Welcome to Rikers Island

When the rap star Lil Wayne was sent to Rikers Island correctional facility last year on a gun possession charge, his fans, many of them familiar with the etiquette of prisons, lit up the internet with commentary: “At least he didn’t bitch out and ask for ad seg,” observed one. “Ad seg” is “administrative segregation”: a term that refers to any inmate’s separation from the general prison population. Prisoners in ad seg have all sorts of reasons for being there, including illness, violent tendencies and fame—the last being, presumably, the reason Dominique Strauss-Kahn was placed in a one-man cell on the island after he was denied bail on 16th May. The rap fan’s remark makes plain the macho scorn prison adepts feel for those in ad seg. It’s considered a place for the vulnerable.

Most people, even incurious New Yorkers, talk about Rikers Island as if it’s just a prison. It’s actually a little village, a baleful version of Disney’s planned community: Celebration, Florida. John Bunyan might aptly have named it “Drear.” Ramshackle buses with grated windows ply its curving streets, dropping visitors, corrections officers, teachers and administrators at their appointed stops. The place has an odd feeling of vacancy because, of course, no one strolls or lounges under the few big maple trees. The work of the cheerless garbage handlers and lawn crews is strictly timed and monitored. If you were allowed to wander, you’d easily get lost amid the densely built cell blocks, the white Quonset huts and gated access roads. Only the playing fields are open, surrounded by no man’s land and razor-wire fences, grassy but sad, lonely-seeming even when a game is in progress and the far-off shouts of grown men sound like birdcalls compared to the roar of jets taking off from LaGuardia Airport.

The island is home to a satellite of the New York public schools, a church and chapels, shops, a vast laundry, medical clinics, a car wash and ten separate prisons with dreary bureaucratic names like the Eric M Taylor Centre or the Robert N Davoren Complex. It is reached by a long causeway from Queens.

It’s a distinctly unhappy village. The usual cynical weariness of an anonymous metropolis like New York has been distilled into something malefic. The banter between corrections officers is mean or snide or mocking, and the prisoners oppress themselves with their own meanness, snideness and mockery or worse. In 2008 news of “the program” came out, a long-established system of self-policing by beatings among the adolescent inmates. And the palpable unhappiness of the place is made worse by something that would seem to be a positive thing about a prison. Everyone there will soon be leaving. No one “does time” on Rikers Island. Sentences of less than two years are served there, but it’s mostly a transfer point or a place for those awaiting trial. Yet the persistent anonymity of 14,000 people arriving and leaving, futures always in the balance, somehow makes the misery all the more acute.

The strangest aspect of Strauss-Kahn’s residency on Rikers Island is that after his ultra-democratic arrest and his handcuffed perp walk (an indignity Americans relish but one that offended the French) the place he was sent to is, quite frankly, low. Rikers Island is known as the place for those who can’t afford bail. A stint there is something of a rite of passage in New York’s poorest neighbourhoods. No one of ambition ends up there, except for the occasional rap artist like Lil Wayne. I met a sombre and mistrustful member of the group The Wu Tang Clan when I was teaching there. But a politician—that’s incredible.

The reason is simple. Politicians and financiers tend to violate federal laws. They end up in the relatively discreet federal prison system. Inmates at Rikers Island have violated state laws which, in the US, include crimes such as murder, rape, unlawful imprisonment, felonious assault, robbery. In other words, Rikers is an island of ordinary criminals. The French writer and one-time petty thief Jean Genet would have delighted in a drama so toe-curling, so excruciating. But Strauss-Kahn should probably look to the sermon of his nobler countryman, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, for perspective on his own fall. “Tis not without cause, sirs, that the Son of God teaches us to shrink from lofty employment. He knows power to be the commonest precursor of error. And that in wielding power over others one oft loses it over oneself. He only is master of his will who shall understand how to moderate his ambitions, who shall think himself powerful enough when he may rule his desires.”