ROAMING RIKERS

Stun Shields, Stray Cats, Buck-Fifties, Boofing: The Top Brass's Tour of
America's Largest Penal Colony Roaming Rikers

Inside and Out: A Two-Part Special Report on Prison and Its Aftermath

This year, the United States achieved a dubious distinction: It surpassed
Russia as the world leader in imprisonment, with one in every 130 people
living behind bars. The U.S. prison population has soared above 2 million,
and most of those inmates are locked up for nonviolent crimes. People are
also leaving prison in record numbers; in 2000, an unprecedented 600,000
prisoners will return home. The imprisonment boom, fueled largely by the
nation's war on drugs, has generated new industries and jobs. It has also
devastated neighborhoods, fractured families, and created a new class of
stigmatized people who will one day return to society. To explore the human
cost of America's growing punishment industry, The Village Voice is
publishing a two-part special report. This week: an in-depth portrait of
the nation's largest penal colony. Next week: one ex-con's struggle to
rejoin her family.

Hidden between the boroughs of New York City, a two-lane bridge rises from
the northwest shore of Queens and extends more than a mile over the East
River. Planes descending into LaGuardia Airport roar overhead constantly,
while thousands of cars and buses commute each day across this
steel-and-concrete roadway. Still, the bridge remains unknown to most New
Yorkers. A mere 11 miles from Lady Liberty's raised torch, it dumps
passengers at the front door of the nation's largest penal colony: Rikers
Island, where 10 jails sprawl across an area half the size of Central Park.

The island is the heart of New York City's jail system, home to 80 percent
of its 14,600 or so inmates, with nine jails for men and one for women.
Rikers' daytime population--including prisoners, employees, and
visitors--is enormous, nearly 20,000. All residents are temporary.
Two-thirds of the inmates are detainees--legally innocent and waiting for
their cases to crawl through the courts--while one-third have been
sentenced and are waiting for an empty bed in an upstate prison or are
serving a year or less here.

As New York City's jail system has grown over the decades, Rikers Island
has become something of a small town, with schools, medical clinics, ball
fields, chapels, drug rehab programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a
bakery, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a bus depot, and even a car
wash.

Despite these signifiers of civilization, it is notoriously difficult to
get onto Rikers Island without a gold badge, a visitor's pass, or a pair of
steel cuffs around one's wrists. A reporter's notebook or television
camera, moreover, will likely get one only nervous glances and a polite
refusal of permission to tour the jails. But here I was one summer morning,
riding in a shiny black Mercury Grand Marquis belonging to Bernard Kerik,
the commissioner of New York City's Department of Correction.

Kerik would later become the city's police commissioner, but on this day
his promotion was still only a whispered possibility, a rumor that had been
spreading through Rikers' jails for nearly a year. In August, when Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani picked Kerik to lead the nation's largest police
department, he pointed to the jail chief's performance managing prisoners
and guards; though the mayor didn't mention it as a selling point, perhaps
equally attractive to him was Kerik's demonstrated ability to manage the
city's media.

On this day, as his driver steered his car toward the Rikers Island bridge,
Kerik looked like a corporate executive on his way to the office, wearing a
gold Rolex, his thinning hair slicked straight back, a silk tie knotted
tightly, and shoes buffed to an obsessive shine. Kerik, 45, has six holes
in his left earlobe--evidence of a prior stint with the NYPD, when he
worked undercover as a ponytailed drug dealer. But today his
spit-and-polish image seemed part of his effort to paint over the jails'
lingering reputation of overcrowding and violence.

Beginning in the late 1980s, riots injured hundreds of inmates and guards
on Rikers Island. And after the Bloods, an African American gang, began
recruiting members here in 1993, a vicious turf war erupted between the
Bloods and the long dominant Latino gangs, the Latin Kings and Netas.
Prisoners' blood regularly decorated jail hallways, and officers dubbed the
jail for teenage boys "Vietnam." For some wardens, jail management meant
shipping their most violent inmates to another facility under the pretext
of reducing overcrowding. At the time, it seemed that the prisoners ran
Rikers.

Kerik had surprised me by approving my request to roam around Rikers.
Although he rarely granted journalists more than a few hours of access, he
permitted me to spend a total of eight summer days on the island,
presumably because he was eager to show how he had tamed Rikers, how he'd
reinvented leadership on an island where crime--slashings and beatings and
stabbings and riots--had once seemed beyond control.

Even before he became the leader of the NYPD, Kerik liked to draw
comparisons between his job and the police commissioner's. "People just
assumed New York City was out of control and could never be changed," Kerik
said. "But look at the drop in crime. All of the things people said five
years ago could never, ever, ever be done--they told me the same thing
about Rikers Island."

Kerik's strategy for rehabilitating Rikers included improving its
appearance as well as its crime statistics. "I'm an image guy," he said.
"Somebody in uniform . . . is supposed to earn respect. [If] you walk up
and have mustard stains on your tie, your hat is on sideways, you have keys
all around you--people think you're a joke. . . . Some of these guys looked
like they ironed their clothes with a hot rock." Kerik paused. "If it's my
agency," he added, "you look the way I want you to look." Kerik's campaign
to win respect for Rikers, and for himself, involved not only well-pressed
uniforms but also good press. At this, he excelled, landing positive
stories in the New York Post, the Daily News, and The New York Times.

As the car nosed across the bridge, LaGuardia appeared on our right, so
near that we drove over a pier of lights pointing pilots to Runway 13-31.
And then once past the gates, here we were, heading down a quiet two-lane
street lined by high-tech modular jails and aging brick jails and
razor-tipped wire twisting around 12-foot fences.

Rikers prisoners refer to their home as "the Rock," but from an
archaeological point of view it's more accurate to call this place a dump.
Long before Rikers Island housed the accused, it served as the repository
of what the city proper had no use for--broken boilers, old sofas, horse
manure, garbage, tin cans, street sweepings, and earth from subway
excavations. First arriving on the island's south side in 1893, the refuse
burned all day, attended by hordes of rats feasting on the city's leftovers.

As the garbage grew, so did the island. Only 87 acres when New York City
bought it from the Riker family in 1884 for $180,000, the island had, three
decades and thousands of boatloads of trash later, swollen to nearly five
times its original size, reaching some 415 acres. The island was
transformed into a different sort of dumping ground in 1935, when the
Rikers Island Penitentiary opened.

Sending prisoners to Rikers continued New York City's Victorian strategy
for dealing with undesirables. The islands rising from the East River in
the middle of New York City have long been receptacles for the sick, poor,
violent, and mentally ill. Over the last 200 years or so, they've housed
insane asylums, a paupers' cemetery, tuberculosis tents, a home for
delinquent teenagers, and a hospital for such infectious diseases as
smallpox and yellow fever.

Now our drive ended in front of Commissioner Kerik's office, a pale yellow
trailer, the seat of his power. His path here began in 1993, when he
moonlighted for Giuliani's mayoral campaign, managing the cops who worked
as the candidate's bodyguards. After Giuliani won, he appointed Kerik head
of the Department of Correction's investigations division. Kerik rose to
the agency's number two position in 1995, despite the fact that he lacks a
college degree.

When Michael Jacobson, a budget expert with a doctorate in sociology,
resigned in 1998, Kerik became the leader of the $860-million-a-year
agency, and now, in his office, I was staring at the framed photographs
adorning its fake wood-paneling--one, of Giuliani, was obligatory, but
another, of Oliver North, I imagined might indicate quite a bit about the
well-groomed commissioner. On his desk, a blueberry-scented candle burned,
an attempt to override the stench left by the stray cats that resided
beneath his trailer.

"We try to run the agency like corporate America," explained Kerik. "In
corporate America, if you can't do the work, you have to go." I didn't
doubt his sincerity. A little later I watched about 120 deputy
commissioners, assistant commissioners, bureau chiefs, assistant chiefs,
wardens, deputy wardens, assistant deputy wardens, captains, and officers
stand as their boss marched into another trailer-turned-conference room at
8:03 a.m. On Rikers Island, management meetings always start the same way,
with the sound of chairs scraping the floor in unison.

Kerik took his seat on the dais next to William J. Fraser, an enormous,
ruddy-faced former guard who was then the agency's highest-ranking
uniformed member, the only person in the room with four gold stars pinned
to each shoulder. Fraser's official title was "Chief of Department," though
he could also have been described as Kerik's enforcer. (When Kerik left for
the NYPD, Fraser was named to succeed him, ensuring his boss's legacy.)
Now, from their perch at the front of the room, Kerik and Fraser surveyed
their managers.

Some wore uniforms; others were civilians in business suits with graduate
degrees and titles like "Assistant Commissioner, Assets Management."
Glancing around the room, it quickly became apparent that the racial
composition of this agency darkens as one descends the pyramid of power.
The four top officials on the dais were white, while the managers they
oversee were a racially mixed group. The populations these managers
supervise--the city's prisoners and guards--include few whites. African
Americans and Latinos make up 80 percent of the agency's staff and 92
percent of its prisoners.

Kerik's monthly meetings formed the centerpiece of his management strategy,
a blueprint for leadership that he borrowed from the NYPD. Modeling his
program on the NYPD's Compstat, Kerik called his version the "Total
Efficiency Accountability Management System," or TEAMS. At these TEAMS
meetings, Kerik quizzed wardens on topics ranging from the names of their
jails' Latin Kings gang leaders to the temperature of their potato salad.
Wardens who didn't have answers sometimes found themselves without jobs.

This morning it was Anthony Serra's turn. Serra, who was then the boss of
Rikers' second-oldest jail, the North Infirmary Command, stood stiffly
before a microphone in the middle of the packed room. Fraser began the
questioning.

"You've had three slashings over the last two months," the chief said to
Serra. "Can you tell me about them?"

"The first incident occurred on May 29, up in housing area 6 South," Serra
dutifully reported. "We had an inmate, Hop, who went to retrieve a cup from
in front of the television. Other inmates were watching the television. He
blocked their view. They got mad at him. They didn't like his response when
they confronted him, so they attacked him."

Serra continued his grim recitation, explaining that the second slashing
occurred when one prisoner tired of another inmate shaking him down and
urged friends to attack his extortionist. In the third incident, a Bloods
gang member sliced the follower of a rival gang, the Five Percenters. To
prevent further violence, Serra promised to erect more outdoor pens to
separate his high-security inmates.

"Overall, you're doing a good job," Fraser said.

"Thank you, sir."

A few years ago, these interrogations didn't always go so smoothly. "I
recall times in this agency when I asked [wardens], 'How many inmates do
you have in your facility?' " Kerik said later. "And they didn't know.
They'd have to get on the phone and call a captain." Such lapses infuriated
the commissioner. "I'm not asking about brain surgery," he noted. "I'm
asking about your job. You're supposed to know." One warden stumbled so
badly that he lost his job before the meeting ended. In this jailhouse
version of corporate America, fear is the ultimate management tool, a way
for guards to control the prisoners, and for the agency's top officials to
control their wardens.

The door to these meetings remained closed to outsiders back when wardens
were fumbling basic questions. But today, violence on the island is at an
all-time low, the door has swung open, and the parade of visitors is
nonstop. Giuliani has sat on the dais next to Kerik. Prison officials from
Hawaii, Singapore, and South Africa have observed these meetings. Vladimir
Yalunin, who runs Russia's prison system, has visited. And on this morning,
a few officials from the New Jersey state prison system filled chairs near
the front. Rikers' sheer magnitude and notoriety make it a popular tourist
attraction for out-of-town prison officials.

With so many visitors passing through, these question-and-answer sessions
seemed to be as much about impressing outsiders as about monitoring
wardens. By now, Kerik's managers had learned what questions to expect and
usually spat back well-rehearsed responses.

The morning's only nerve-racking moment came shortly after John Basilone,
then the warden of the Anna M. Kross Center, stepped behind the podium.
With 2305 men in his jail, Basilone supervised a population larger than
Maine's entire state prison system. Fraser glanced down at his copy of the
wardens' report cards, stapled into a 60-page packet known as the "Primary
Indicator Report." There aren't any A's or B's in these report cards, but
there are plenty of monthly numbers designed to measure the wardens'
performance, from how many of their prisoners escaped or hanged themselves
to how many visited a hospital or got caught with a homemade shank.

Fraser grilled Basilone about his slashing statistics, then homed in on the
number of times prisoners visited the jail's commissary, the mini-grocery
store where popular purchases include Keebler cookies and Newport cigarettes.

"You had 5600 people from January to May go to commissary, and [in June]
that figure doubled to 11,792," Fraser said to the warden. "Is that an
accurate number? If so, tell me we're not having a riot or something."

"I believe the numbers have--" Basilone stopped. Everyone in the room
waited. Finally, Basilone responded. "No, Chief."

"Listen, forget the answer," said Fraser, his voice growing louder and his
cheeks redder. "This is something for everyone. When you see spikes [in
your numbers] in certain areas, go see what's wrong. A spike in commissary
is very critical because it can indicate a number of things, from an inmate
strike to an inmate food boycott to a potential disturbance brewing. That's
when people stock up on commissary, because they know they ain't going to
be leaving their cells to eat."

"We had looked into this," the warden insisted. "We didn't have anyone
hoarding."

Fraser wasn't satisfied. "If 11,000 is accurate, then the 5600 number is
not a good answer, because that means you didn't have sufficient stock [in
the commissary]," the chief said. "You're lucky you didn't have more
stabbings and slashings because, if I'm an inmate and I can't get anything,
then I'm going to be a little upset. This is serious stuff, guys. Take it
serious!"

Kerik announced a 15-minute break, and the crowd drifted toward the table
in the back with trays of prisoner-made pound cake from Rikers' bakery. Two
video monitors, which had shown charts and graphs during the wardens'
interrogations, now flashed a revealing slogan: Great players win games.
Great teams win championships.

Kerik invited his visitors into a back room. "There are five issues that
inmates can really rally around to the point of a riot," he said. "One is
commissary, one is visits, one is telephone, one is food, and one is mail."
He explained that any disruption in these services--if the flow of letters
stops or the phone lines go dead--could spark a rebellion. Analyzing
statistics to figure out exactly how much hardship his prisoners would
endure, Kerik seemed to have transformed the practice of punishment into an
elaborate mathematical equation.

Despite the faltering of his last warden, the commissioner assured the
visitors that his employees were excelling. Kerik's message was simple and
seductive: He had regained control of Rikers with his version of corporate
accountability--charts, statistics, intimidation. Indeed, Kerik has shrunk
the number of stabbings and slash-ings by 93 percent in the last five
years--an impressive accomplishment heralded by even his harshest critics.

But in a penal colony, even when there's good news, there's plenty of bad
news, too. Over the three months I visited, two officers and two captains
were arrested for beating an inmate and trying to cover up the assault.
Three prisoners escaped. A guard committed suicide by flinging himself in
front of a subway. At the same time, the Department of Correction was still
reeling from a spate of news stories exposing sloppy medical practices,
including charges that inmates had died because the city's handpicked
health care provider was trying to cut costs by sending fewer patients to
the hospital.

Like any statistics, Kerik's numbers told only part of the story of Rikers
Island. The numbers that the Department of Correction doesn't collect may
be just as revealing. Questions never asked at these management meetings
include "How many of your prisoners are repeat visitors to the city's
jails?" and "How many of the prisoners you released left with a referral to
a drug rehab program?" In these low-crime times, Kerik's focus remained
fixed on perfecting the art of jail management, not on improving services
for the drug addicts and mentally ill people who stream back and forth over
the Rikers Island bridge.

As I learned more about Rikers Island, in fact, the place began to resemble
not so much an efficiently managed corporation as a city-run superghetto
kept out of the public eye. Statistics don't tell the whole story, but they
do suggest that just beneath New York's media-hyped boom lies a world of
poverty, suffering, and chaos: About 30 percent of prisoners report they
were homeless at some point within three months before they were locked up.
Twenty-five percent receive some mental health services. Twenty percent of
the women and 7 percent of the men are HIV-positive. And 90 percent are
high school dropouts.

Statistics show that more than 80 percent of people arrested in Manhattan
test positive for illegal drug use. Each year, the city's jails get about
130,000 admissions. Nobody knows exactly how many different people this
number represents, but half have made at least one prior trip to a city
jail within the last fiscal year. So many prisoners are Rikers regulars
that guards welcome them by name when they arrive, and inmates congratulate
the officers when they get promoted.

Three-quarters of the detainees in New York City's jails are locked up
solely because they cannot afford bail. Perhaps the most revealing
indicator of these prisoners' poverty is the fact that 42 percent have
bails of $1000 or less. For many thousands of them, a few extra hundred
dollars is enough to determine if they live at home as their case goes
through the courts--a process that can last anywhere from two days to
occasionally more than two years--or wait, whether innocent or guilty, in a
concrete cage.

Inside Tier 3C

In the lobby of the North Infirmary Command, a five-story jail across the
street from the commissioner's trailer, I dropped my driver's license in a
metal drawer. The guard behind the glass pushed back a laminated pass.
"Don't lose that thing," said Angelo Manzi, then the jail's deputy warden,
as I clipped it to my shirt. "Or we'll have to find a place for you." He
was joking, but not entirely. On Rikers, a misplaced visitor's pass
triggers a facility-wide search; in a prisoner's hands, it could become a
get-out-of-jail-free card.

The North Infirmary Command has only 446 beds, fewer than any other Rikers
jails, but it is a magnet for journalists because it holds the "front-page
folks," as Thomas Antenen, the Department of Correction's spokesman at the
time, liked to call them. All stripes of celebrities have slept there, from
David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz and Robert "Preppy Killer" Chambers to
Reverend Al Sharpton and rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard of Wu-Tang Clan. Most
inmates whose mug shots show up in the tabloids do their time at this jail,
where they are kept apart from the rest of the prisoner population so
guards can watch them closely.

Today, there were no boldfaced celebrities on Rikers. Ol' Dirty Bastard had
been arrested two days earlier, but this time he'd paid his bail quickly.
The best-known resident at the moment was Kenneth Kimes, who, with his
mother, was convicted of murdering a Manhattan millionaire. (Later, after
being shipped to an upstate prison, Kimes attracted national attention when
he held a reporter hostage for more than four hours with a Paper Mate pen.)

For reporters, photographers, television producers, and cameramen who
wanted to visit Rikers, Antenen was the gatekeeper. Until recently, when he
followed Kerik to the NYPD, Antenen's job had been to spin for the city's
jail system as its "Deputy Commissioner, Public Information." When a
reporter heard that a prisoner had hanged himself or stabbed a guard or
tried to swim to LaGuardia, Antenen got the call. His duties included
sifting through media inquiries from as far away as Japan and Italy,
memorizing the names of rap stars who are often arrested, and turning down
all journalists who asked to spend a night in a Rikers cell.

I had been to the North Infirmary Command as a reporter twice in the last
few years, and like almost every interview conducted on the island, mine
were set up ahead of time, according to the agency's rules. I faxed a
letter to Antenen. The prisoner signed a release. And on the appointed day,
a guard escorted the inmate into a tiny room close to the jail's entrance,
where I got one hour, maybe two, to ask questions. No strolling around the
jail, no peeking inside the inmate's cell, no chatting with other
prisoners. As Antenen liked to say, "We don't just let reporters go fishing
among our inmate population."

But for this story, Kerik and Antenen made an exception. They had agreed to
let me tour Rikers' jails as long as I had an escort. Or four. This
morning, my presence seemed a matter of discomfort, since the jail's three
highest-ranking officials, plus Antenen, had decided to act as my personal
tour guides. I recognized one of them, Anthony Serra, from the recent
meeting of Kerik's managers. Serra became a guard when he was 23, after
toiling for three years as a dividends clerk on Wall Street. At 39, his
buzz cut and stocky frame made him look less like a corporate climber than
a marine, the job he held after high school.

We began our tour outside Tier 2C, where inmates pass the hours in their
six-by-eight-foot cells or an attached cage, which functions as a
mini-recreation room. The walls echoed with the voices of talk-show hosts
and cartoon characters. Serra stopped next to the first cage, home of his
youngest prisoner.

"This inmate was involved in a murder in our adolescent facility," Serra
said, gesturing at a sullen 17-year-old named John Alexander, who later
pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. "But because he's an
adolescent, he gets this cubicle to himself. We run services just for him.
We take him to recreation. We take him to the library. When he goes to
school, he wears mitts, but not during school." On Rikers Island, "mitts"
are black, foot-long tubes, closed at one end, which are locked onto the
hands of especially violent inmates.

Alexander did not look up from his television as Serra described his
predicament. After the teenager strangled fellow inmate Lance Gaston in
January 1999, officials moved him to this cell. "Are you getting your GED?"
Serra asked through the steel bars. The inmate nodded. "Are you going to
pass?" He nodded again. "Have you taken any practice tests?" The teenager
shook his head no. Serra encouraged him to study, then strode down the
narrow cell block.

The forced falseness of the exchange reminded me, if I needed reminding,
that the truth about daily life inside Rikers does not come out easily.
Casual conversations, whether with inmates or guards, are almost
impossible; careless remarks to a reporter can injure a career or plunge a
prisoner into disfavor. The evidence is everywhere--including in the
clenched jaw and darting eyes of a captain at the women's jail when I tried
to chat with him about his job. "We can't talk to reporters," he said.
"It's in our rule book." The pleading stares of prisoners as they passed me
in the hall suggested they would scream out all their fears and
frustrations if only a row of officers armed with pepper spray were not
watching. In this sense, all prison reporting is a lie, and the best one
may hope for is a set of half-truths or an unscripted moment that reveals
what is supposed to remain hidden.

Next was Reginald Harris, who reclined in a plastic chair and stared at the
window across the corridor from his cell. According to a printout Serra
carried on his clipboard, Harris escaped from a state facility in 1982 and
was caught with "escape-related" material while on Rikers in 1990. Over the
years, he'd made three trips to state prison for weapons possession. I
asked Harris what he did all day. He slipped off a pair of headphones and
fixed his gaze on the crew of visitors outside his cage.

"I figure out ways to get out of jail," he said.

Serra chuckled, but only for a moment.

"I've been coming to Rikers Island since 1968," said Harris, 49, dragging
on a Newport. "I don't respect the law. I feel it's my right to be free.
I've escaped three times--two times it was documented and once before they
put in the computer system. I escaped in 1973, 1982, and I tried in 1990."
What went wrong in 1990? "I had a map," said Harris, sounding rueful. "But
I told the wrong person. I thought he wanted to be free."

Serra steered the group up a flight of stairs. On Rikers, most prisoners
who flout the rules--who slash an enemy or punch a guard--get sent to one
of five special punitive units nicknamed the "Bing." Inmates who are too
notorious and dangerous for the Bing come to Tier 3C of the North Infirmary
Command--where we were now. As we approached the entrance, Serra shouted,
"On the gate!"

Glancing at his inmate roster, Serra pointed to Damon Barow's name. "He cut
a C.O. [correction officer] while he was in [the Bing], so he's over here,"
Serra explained. Next was David Pannell. "He's a Five Percenter and he's at
war with the Bloods," he continued. "The Bloods would love to do him any
time they can." Steel mesh covers the cages on Tier 3C to prevent prisoners
from slicing passersby. This precaution was especially helpful at the
moment, since Pannell lived at the corridor's far end, while the prisoner
in the first cell was Leonard "Deadeye" McKenzie, the leader of the Bloods.

Tier 3C's residents began hollering before we even stepped inside their
cell block. "Every time I come in here, they annoy me," said Serra, his
smile now gone. "Someone had a gold bracelet and he refused to give it up.
He swallowed the chain. And he stuffed a ring in his butt. I brought in the
search team, and they refused to lock in [to their cells], so I had to gas
them."

Officers pepper-sprayed the inmates into submission, but the memory of the
confrontation still riled Serra. "Did you see The Silence of the Lambs?" he
asked, referring to the way the Anthony Hopkins character, Hannibal Lecter,
is cuffed, chained, and muzzled. "That's how I would like to do it. I'd
love to put 'em on handcarts and just transport them."

Gossip columnists at the New York Post may not know Deadeye's name, but on
Rikers Island he is an A-list celebrity. Deadeye, whose moniker refers to
his one cloudy eye, cofounded the Bloods' New York City chapter on Rikers
in 1993. Soon after, he boosted his notoriety by slamming an officer in the
head with a 50-pound dumbbell. Now 32, Deadeye has been cycling through New
York's jails since age 10, on charges ranging from selling cocaine to
robbery to assault. His "pedigree card"--where officers scribble an
inmate's security classification--states: "Must be accompanied by staff for
every move. Highly assaultive."

"Hey, warden, why should I be subjected to no-contact visits with my
family?" Deadeye shouted as we walked by his cell.

"It's for your own protection and the protection of the inmate population,"
Serra told him. "He's a little angry with me because I took away his
contact visits," the warden whispered to me. "Now he visits through glass
because I don't want anyone slashing him, and I don't want him slashing
anyone."

With hundreds of followers, Deadeye is among Rikers' most powerful
residents, part of the impetus behind Kerik's Gang Intelligence Unit. "When
he arrived here," Serra said, "the very next day, I had a slashing in my
yard between the Bloods and Five Percenters for no other reason than the
Bloods were showing off for the boss." Since then, Deadeye has not given
Serra too many headaches. "I let him know he may be the leader of the
Bloods, but I'm the leader of the jail and I control him," Serra explained.
"I tell him it could be peaceful, or we could go to war every day."

Serra's tour of Tier 3C ended in the hallway outside the cell block, next
to a padlocked cabinet mounted on the wall. Inside, two rows of orange Bic
razors hung behind a glass door. Prisoners are allowed a razor for a
15-minute shave each day. But if they refuse to return their Bic, the
warden calls in his search team--guards in helmets and body armor, armed
with batons and shields. As Serra finished, I counted the razors and jotted
in my notepad: New 36, Used 13.

I realized a deputy warden had been monitoring what I wrote when he blurted
out: "Did you count 13?" Suddenly, the calm professionalism of the jailers
gave way to quiet panic. A missing razor meant a search team and pepper
spray. Everyone stared at my notes, then at the cabinet. The officials
quickly counted the used blades. One, two, three, four . . . 14. I'd
undercounted by one. The men relaxed.

Did You See Me on TV?

As paradoxical as it sounds, it's possible to be arrested on Rikers Island.
This is one of the functions of the Gang Intelligence Unit, a squad of 111
guards who track gang members and each month arrest 80 to 100 prisoners on
charges ranging from torching a mattress to smuggling in cocaine to
stabbing a correction officer.

Today, two guards inside the George Motchan Detention Center were preparing
to arrest a young man for having a small razor blade. Gregory Borges bent
forward, lifted one leg of his jeans, and slid a 9mm gun into his ankle
holster. A few feet away, his partner, Joseph Sanabria, pulled the Velcro
straps of his stab-proof vest tight around his torso.

Emmanuel Bailey, then the assistant deputy warden in charge of this unit,
strolled over. "You got your mitts?" he asked his officers. "You got
everything you need?" The mitts arrived on Rikers a couple years ago, a new
weapon in Kerik's campaign to seize control. Invented by a Nevada jail
guard, the mitts are supposed to deter inmates from wielding razor blades
or picking their handcuff locks. Sanabria grabbed a pair off a table and
headed for the door.

Before joining his officers to oversee today's arrest, Bailey showed me
around his headquarters. There are 2100 alleged gang members in the city's
jails, he explained, and his unit's main gangbusting tool is an elaborate
computer-tracking system. Click a few times on a mouse in this room, and a
gang member's life story pops up on the screen--his height, weight, home
address, mother's name, most recent visitors, enemies, a photo of his tattoos.

The Bloods, Latin Kings, Netas, and Five Percenters are Rikers' largest
gangs, but there are more than 50 others with names reflecting New York
City's diversity, including the Chicano Nation, the Nigerian Express, the
Trinitarians, the Jamaican Posse, and Dominican Power. As Bailey emphasized
how well-trained and professional his unit was, a customized screen saver
floated across one of his computer screens: Gang Intelligence/Arrest Unit
AKA Blood Hunter.

The Gang Intelligence Unit is a favorite stop on any tour of the
new-and-improved Rikers Island. For decades, a feeling of inferiority had
hovered over Rikers Island, a sense that jail guards operated in the shadow
of the NYPD. When the NYPD's crime-fighting feats became front-page news
across the country a few years ago, Rikers' guards felt forgotten,
neglected, snubbed.

Now the agency's leaders like to talk about how police officers from
Brooklyn to Alaska are calling them for help, for tips on tracking down
gang members or deciphering their codes. In his office, Bailey pointed to a
framed picture of himself from the May 1999 issue of POLICE, which hung on
a wall next to his desk. "That's a real police magazine," he said, a grin
spreading across his face. "And we made the cover." The assistant deputy
warden likes to tell visitors about his appearance in an A&E documentary,
and he beams when inmates mention they saw him on television.

A few minutes later, Bailey pulled out his most compelling prop, a gory
mosaic of Polaroids showing prisoners minutes after they have been sliced.
Taped to the center of his "victims board" were the weapons of choice among
Rikers residents: paper-thin razor blades. Girlfriends slide blades to
their inmate boyfriends while kissing in the visiting room, and friends
mail them into the jails hidden inside the perfume-ad inserts of glossy
magazines.

(Sometimes razors arrive through the mail, addressed to unsuspecting
prisoners. This is a favorite tactic of jealous men trying to move in on
women after their boyfriends get sent to jail. Sending blades to a jailed
boyfriend is an attempt to get rid of him--to get him in trouble so he
spends extra time on Rikers or, better yet, gets shipped off to a faraway
prison.)

Like prisoners everywhere, Rikers inmates use their rectums as a sort of
suitcase for weapons, concealing one or two razor blades--or sometimes even
20 or 30--by "slamming" or "boofing" them. They wrap the blades in
matchbook covers, tie pieces of thread or string around the cardboard, and
then shove the weapons up their rectums. Before Rikers officials banned
Nike Airs, inmates hid blades in the sneakers' hollow chambers. And
prisoners used Vaseline for slamming until officials made that item
contraband too.

The dozens of photos tacked to Bailey's bulletin board showed prisoners on
their backs, blood pooling around their heads and oozing across white
hospital sheets. The men wear the evidence of a recent slashing on their
cheeks, necks, chins, foreheads. These are the slicer's favorite targets; a
scar stretching across the face will always be visible, forever marking the
victim and advertising the attacker's ferocity.

When the Bloods began warring with Rikers' Latino gangs several years ago,
many more prisoners walked around with scarred cheeks. Slashings became the
quickest way for the Bloods to announce their arrival on the island; to
join the gang, Rikers inmates had to "blood in," or slash someone across
the face. Such assaults became so routine that Bloods members referred to
the act of cutting their fellow inmates as "putting in work."

Certain types of slashings were so common that they too acquired names.
There is the "buck-fifty," a cut that needs 150 stitches. An ear-to-mouth
slicing has the unfortunate name "smiley." Cuts on the back, chest, or
elsewhere on the body lack nicknames, since those targets are less
desirable. "You get no points for the back of the head," Bailey said. "Any
facial cut is a bonus area because you can never cover your face."

Bailey explained that the new weapon of choice is a scalpel, which is
thinner than a razor blade and so less likely to set off a metal detector
when stashed inside the rectum. Some assailants prefer the scalpel because
it takes a second or two longer to feel its sting, just enough time to
steal away unnoticed.

Now Bailey and I joined officers Sanabria and Borges outside, and we
climbed into a Ford Taurus. We turned onto Hazen Street, the main road on
Rikers, which curls around past most of the island's jails, and one minute
later arrived at the Anna M. Kross Center, one of Rikers' largest
facilities, which spreads over 40 acres. Long modular units added to the
back of the jail make it look from above like a spider with its legs
stretched out.

Sanabria stopped at the front entrance and ran in to drop off the officers'
guns, which are banned inside jails lest an inmate grab one. As we rode
around to the back of the jail, the investigators grew quiet, and in the
backseat Borges nervously fingered the pair's walkie-talkies. "You can't
fall asleep and start getting routine," he explained. "You have to remember
anyone can be violent at any time."

Bailey and his two officers strode through the jail's intake area, past Pen
#2, where nearly 40 men were crammed together in a space the size of a
typical Manhattan living room, though its only furnishings were wooden
benches and a toilet with no door. I estimated the temperature to be 90
degrees. The only fan blew from behind the officers' desk. The stench of
sweat hung heavy in the air, as did an overwhelming sense of frustration
and defeat.

Some of the inmates had just been arrested; others had been up since 4:30
a.m. and were returning from a day at court. Several jockeyed for a spot
near the front of the pen, where they would be visible to the officers and
perhaps less likely to be attacked. Next door, Pen #3 was incongruously
empty, save for the leavings of its most recent inhabitants: blankets, milk
containers, a smattering of orange peels, one plastic slipper, half a roll
of toilet paper, and one odorous puddle.

The inmates peered through their bars as Bailey strolled by. His uniform--a
navy jacket with four gold buttons and a gold oak leaf pinned on each
shoulder--announced his authority; the presence of an assistant deputy
warden signaled that something out of the ordinary was about to happen.

The prisoners craned their necks to watch as a guard walked down the
corridor toward the intake area, delivering German Gonzalez, a tall,
slender inmate with a teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye. Gonzalez had
been on Rikers for a couple weeks, ever since cops picked him up for
selling heroin. He knew the island well. Like many addicts, he was a
frequent visitor; over the past few years, he had made seven trips and
spent a total of 398 nights in jail.

Counselors on Rikers Island used to help combat this cycling by easing the
transition to post-jail life. They helped inmates navigate the maze of city
agencies--sign up for food stamps, find a bed in a drug treatment program,
track down a birth certificate to apply for Social Security, even re-enroll
in high school. But over the last five years, the number of counselors in
the city's jails has plunged from 105 to 11, and Rikers' revolving door
continues to spin nonstop.

As Gonzalez entered the system this time, a guard accused him of having one
razor blade in his pocket and another hidden in the sole of his sneaker.
Possession of a razor blade is legal on the streets of New York City, of
course, but carrying one onto Rikers Island can be a felony. Gonzalez
looked more confused than menacing as Bailey and his two officers led the
prisoner behind a plastic curtain. On Rikers, detainees wear their everyday
clothes unless they get rearrested, and so the officers ordered Gonzalez to
strip off his jersey and khaki shorts and climb into a slate-gray jumpsuit.

Gesturing to Gonzalez's cuffed wrists, the assistant deputy warden said,
"I'm sorry about this."

"It's all right," said Gonzalez with a shrug. "Shit happens." He paused,
then added, "Am I going to court?"

A guard told Gonzalez in Spanish that they were taking him to the 41st
police precinct in the Bronx. Borges stuffed Gonzalez's clothes into a
cotton sack, while Sanabria squatted to fasten a pair of clamps around the
inmate's ankles. Bailey asked Gonzalez if he'd heard about the agency's new
policy of arresting prisoners for crimes committed on Rikers Island.

"I've never been arrested, but I heard about it," Gonzalez said.

"Did you see me on TV?" Bailey asked.

The prisoner looked puzzled, but he played along. "No," he said. "I didn't
see you."

Forty pairs of eyes followed Gonzalez as the officers steered him past the
holding pens toward the exit. The arrest seemed intended as much to send a
message to the prisoners in Pen #2 as it was to punish Gonzalez. (Four
months later, this case against Gonzalez would be dismissed.) The
commissioner had told me that because the number of violent incidents had
plummeted, Rikers inmates no longer needed weapons for self-defense, but
when I asked the prisoner why he'd wanted a razor, he rolled his eyes and
stared at me like I was crazy. "Because I got to protect myself," he said.

[ continued at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1875.a01.html ]