An excerpt from the new book, The Rikers: An Oral History, about the horrors of solitary confinement.

In Rikers: An Oral History, which hits bookstores Tuesday, authors Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau delve into the culture and history of Rikers Island. Rayman covers criminal justice for the New York Daily News, with a focus on the city’s jails. He is also the author of the NYPD Records. Blau is a former reporter for the Daily News and is now a senior reporter covering prisons and politics at The City..

“No one else hears the creak of wheels”

The United Nations considers any stay in solitary confinement for more than fifteen consecutive days a form of torture. For years, the restrictions in the New York prison system went far beyond that.

At its peak, there were about a thousand so-called punishment cells, some of which were specifically designed for teenagers and people with mental illness. Research shows that twenty-three hours a day in a cell causes serious psychological damage, especially for teenagers whose brains are still developing. Research also shows that punishment does little to reduce violence because the same people re-enter the general population later.

Over time, medical experts have determined that the long-term cost of a single treatment, especially for vulnerable populations, far outweighs any positive initial outcome. New York currently has strict limits on how long people can be isolated, and some groups are completely exempt from solitary confinement.

Prison officials and labor leaders fought each of the changes vehemently, arguing that punishment is necessary to ensure the safety of people who follow the rules.

HECTOR “PASTOR BENNY” GUARDIAN, former leader of Latin King, detained from 1991 to 1994: I first got into Bing in 1992. You only swam on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Sometimes they spit in your food. They would put your food under your door. I had to carefully sort out the food. They gave you a monkey suit; no own clothes. In the summer you had a sweltering heat. Imagine spending almost four years in your bathroom, locked up and unable to go anywhere. That’s how it was. You were so close, yet so far away. I’ve seen guys kill themselves, lose their minds, break down. I had to stay focused. I said that one day I’ll be free. I won’t let these people beat me.

RON CUBYDefender: I had one client sent to solitary confinement for thirty days for possession of Tylenol, just over-the-counter Tylenol, and some make-up. It was at the Rose M. Singer Center where there are women. Probably the most horrific stories involve the use of solitary confinement to hold the seriously mentally ill. I remember one occasion, I won’t name her, but at the Rose M. Singer Center she was known as Crap. And she was known for this because she constantly used her own feces to throw and write on prison walls and decorate herself.

And they put her in solitary confinement for months and months in this stinking, stinking, defecated cell. And in the outside world, the grease goes to the creaking wheel. In a place like Rikers, the squeaky wheel is turned off and locked in a cell so deep that no one else hears the squeaky wheels.

HELEN TAYLOR, detained 1970s, 1980s: There was only a toilet and a bed, and they just threw you in there, and you took a shower every other day for fifteen minutes. Your food will be icy and your room will be dirty. They let you clean it once a week for fifteen minutes. It was all about fifteen minutes. You were supposed to lie there and be silent, and if you were not silent, they would come and beat the shit out of you. There was no TV. You get an hour of recording per day.

As if they were trying to destroy people. You were supposed to be strong.

Jacqueline McMickens, Commissioner of Corrections, 1984 to 1986: I have no problem with that at all. I think some people need to be alone. The boy who decided to throw chairs? Put him in a room and watch him. You don’t go to Macy’s and Gimbels and take whatever you want. There is a consequence.

DR. HOMER VENTSChief Correctional Medical Officer, 2015 to 2017: We did this analysis of about 250,000 prison admissions and found very strong data that people in solitary confinement were about seven times more likely to self-harm, and more likely to self-harm about six times higher. likelihood of fatal self-harm.

DONOVAN DRAYTON, detained from 2007 to 2012: It’s like being locked, locked, and the key thrown away. It’s like you’re in a small cell twenty-three hours a day if you record for that one hour and that’s for x days. You see, when I went to the box, they could give you a year, and a hundred days, and four hundred.

It drives the crazy man in the box crazy, man. They come out a different person. So now they set it where you only [have] thirty days of pop and they take you out. They let you get together for a bit and then they come and grab you and you spend some more time. But the box is brutal, man.

BARRY CAMPBELL, detainees 1980s, 1990s: First time in ShIZO, I thought it was nothing. What is everyone talking about? The first time you are there for about half an hour, forty-five minutes, but it’s nothing. And then you realize that you literally have no one to talk to, that you are literally alone in this cell for twenty-three hours. At first I did a workout regimen until I couldn’t do it anymore. And then you sing and also knock on the walls. You can’t take it anymore. And then, eventually, you find yourself talking to yourself, and then, eventually, you start counting the cockroaches that enter your doors, or how many times you see a mouse today. And you stare endlessly out the window, just looking at the grass and leaves blowing in the wind. People go crazy there.

DONOVAN DRAYTON: I cried. At the time I went to the box where my camera was, you could see the Triborough bridge and it was the most beautiful view and the most painful view at the same time, because it was like, yo, I can never, ever cross that bridge again as a free man. Like next time, they can take my coffin back to my father to bury me for free.

CATHY MORSEarrested 2006: [W]e will receive complaints from persons who have been in solitary confinement. And it was a dungeon. I thought the noise in the apartment block was surreal, but the noise alone was unbelievable. You’ve had people pounding on their walls, just screaming. It was so bad. It didn’t even sound like the man was screaming. It was more like a wounded animal crying out for help.

KAREN SESSOMS, Correctional Officer, 1991 to 1993: As a Correctional Officer, this is not a place where you want to just sit. You want to keep walking. When you watch them, they watch you. You can hear something being sharpened, usually a weapon.

ELIAS HUSAMUDIN, president of the Corrections Benevolent Association, from 2016 to 2020: 99% of prisoners never returned after serving ten, thirty, fifty days. This has greatly helped to cope with behavior that was unacceptable thirty years ago and now. But the one percent it didn’t work on, I believe we failed. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

DONOVAN DRAYTON: It’s hard, dude. Just being in a room with yourself for so many days. It can literally drive you crazy. You know what, if you’re not mentally strong and mentally stable, it will change you. See what happened to Caliph Browder? You know, he went to jail, he was mentally stable. He returned home from prison mentally shot. Rikers Island killed this man.

MICHAEL LOVEdetained in the early 1980s, early 1990s: Was [officer]. He came to extract me. I didn’t go out. He grabbed my T-shirt and yanked so hard that it left a scar on my neck that I still have. He hit me against the wall. He said “I’ll break your arm” and I said “Come on break it [expletive]”. This is psychologically induced fatalism. You don’t care about the consequences. That night he took off all my clothes, threw me into a cell and left the window open. It was winter. This happened probably in the 76th or 77th year. I was about eighteen.

BARRY CAMPBELL: [When you get out] it’s like getting out of jail, out of jail. Literally. If you went in there for something substantial, when you go out, everyone is like, “Boy, you’re a crazy dude.” You know they’ll put you back in soon. And so there is a certain reputation that follows you if you went there for something violent, not because you were caught with a pack of cigarettes. So when you go out, most people, if you’ve been a violent person, most people know why you went there. They get excited when you go out.

From the book RIKERS: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau

Copyright © 2023, Graeme Rayman and Reuven Blau.

Published by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.