told-to writing may seem like words simply cut and pasted onto a page, but Chammah assured there is far more than meets the eye.
“It sometimes makes it seem like there isn’t a lot of editing,” said Chammah, “but sometimes these are like 45-minute or two-hour-long interviews that are being cut down to a few hundred words, and choosing what to pull out of the interview and how to phrase it and frame it is a lot of work.”
So when it comes to a topic as frequented as Rikers, why go through all the effort of keeping the interviewees’ voices?
“We thought that what we could do is provide a much more personal take on it,” said Naddaf. “We know Rikers is horrible; we know this abuse takes place. What does it actually feel like to be one of the people inside of that place that we’ve heard such terrible things about? … It feels like a fresh, very human take on a difficult subject that’s been reported on elsewhere at length.”
This unconventional form of storytelling, coupled with these disquieting images, developed an entirely new side of the never-ending Rikers story.
“It just felt really raw,” said Naddaf. “I think that’s partly because these are folks who are dying to tell their stories and don’t get the chance to oftentimes. No reporters are really knocking on their door and saying, ‘Hey, juvenile offender, tell me your story.’”
But when they are given the opportunity, trust is imperative.
“You’re often talking about people who have had these really emotionally traumatic experiences and going straight to them can either turn them off or scare them, but they tend to trust the lawyers that they’ve hired to work with them,” said Chammah. “So the lawyer can be kind of a gatekeeper for you as a reporter.”
CORRECTION OFFICERS
““They’ll say things like, ‘Oops, I’m sorry. We’re understaffed.
We can’t bring them to the counselor.’” – Beth Schwartzapfel
Change is coming, slowly but surely, to New York’s incarceration institutions. The changes that have happened, thanks to upper administration certainly seem like a step in the right direction. But these kinds of solutions — programs like CAPS, mental health counseling and other alternatives — can only have an effect on the institution if the inmates are actually able to participate in them.
And they aren’t.
“It’s like, why was slavery so hard to change?” said Schwartzapfel. “You have these deeply entrenched, cultural norms and you have these institutions, extremely powerful institutions, who are resistant to change, who, in fact, sort of have their interests staked on the place not changing.”
The administrators may be making the rules, but the correction officers are the ones enforcing them.
What they say goes.
“If the correctional officer says don’t bring them, they don’t go,” said Schwartzapfel. “They’ll say things like, ‘Oops, I’m sorry. We’re understaffed. We can’t bring them to the counselor.’”
In what seems to be an institution filled with rotten apples, there must be good intensions somewhere, though, right?
“Nobody with any intelligence would choose to set up a criminal justice system the way ours is set up right at the moment, and, likewise, I don’t think anybody running Rikers right now would wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to design a jail and have it be just like this,’” said Schwartzapfel. “So I wouldn’t say well meaning people can create a system like this, but I would say well-meaning people can perpetuate a system like this.”
SURPRISES ALONG THE WAY
“You hear about these dramatic events, like people dying or fights, but … people are sort of just living, and it’s a very boring place.” – Maurice Chammah
Sources back out of interviews all the time — some with a reason, others without a word, and even a few out of concern for their safety and for their life.
“I found there was a lot of fear among people who worked at Rikers regarding retaliation for speaking out,” said Goldstein. “Several other sources backed out of speaking with me at the last minute because of this.”
Naddaf further explained the fear this institution tends to strike into these people when they are approached by the media.
“It’s a dangerous thing to do sometimes, when you’re behind bars, to kind of talk about how terrible it is there, because you don’t know what’s going to happen when that article comes out,” said Naddaf. “You don’t know if the guards will get upset or the prison officials will want to punish you or if other inmates will retaliate in some way.”
After his interview with former Rikers volunteer librarian Christian Rees, Chammah saw another side to prison life that many on the outside of these facilities might find difficult to grasp.
“You hear about these dramatic events like people dying or fights, but 99 percent of the time, like in the real world, people are sort of just living, and it’s a very boring place,” said Chammah.
But the inmates aren’t the only ones with his sort of helplessness in their day-to-day routine. Terri Scroggins, girlfriend of Victor Woods, an ex-inmate who died at Rikers of internal bleeding, told Chammah her story and left him with an empty feeling in his chest.
“I think I knew that that was the dynamic,” said Chammah, “but when [Scroggins] talked me through it it was so heartbreaking to realize how helpless these people feel when they have a loved one who is inside and they want to help them but they just don’t know how to do it.”
TIPS & ADVICE
“Don’t be scared of being a pain in the ass…” – Dana Goldstein
“Work really, really hard; have zero entitlement; say yes to everything; and don’t get too wounded when your stuff gets rewritten or there’s a lot of revising,” said Naddaf, chuckling at memories of her own entry-level experiences. “It only serves yourself and your entire career to work as hard as possible.”
While each of the writers had a personalized way of saying it, the general consensus is that this kind of reporting is no easy task and sometimes might be a little confusing to take on.
“You need to be impartial, but tough, but empathetic … it’s a juggling act,” said Naddaf.
Goldstein and Schwartzapfel credit their success to persistency. What may be annoying to others could ultimately be what is best for your story.
“Don’t be scared of being a pain in the ass in your struggle to find sources,” said Goldstein. “I still have to remind myself that sometimes, it’s my job to be annoying.”
“Don’t ever take no for an answer … Even when it’s no, it may not be no,” said Schwartzapfel.
But while incessantly contacting your sources might be important, Naddaf was sure to note that there is a fine line between being a nuisance and flat out rude.
“Someone is trusting you and someone is opening themselves up,” said Naddaf, “and even if it’s a story in which you’re kind of taking a somewhat antagonist [angle] or you’re trying to kind of get at someone or get them to be honest about something maybe they haven’t been honest about in the past … It’s always good to be aware of the fact that the person on the other end is a human being and not just a target.”