Lockdown on Rikers

Lockdown on Rikers PDF Author: Mary E. Buser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466890169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Mary Buser began her career at Rikers Island as a social work intern, brimming with ideas and eager to help incarcerated women find a better path. Her reassignment to a men's jail coincided with the dawn of the city's "stop-and-frisk" policy, a flood of unprecedented arrests, and the biggest jailhouse build-up in New York City history. Committed to the possibility of growth for the scarred and tattooed masses who filed into her session booth, Buser was suddenly faced with black eyes, punched-out teeth, and frantic whispers of beatings by officers. Recognizing the greater danger of pointing a finger at one's captors, Buser attempted to help them, while also keeping them as well as herself, safe. Following her promotion to assistant chief, she was transferred to different jails, working in the Mental Health Center, and finally, at Rikers's notorious "jail within jail," the dreaded solitary confinement unit, where she saw horrors she'd never imagined. Finally, it became too much to bear, forcing Buser to flee Rikers and never look back - until now. Lockdown on Rikers shines a light into the deepest and most horrific recesses of the criminal justice system, and shows how far it has really drifted from the ideals we espouse.

Lockdown on Rikers

Lockdown on Rikers PDF Author: Mary E. Buser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466890169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mary Buser began her career at Rikers Island as a social work intern, brimming with ideas and eager to help incarcerated women find a better path. Her reassignment to a men's jail coincided with the dawn of the city's "stop-and-frisk" policy, a flood of unprecedented arrests, and the biggest jailhouse build-up in New York City history. Committed to the possibility of growth for the scarred and tattooed masses who filed into her session booth, Buser was suddenly faced with black eyes, punched-out teeth, and frantic whispers of beatings by officers. Recognizing the greater danger of pointing a finger at one's captors, Buser attempted to help them, while also keeping them as well as herself, safe. Following her promotion to assistant chief, she was transferred to different jails, working in the Mental Health Center, and finally, at Rikers's notorious "jail within jail," the dreaded solitary confinement unit, where she saw horrors she'd never imagined. Finally, it became too much to bear, forcing Buser to flee Rikers and never look back - until now. Lockdown on Rikers shines a light into the deepest and most horrific recesses of the criminal justice system, and shows how far it has really drifted from the ideals we espouse.

Rikers High

Rikers High PDF Author: Paul Volponi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101185120
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
An unflinching story about justice, courage, and the life of one young man behind bars. It started out as an innocent day for Martin, but it quickly turned into his worst nightmare--arrested for something he didn't even mean to do. And five months later, he is still locked up in jail on infamous Rikers Island. Just when things couldn't get worse, Martin gets caught in a fight between two prisoners, and his face is slashed. He's scarred forever, but one good thing comes from the attack: Martin is transferred to a part of Rikers where inmates must attend high school. When he meets his caring and understanding teacher, will Martin open up and learn from his situation? Or will he be consumed by prison and getting revenge on his attackers? "Volponi, who taught on Rikers Island for six years, writes with an authenticity that will make readers feel Martin's fear."--Publishers Weekly "Volponi . . . brings to life a believable range of teachers, COs, and inmates and portrays power, hierarchies, and race relations both outside and inside the jail walls with unflinching realism."--School Library Journal "With down-to-earth language based on his own experiences . . . Volponi captures the reader."--VOYA

Life and Death in Rikers Island

Life and Death in Rikers Island PDF Author: Homer Venters
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421427354
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Shining a light on the deadly health consequences of incarceration. Finalist in the PROSE Award for Best Book in Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology by the Association of American Publishers Kalief Browder was 16 when he was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. Unable to raise bail and unwilling to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit, Browder spent three years in New York's infamous Rikers Island jail—two in solitary confinement—while awaiting trial. After his case was dismissed in 2013, Browder returned to his family, haunted by his ordeal. Suffering through the lonely hell of solitary, Browder had been violently attacked by fellow prisoners and corrections officers throughout his incarceration. Consumed with depression, Browder committed suicide in 2015. He was just 22 years old. In Life and Death in Rikers Island, Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City's jails, explains the profound health risks associated with incarceration. From neglect and sexual abuse to blocked access to care and exposure to brutality, Venters details how jails are designed and run to create new health risks for prisoners—all while forcing doctors and nurses into complicity or silence. Pairing prisoner experiences with cutting-edge research into prison risk, Venters reveals the disproportionate extent to which the health risks of jail are meted out to those with behavioral health problems and people of color. He also presents compelling data on alternative strategies that can reduce health risks. This revelatory and groundbreaking book concludes with the author's analysis of the case for closing Rikers Island jails and his advice on how to do it for the good of the incarcerated.

A World Out of Reach

A World Out of Reach PDF Author: Meghan O'Rourke
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300257368
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Selections from the "Pandemic Files" published by The Yale Review, the preeminent journal of literature and ideas “If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of COVID-19 and the cataclysmic spring of 2020—a record for us and for posterity—in the arresting voices of poets, essayists, scholars, and health care workers. Ranging from matters of policy and social justice to ancient history and personal stories of living under lockdown, this vivid compilation from The Yale Review presents a first draft of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history. Contributors: Katie Kitamura • Laura Kolbe • Nitin Ahuja • Rena Xu • Alicia Christoff • Miranda Featherstone • Maya C. Popa • Major Jackson • John Witt • Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Nell Freudenberger • Briallen Hopper • Brandon Shimoda • Yusef Komunyakaa • Laren McClung • Eric O’Keefe-Krebs • Sean Lynch • Millicent Marcus • Meghana Mysore • Rachel Jamison Webster • Emily Ziff Griffin • Rowan Ricardo Philips • Kathryn Lofton • Monica Ferrell • Russell Morse • Randi Hutter Epstein • Noreen Khawaja • Victoria Chang • Joyelle McSweeney • Khameer Kidia • Emily Greenwood • Elisa Gabbert • Emily Bernard • Hafizah Geter • Emily Gogolak • Roger Reeves

Lockdown America

Lockdown America PDF Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859843031
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Lockdown America documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the war on drugs. Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.

Storm on Rikers Island

Storm on Rikers Island PDF Author: Fred Kreider
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732017603
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Corrections officer Nicholas Billings has only just started working in America's most infamous jail, Rikers Island, when one of the worst winter storms on record shuts down all access to the facility. Norman Henkes, accused mass murderer and practicing occultist, has been locked away in Officer Billing's housing area. When grizzly, unexplained deaths begin to occur inside the jail, Billings begins to suspect that Henkes is somehow responsible. Each time he reports to work, Billings becomes more and more entangled in the growing horrors and depraved bloodshed.As the storm rages outside the prison walls, a quiet evil spreads it's black wings inside, sacrificing lives for an unspeakable demonic ritual that will test the very sanity of Billings and everyone he loves.

Hell Is a Very Small Place

Hell Is a Very Small Place PDF Author: Jean Casella
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620971380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

Way Down in the Hole

Way Down in the Hole PDF Author: Angela J. Hattery
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978823789
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.

Gorilla and the Bird

Gorilla and the Bird PDF Author: Zack McDermott
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316315117
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
"Glorious...one of the best memoirs I've read in years...a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. [McDermott] can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath." -- Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a partner who can love him back, bipolar and all. Introducing an electrifying new voice, Gorilla and the Bird is a raw and unforgettable account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.

12 Angry Men

12 Angry Men PDF Author: Gregory S. Parks
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459607597
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was approached by the police on the front porch of his home in an affluent section of Cambridge, many people across the country reacted with surprise and disbelief. But many African American men from coast ...