ROAMING RIKERS

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

[ continued from part 1 which is at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1874.a07.html ]

A Visit To Rosie's

By now, summer classes at the Rosewood High School had ended. The girls in
the Rose M. Singer Center, or "Rosie's," where Rikers houses its female
inmates, had to entertain themselves. So on this humid morning, four girls
crowded around a table playing spades and swapping stories in a room with
bare walls, one fan, and a long window looking onto a guards' station. The
ringleader in cell block "6 Upper" was Mona Lisa, a saucy 17-year-old from
Harlem.

She glanced at the cards in her hand and tossed a two of diamonds on the
table. A cigarette swung from her lips as the teenager rattled off the
reasons why life stinks inside the Bing, the jail's cell block for
especially unruly prisoners. "In the Bing, you can't have an ashtray," Mona
Lisa said. "You can't have cigarettes. You can't have oatmeal. The other
thing about the Bing is you only get one shower a day."

Scattered around the room were nine other teenagers, who gossiped and
braided each other's hair as a television blared The Jenny Jones Show. The
audience in front of the television included the captain who had been
assigned to escort me around the jail--a sign, I figured, that he wasn't
too worried about what the girls might tell a reporter. Kerik's tour of
Rikers' reforms does not include a stop inside cell block 6 Upper at
Rosie's. Indeed, the women's jail, which has never had a problem with
stabbings and slashings, does not fit neatly into Kerik's tale of dropping
crime rates.

Today, the population at Rosie's includes 1600 adult women, 30 16- to
18-year-olds, and nine babies. After touring the men's jails on Rikers,
strolling through Rosie's is a surprise: The entrance is painted pink, the
fear of violence doesn't hang in the air, and most of the guards are
female. Prisoners sometimes stroll arm-in-arm through the halls, and if
they encounter a toilet with no seat, they'll stick down sanitary pads to
create a cushion.

Pregnant inmates live together in a dorm called "Building 7," passing the
days in a haze of cigarette smoke. And in the jail nursery, mothers push
strollers around a patch of asphalt, chatting about the three new sets of
twins or about which of them were shackled after they gave birth. In every
part of Rosie's, the women debate a pet theory, that they get worse
services than the men--that their food is less tasty, that they are told to
use toilet paper instead of sanitary napkins when supplies run low--because
they are less violent.

In cell block 6 Upper, the inmates' favorite topic of discussion was the
Bing, and the self-appointed authority was Mona Lisa. Short braids frame
Mona Lisa's baby face, which might let her pass for 14 until she sashays
around the cell block, drawing attention to her ample hips. Though this was
Mona Lisa's first trip to Rikers, she already sounded like an old-timer,
wearing her Bing time as a badge of honor. Mona Lisa said she'd arrived on
Rikers three months earlier and had already spent 40 days in the jail's
Bing, where inmates are locked in a room for 23 hours a day.

"You get a phone call once a week," she said. "You can't have no food in
the Bing. Nothin' that we get up here. We don't go to commissary for soap,
y'know, things you want. They call it toilet-bowl shopping," Mona Lisa
said, referring to the inmate practice of storing soda or perishable foods
in a cell toilet. "In the Bing, we don't even go toilet-bowl shopping!"

What did Mona Lisa do to earn a trip to the Bing? "A girl threw pee on my
bed because I didn't give her a cigarette, and I threw pee in her face,"
Mona Lisa said with a smirk. "She slapped me. A C.O. broke it up. Then I
beat her up in the bathroom."

Male prisoners get sent to the Bing for offenses like attacking a guard or
slamming razor blades, but female inmates receive the same punishment for
less serious transgressions. According to the warden of Rosie's, female
prisoners tend to go to the Bing for "fighting with each other,
disrespecting staff, not following orders, lingering in the hallways . . .
and stealing from each other." One of the few times an officer found a
razor blade in this jail, the inmate was using it to sculpt her eyebrows.

Jennifer, 17, sat nearby, half listening to Jenny Jones and half watching
her fellow inmates' card game. Jennifer's belly pushed against her T-shirt,
evidence that she is among the 20 percent of Rosie's prisoners who are
pregnant. Jennifer said she had been on Rikers for three months after being
picked up in a drug sweep. Today, she looked sulky, but it was not morning
sickness or the lack of air-conditioning that was troubling her.

"A girl in here just got jumped and had a miscarriage," she said. Two weeks
had passed and Jennifer was still upset about how her friend's alleged
attacker was treated. "She didn't go to the Bing or nothing," Jennifer
said. "That's not right. She should be tried for attempted murder or murder."

"Yep." Evidently, everyone had already heard about the incident, and
everyone agreed with Jennifer.

Mona Lisa steered the conversation to another girl they all knew. "You know
Cheryl, right?" she asked. (This inmate's name has been changed.) "She has
to stay in the Bing until 2003. She was fighting C.O.'s, captains. She
walks around with the black mitts on her hands. She even has a lawsuit
because they beat her. She's 18." A sense of awe crept into Mona Lisa's
voice as she recounted Cheryl's troubles. "Everybody in here knows her,"
Mona Lisa said. "She's famous in here."

"She gets sprayed with mace and she just keeps on going," another girl added.

The card game ended, and Mona Lisa scribbled down the scores. "This is my
case right here," she said, pointing to the top sheet of a stapled stack.
Mona Lisa explained that an adult inmate in the law library had helped her
photocopy these descriptions of the penal codes for the charges she faces.
The crime listed on the first page: 120.10 Assault in the First Degree. "I
was reading it because when we get in the courtroom, I don't be
understanding what they're saying," Mona Lisa said. Her fellow
players--Christine, Ruby, and Desiree--all nodded in agreement, although no
one else wanted to discuss why she was on Rikers Island.

There did not seem to be much to do other than keep playing cards, so the
girls dealt a new hand. To pass the hours, they also bickered and fought.
They traded tips on how to make an ashtray out of a soap bar and how to
make an envelope using paper and toothpaste. They complained about
everything--about the cops who arrested them, their prosecutors, the
jailhouse soap that made their skin crack. And they talked about how they
were never, ever going to come back here.

Mona Lisa's strategy for combating boredom seemed to involve talking
compulsively. "I never would have gone to the Bing," she continued. "But,
you know, I've been here a long time, and you can go and tell a C.O. that
this person is doing this and they never say nothing. And then when you
take matters into your own hands, you go to the Bing. I don't like that."

"We're all different ages, but some of us are more mature than others,"
explained Desiree, perhaps as a way to counter Mona Lisa's Bing tales.
"Some of us know how to get along better than others do." Desiree said
she'd been on the island for only three days, but already she had compiled
a lengthy list of grievances. "The food is really disgusting," said
Desiree. "That's what we got to talk about. And the way the C.O.'s talk to
us--that's another thing that's really disgusting. They curse at us,
especially in new admissions. They be treatin' you like shit, [saying]
'Shut the fuck up.' "

The captain in the corner remained out of earshot, and Desiree seemed
unbothered by his presence. Unlike adult prisoners I had met, these girls
had little fear about saying what was on their minds.

"And people that get dope sick--" Desiree continued. "You shouldn't do
dope, but the C.O.'s act like it's [the addicts'] fault. If they see
somebody having a seizure, they leave them there."

"Somebody could die in here because they take their time," said Mona Lisa.

"You know what I think is so nasty?" said Ruby, glancing up from her cards.
Wearing a denim miniskirt and green metallic nail polish, Ruby looked as if
she could have been heading out to a party. "Say she just came into new
admissions," said Ruby, gesturing to the girl next to her, "and I've been
here already. [The medical staff] haven't checked her, but they've checked
me. And they chain me to her when we go to court. That's nasty because you
don't know what she's got. She could be somebody off the streets. She could
have TB or something."

"We're not supposed to get handcuffed to anyone because we're adolescents,"
said Mona Lisa. "They're supposed to put you by yourself in a cage,"
another teenager added.

A pudgy girl sitting behind Desiree leaned forward to join the
conversation. "I don't like the cages," she said, "because I feel like I'm
an animal in the Bronx Zoo."

At 11:15 a.m., Desiree, Mona Lisa, Ruby, and Christine pushed back their
chairs and stacked their cards on the table. On the back of each playing
card was a helpful message: Play it safe. AIDS can happen to anyone. The
girls drifted out of the dayroom and lined up against a wall, ready to be
marched to the mess hall. By now, they had stopped gossiping and joking and
smiling. Already, they'd mastered this monotonous drill; the excitement of
learning to navigate this new world had quickly ebbed.

A few hours later, I visited the jail's Bing for adolescents. An officer
let me into an empty eight-by-10-foot cell, and I tried to imagine how Mona
Lisa's youthful enthusiasm had fit into such a small space. Then I spied
her handiwork covering one cinder-block wall:

Shay & Mona Lisa 4Ever One

Bloody Face & Mona Lisa

Blood Shai & Mo-Love 9Stop 1Love 4Ever In Life.

It could have been a high school bathroom stall, I thought--until I noticed
that some young prisoner had sketched a calendar by the door and drawn a
slash through each day of captivity.

Beauty Tips for Prisoners

Petra Cirino laid her scissors on the counter and watched her customer wipe
at the snips of hair clinging to her sweaty face. "I feel like a new
woman," said Frances Burgos, stroking her stylish bob. Petra beamed. When
not locked up on Rikers Island, Petra cuts hair in her Spanish Harlem
apartment, charging up to $50 a head. Today, she was working as a
hairdresser at Rosie's, getting lots of love from her fellow inmates but
earning only $12 a week.

My captain-escort dropped me off here one afternoon and didn't bother to
stick around. Decorated with ripped leather chairs, the salon had scant
amenities: no glossy magazines, no manicures, no colorings. But the beauty
parlor did boast two hot presses, honey- and-almond shampoo, four sinks,
pink cinder-block walls, and Petra's considerable skills--beautifying her
clients while masking the scars of their pre-prison lives.

Nowhere may a beauty salon be more needed than inside the women's jail on
Rikers Island. The women here appear to be in far worse shape than the
men--more sickly, more beaten-up, more defeated. Statistics confirm they
are more likely to be HIV-positive and mentally ill. Black eyes and bruises
are lingering reminders of abusive boyfriends and husbands on the outside.
And some women appear only half alive, zombies passing the weeks in a
Thorazine stupor. More men have their rap sheets written on their
faces--the half-healed scar of a buck-fifty, say--but the women here also
carry the scars of lives hard-fought.

Petra has encountered so many disfigured heads on Rikers Island that she
adapted her hair-cutting routine for the prisoner clientele. "Before I
start with anyone," she explained, "I ask, 'What do you want? Do you have
any scars? Do you have any place you don't want me to touch?' " Even with
her ample experience, Petra's newest client posed a challenge. Frances had
an uneven scalp, a fact she revealed by pushing aside a lock of wavy hair
near her crown, exposing a smooth, bald spot the size of a quarter.

"I've got a big dent because I've got a plate in my head," said Frances,
who was 28 years old and had four children. "I was seven months pregnant
when I got shot five years ago. I was an innocent bystander on a street in
Brooklyn." Frances finished her story by lifting her lime green shorts,
showing the foot-long scars that crawl up the inside of each thigh.

Every day, a few dozen prisoners visit this windowless room. To get a hair
appointment, inmates must jot their names on a sign-up sheet; those going
to court the next day jump to the top of the list. Fifteen minutes in a
chair at this beauty parlor represents a chance for a woman to improve not
only her appearance but also her odds of going home a little sooner.

"I really wish I could go to court tomorrow," said an inmate accused of
selling crack, as she admired her freshly cut hair in the mirror. "I would
look proper in front of the judge and the D.A., to let them know I'm
starting to make a change." For a prisoner with no bail money and an
impossible-to-reach public defender, getting her hair pressed and curled
may be one of the only steps she can take to expedite her release.

As she moved around her salon, the hairdresser dragged one leg. When I
asked Petra about her own scars, she rolled up her pants. "I don't have a
kneecap," explained Petra, 42, glancing down at a leg that appeared eaten
away, gnarled scar tissue replacing once smooth skin. "Thirteen years ago,
I fell off a motorcycle. I was in a wheelchair for a year, then four years
until I was off crutches." Petra paused. "I'm always in pain," she added.

Petra's job helped her forget that this was her fifth trip to Rikers, that
she'd already done one bid in state prison on a drug-selling charge, that
she might soon have to make another trip upstate. To land a job cutting
hair at Rosie's this summer, Petra did not have to submit a resume or
endure a series of interviews. She came in as a customer on a recent day
and, frustrated by the long wait, picked up a pair of clippers and trimmed
her own hair.

"She did a good job, and I said, 'We might as well put you to use,' " said
John Nance, the 53-year-old barber who has overseen the salon for 11 years.
Like any manager, he knew how hard it was to find good employees. "We have
to fire a lot of them because they don't want to obey orders," Nance said
of his inmate stylists. "But we give them one week's notice."

Over the years, Nance has heard the stories of hundreds of inmates, and
along the way he's developed strong opinions about the criminal justice
system. "A lot of girls are here that shouldn't be here," said Nance, who
cuts hair at his own barbershop in Queens after he gets off work at
Rosie's. "They constantly come in, over and over. I don't understand it.
It's mostly drug addicts in here."

Though the barber tries to forget about the jail's grim procession of
junkies when he leaves each day, the women's stories have inspired him to
do his part to stop Rikers' revolving door. He and his wife adopted two
children born to a drug-addicted mother. "That's two I'll keep from here,"
Nance explained.

As the salon's 3 p.m. closing time neared, the day's last customers
trickled out the door and the hair dryer's noisy hum stopped. "I don't get
paid that much here," Petra said, as she checked her supply of shampoo and
cleaned her clippers. "But it's relaxing to me. I'm doing something I do on
the street, so I feel a little freer." At the officer's desk by the door,
the hairdresser traded her tools--her scissors, comb, trimmers, and
clippers--for her inmate ID card. The guard frisked Petra, and prisoner
#5617359J limped back to her cell.

In Captain Grillo's Garage

When razor counting and gang tracking fail to keep the prisoners under
control, Rikers' leaders descend on a garage located next door to the car
wash on the island's north side. Antenen, the jails' spokesman, brought me
here one afternoon and pressed the buzzer by the entrance. A door rose,
revealing a cavernous warehouse. Equipment climbed the walls and spread
across the floor--stacks of riot helmets, toolboxes, a circular saw, fire
extinguishers, Kevlar vests, hoses, a forklift, a pipe wrench, spit masks,
wooden batons, plastic shields, mitts, and life preservers.

Captain James Grillo beamed when he discovered Antenen and I had come to
check out his workplace, the garage holding all the equipment for the
Emergency Services Unit. Depending on whom you ask, the ESU, or "boom
squad," is a group of dedicated officers with the toughest job on the
island or a bunch of testosterone-fueled thugs who get a rush from brawling
with the inmates. ESU guards break up riots, search cell blocks, and haul
uncooperative inmates out of their cells.

The ESU employed only 16 guards when Grillo became its training captain
seven years ago. Then Kerik arrived and expanded the ESU to 111 officers.
At the same time, Kerik quadrupled the amount of money the Department of
Correction spent on security equipment--a three-year budget of $2.5 million
from 1993 to 1995 escalated to $10.1 million from 1996 to 1998. With every
extra million dollars, trucks packed with shiny new weapons and other
assorted high-tech gizmos arrived at Grillo's garage.

As the U.S. prison population has exploded in recent years, so has the
number of companies marketing products to jail officials, creating a
multimillion-dollar industry. Grillo tests many of the latest products in
this garage, transforming it into his own personal laboratory as he tries
to discover new and better ways both to protect guards and control prisoners.

The captain began our tour by grabbing a Plexiglas shield with a battery
pack on the back and silver wiring across the front. He planted his feet.
"C'mon! Out of your cell!" Grillo shouted, shoving the shield toward an
imaginary inmate. "We're not going to use force. But this shield gives off
50,000 volts!" The captain flicked a switch, and bright blue sparks of
electricity shot across the quarter-inch-thick piece of plastic. A loud
crackling sound followed. "Most of the inmates will comply," Grillo
explained. "They don't want to get shocked."

Stun shields first arrived on Rikers Island in 1997, with the promise that
both guards and inmates would suffer fewer bruises and broken bones. Behind
this notion was the theory that the shield would scare prisoners into
submission--not because a guard pressed it against their flesh, but because
the mere sight of the sparking shield would transform inmates into
Pavlovian dogs, who would quickly learn to exit their cells meekly rather
than get zapped and dragged out by angry guards. By this measure, the
agency's 90 shields--bought at $545 a piece--have been effective.

But, of course, some inmates do get shocked. For these obstinate prisoners,
an instructor's guide provides helpful pointers: Aim for the back, arms,
legs, and buttocks. Don't aim for the eyes, testicles, scrotum, throat,
spine, open wounds, or pregnant stomach.

In the beginning, the biggest hurdle to the shield's effective use was not
Amnesty International, but the guards' timidity. "The officers didn't want
to hit the inmates with the shield--with all the oversight agencies we
have," Grillo said. "The inmate just got one little crack. It wasn't
intimidating enough." Grillo had the shield's battery pack rigged so the
officer can no longer zap prisoners for only a second or two. Now every
switch of the shield triggers a six-second shock of 50,000 volts.

Grillo disappeared for a moment, then returned cradling a sleek object
resembling a video camera. "I want to show you something else," he said.
Across the room, one of Grillo's officers pressed his hand against a metal
door, then stepped away. Through the lens, I could make out a grainy
black-and-white picture of his handprint. This device, called NightSight,
uses technology originally marketed to the military to help soldiers track
their enemies.

A handful of prisoners escape from the city's jails each year, and the list
of successful strategies is long and varied. Three inmates stole an
officer's Oldsmobile and drove over the bridge in 1980. Several prisoners
have managed to swim to LaGuardia, while others have been pulled down by
the bay's vicious tides. And in 1999, an inmate escaped by clinging to the
bottom of a truck.

Each missing person triggers an enormous manhunt. Now, instead of prowling
around the island's leafy areas or climbing through dirt to check under
modular housing units, the guards can use NightSight. "This picks up body
heat," Grillo explained. "It's totally incredible. A few years ago, we were
looking for a guy in a field, and we found a couple eggs from a goose!"

To Grillo, the device represented a vote of confidence from his boss. "If
it weren't for Kerik, I wouldn't have this, because this is $13,000," said
Grillo, rubbing his prized acquisition. "When I decided on this, he said,
'OK, you got it, buddy.' We bought one for each boat, and for the patrol
vehicle, and the handheld one." A mischievous grin crept across the
captain's face. "Now I got to butter him up to see if I can get $13,000 for
something else," he said.

And yet, Grillo's garage does not contain all of the most expensive
equipment purchased by the Department of Correction. In 1997, a new type of
metal detector, the Body Orifice Security Scanner, known as the BOSS chair,
arrived on Rikers. Instead of walking through the detector, inmates must
sit on it. The $4500 chair beeps if a prisoner has any type of metal inside
him--handcuff keys, razor blades, shanks.

Officer Brian Kirk walked over to join his boss's show-and-tell tour as
Grillo picked up one of his least expensive weapons, an eight-foot metal
pole with a crossbar near the center and a U-shape at one end, which looked
like it could pass for a medieval torture tool. The two men seized the
crossbar, lifted the pole parallel to the ground, and jabbed it into the
gut of an invisible prisoner. If an inmate is armed with a homemade weapon,
they explained, the device pins him against a wall.

Grillo moved on to another favorite piece of equipment: riot vests. The
Department of Correction would later award a $4.8 million contract to
purchase 11,000 vests for jail guards. Kirk slipped on one of the
half-inch-thick vests, and Grillo inspected it as if he were a football
coach checking his players' equipment before a big game. "It came without
the shoulder pads," Grillo explained. "Then we had an officer stabbed in
the shoulder, so we had them add shoulder pads."

Next on Grillo's tour was a 36-inch wooden baton, which looked like it
could have been hanging from a cop's waistband. The captain grabbed the
baton and lunged forward. "You always aim lower than the throat," he said.
"And you can use it to lock the guy's arms back." Grillo dropped the wooden
baton and picked up a shorter, sleeker version known as a Celayaton.
"That's the same thing they use in these third-world countries where they
do a lot of caning," Kirk explained. A sticker on the Celayaton stated
"Made in Indonesia."

Grillo grew animated as he described how--armed with a Celayaton instead of
an old-fashioned wooden baton--a guard can bang an inmate without breaking
his bones. "This is new technology," he said. "It's a nonlethal weapon. If
you are starting to have a problem with an inmate, you may not be able to
mace him. Now you have another alternative. Everything is nonlethal. We
hope to keep things that way. Unless they escalate . . . "

By this time, Antenen had left the garage and was outside making calls on
his cell phone. I figured he would not be pleased to hear this last bit of
Grillo's monologue. The captain could not seem to stop himself, to hide his
enthusiasm for a job that outsiders might think borders on the barbaric. As
if to combat such a judgment, and to emphasize the importance of all the
equipment cluttering his garage, Grillo recalled his earlier days on Rikers.

"When I was in HDM [House of Detention for Men] in 1986, we had guys with
their throats cut, guys with their ears cut off," said Grillo, who became a
jail guard in 1978. "It was a regular bloodbath. It was the worst jail on
Rikers Island, and I was the dep[uty warden] in charge of security. Morale
was terrible. All day long we were fighting."

Today, there are fewer than a dozen stabbings and slashings a month on
Rikers Island. But Grillo believes in being prepared. Perhaps the best
evidence of his attitude was the armored personnel carrier parked in front
of his garage. In recent years, Grillo has purchased enough military
equipment to outfit a small army--two armored personnel carriers, a crash
truck, and a 125-foot boom crane from the German military.

The captain says this equipment is for "when there is a serious incident on
Rikers Island." But these vehicles' true purpose seemed more to do with
giving guards another way to remind the prisoners who runs Rikers. Officers
bring the crash truck to respond to minor disturbances in the jail yards.
Like grade-school kids infatuated with go-karts, they joke about driving
the tanks along the streets of Rikers in the middle of the night.

Perhaps this is the perfect snapshot of post-Cold War America: plenty of
leftover military equipment and no one to fear except our own prisoners.
After spending countless hours obsessing about the finer points of body
armor and riot vests and stun shields, Grillo was eager to try out his
purchases. But what "serious incidents" have actually required the use of
his armored personnel carriers and boom crane and crash truck? "We haven't
had anything," Grillo said. "It's killing me it's been so quiet."

Bing Days

An officer pushed a metal food cart into the Bing and parked it in front of
cell #1. Unlocking the door's slot, the guard shoved a tray of food inside.
Before he could shut the slot, however, the occupant of cell #1 thrust his
arm out the door. He had spied me outside his cell and begun hollering. "I
want to talk to her!"

"Move your arm out of the food slot," said the officer, who kept one hand
on the heated cart stocked with dozens of lunches.

"I got things to address!" the inmate shouted.

It was "feeding time" in cell block 1 South in the Bing, the most
soul-deadening place on Rikers Island. On Rikers, there are five separate
Bings, or punitive segregation units--for men, women, adolescent girls,
adolescent boys, and mentally ill inmates. But when people refer to "the
Bing," they usually mean the men's unit, officially called the Central
Punitive Segregation Unit, which occupies a five-story addition to the Otis
Bantum Correctional Center. This 2000-bed jail is one of Rikers' newest, a
high-tech facility with prefab cells and sliding doors operated by switches
in a central control room. From the outside, the slate-colored building
with bright blue trim bears little resemblance to Rikers' older jails.

The Bing was created in 1988 as a management tool, a place to put all the
most rebellious prisoners together in order to make the rest of the city's
jails run more smoothly. Today, two-story cell blocks run along each side
of the Bing, creating the illusion that it is an airy, spacious place. But
from inside its 72-square-foot cells, of course, the place looks quite
different.

On this day, Rikers' jail-within-a-jail held 269 men, who spend all day
alone, locked inside rooms just big enough to spread their arms or walk a
few steps. Unlike inmates elsewhere on Rikers, these prisoners exit their
cells only for a shower or "recreation," which is an hour alone in an
outdoor cage. There are no televisions, no visits to the law library, no
chances to gossip in the mess hall. The primary occupation of the men here
seems to be the struggle to stay sane.

Showing me around the Bing this morning were Leroy Grant, the warden of the
Otis Bantum Correctional Center, and Angelo Rivituso, then the deputy
warden in charge of the Bing. Grant is 6-5, with a basketball player's
build and the sort of imposing presence that seems to befit a Bing warden.
At the moment, Grant did not look pleased that the occupant of cell #1 had
interrupted his tour, creating chaos in front of a guest.

"What's the problem?" asked Grant, who wore a navy jacket with four gold
buttons, a black tie, and one gold star on each shoulder.

"It's a pleasure to see someone in authority by here," the inmate said.

"Y'all right?" Grant asked. "Take your arm out."

The inmate did not deliver a litany of gripes. Not about today's lunch of
steamed carrots, spaghetti with meat sauce, white bread, and Kool-Aid, nor
about anything else. What he wanted, it seemed, was a little attention.
"Can I have your business card?" he asked the warden.

Grant ignored this stab at humor, but he'd already given the inmate what he
wanted. The inhabitant of cell #1 pulled his arm inside, and the officer
shut his food slot.

Mealtimes are the most chaotic periods of the day in the Bing, sometimes
dragging on for two hours. Almost every day, someone shoves an arm--or
occasionally even his head and shoulders--out of his slot. Prisoners scream
all day long, but they know the best way to get a response is to hold a
one-arm protest during mealtime.

Sometimes, inmates have a legitimate grievance--an illness, a missed weekly
phone call, a suicidal urge. Sometimes, they just want to taunt their
jailers. For men locked in their cells all day, mealtime brings not only
food but also a chance to get a tiny taste of power. In this setting of
extreme isolation, putting an arm through a food slot can seem like a
desperate grab for recognition.

The occupant of cell #2 tossed his overcooked carrots into the hallway
before the guard could lock his slot. If more than one prisoner at a time
refuses to let the officer shut his food slot, the guard halts his midday
routine. The mantra for maintaining control in the Bing is "Two slots,
everything stops." It takes only two inmates to dangle their arms out of
their cells, the deputy warden explained, before "food is flying."
Prisoners fling veal patties and apples across the cell block, and they
squirt shampoo bottles filled with urine and Kool-Aid at officers passing
by. Sometimes, female guards even encounter prisoners trying to masturbate
on them through an open food slot.

To regain control, Bing officers are supposed to follow a strict protocol.
"After we exhaust all our IPC [interpersonal communication] skills," Grant
explained, "then we have to bring in the officers with the stun shields and
OC [oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray] and get him to comply." Getting
the prisoner to comply often means performing a "cell extraction"--entering
an inmate's cell, forcing him facedown onto the ground, cuffing him behind
his back, and hauling him out.

A typed document, known as the "24-Hour Report," circulates around Rikers
each morning, detailing these incidents and any other "use of force."
Between July 1998 and July 1999, there were 496 use-of-force incidents in
the Bing, including this typical incident from May 29, 1999:

At 1225 hours, in 1 South Cell 27, Inmate Malik . . . refused repeated
orders to close his food slot. . . . Under the supervision of Captain
Lomas, Officers Malone (E.I.S. [Electronic Immobilization Shield]), Wilson
(Legs), Evans (Right Arm), Hill (Left Arm), and Guzman (Handcuffs)
restrained Inmate Malik with a 6 second application of the E.I.S., control
holds, and the application of handcuffs; and removed him from the cell.
Inmate Malik refused medical treatment and no injuries were noted. No
injuries were reported by staff.

Jail officials and their critics agree that the use of stun shields and
pepper spray has led to a drop in the number of broken bones and bruises in
the Bing. But some prisoners do still get hurt. During May and June of
1999, Bing inmates were injured in about half of the 129 use-of-force
incidents. Their injuries ranged from a scratched arm and a swollen wrist
to broken teeth, multiple contusions to the face and nose, and an asthma
attack triggered by pepper spray.

There are far fewer serious injuries in the Bing today largely because of a
class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society in 1993. This suit
exposed rampant abuse, revealing that between 1988 and 1998 guards
seriously injured at least 300 Bing inmates. Broken bones, perforated
eardrums, and fractured skulls were fairly common here several years ago.

Perhaps the most damning document collected in this lawsuit was a report
prepared for the Legal Aid Society by Vincent M. Nathan, who has been a
court monitor in prison reform litigation cases for more than 20 years.
Nathan wrote:

The CPSU [Central Punitive Segregation Unit] occupies the third ring of
hell in the field of corrections in the United States. Staff's behavior in
this highly secure unit is . . . psychopathic behavior. Not only do
officers respond to any form of aggression with punches and kicks, they
actively seek out their victims and punish them brutally for verbal insults
and insubordination; staff inflict "greeting beatings" to establish their
turf or, perhaps in some cases, just for sheer perverted pleasure. . . .
CPSU supervisors, including wardens, have deliberately adopted terror as
their underlying management philosophy.

As part of their settlement with the Legal Aid Society, Rikers officials
added 300 cameras to the Bing and now document every cell extraction. To
show how he monitors his guards, Rivituso, the deputy warden, led me into
his air-conditioned office on the Bing's third floor, where he kept a
popcorn popper, a jar of homemade pickled jalapeno peppers, and a stash of
videotapes depicting his officers wrestling inmates out of their cells.

A bulletin board across from Rivituso's desk featured a row of Polaroids of
the Bing's worst inmates. The most notorious one was a 22-year-old Blood
named Peter Showers. Grant pulled out a two-page list of Showers's
infractions: refusing to have his cell searched, assaulting staff,
threatening inmates, arson. When Showers comes to Rikers, officers do not
wait for him to break Rikers' rules again; he goes straight to the Bing.

I was not permitted to interview Showers or any of the other prisoners in
the Bing. So I asked to speak with an inmate who worked in the Bing, one of
the men who held the job of "suicide prevention aide." What I got was an
interview with Samuel, an affable 40-year-old with a missing front tooth,
who had been locked up for 10 months on a cocaine possession charge. Samuel
and I stood next to the "bubble," the glass-enclosed control room outside
the cell block, as he told me about his job.

"I watch the inmates to make sure they're not attempting to injure
themselves or commit suicide," he explained. "If an inmate is attempting to
hang up, I contact an officer. Then I lift the inmate up so the noose is no
longer around his neck, and the officer cuts him down. If the inmate is
cutting [himself] up, I'm to stand outside the cell and wait till the
officer comes to disarm the inmate. I'm supposed to make, like, a
tourniquet or a patch press to slow down the bleeding." Samuel demonstrated
by pushing his palm against the inside of his wrist. "Or stop the bleeding,
if I'm lucky," he said.

Samuel is one of several suicide prevention aides who patrol the Bing,
earning 50 cents an hour to peer inside cell windows and make sure none of
their fellow inmates are trying to kill themselves. "A lot of guys--they
have a very hard persona, but you get talking to them and they're just
young guys," said Samuel, who is older than most of the inmates in the
Bing, where the average age is 23.

"They're just followers, following what's hot right now," he continued. "A
lot of times, guys lose hope, especially guys who are facing a lot of time.
Their wives are leaving them, their girlfriends are leaving. I try to
reassure them that even people who are not in prison, their relationships
go south for whatever reason, and that's just a part of life."

So far, nobody has tried to hang himself on Samuel's watch. He'd been a
suicide prevention aide for only a month, working the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
shift, but already all the prisoners seemed to know him, or at least know
his voice. If he showed up a few minutes after 10 p.m., the inmates chided
him for being late.

Samuel's current job could not be more different from the last one on his
resume: stock manager at the Warner Bros. store in Times Square,
supervising workers as they lined the shelves with Tweety Bird T-shirts and
Bugs Bunny drinking glasses. In an unexpected way, though, Samuel said, his
stint at Warner Bros. helped prepare him for his current position, since
they're both "standing-type jobs."

As Samuel spoke, the warden stood a few feet away, monitoring all of his
words. Perhaps to placate the warden, Samuel adopted a demeanor of complete
deference. He kept his hands clasped behind his back, as if he were wearing
a pair of invisible handcuffs. When Samuel finished his spiel, the warden
stepped forward. "His role is very significant," Grant said. "A lot of guys
feel loneliness and a sense of despair. He can go over to them and let them
know they're not the only ones going through this. He plays a vital role
helping them cope." Samuel stayed silent as the warden spoke, and soon an
officer came to lead him away.

Grant and Rivituso escorted me out of the Bing and past the "staging
area"--a curve in the hallway where guards suit up before storming into the
Bing. Riot vests, fireproof jackets, firemen's boots, metal helmets, and
gas masks lined wooden shelves. Samuel's words seemed to linger in Grant's
mind; without any prodding, the warden steered the conversation back to
suicide. "If you happen to have one of those experiences of a guy hanging
up, there's guilt," Grant said. "I've had this as an officer. I saw a guy
successfully hanging up. It leaves a hollowness."

In his office, Warden Grant explained that he had been an officer at the
Anna M. Kross Center 15 years earlier when an inmate tied a T-shirt to a
cell door and hung himself. "You ask yourself a million questions," said
the warden, leaning back in his leather chair. Grant fingered his remote
control and glanced across his desk at the three video screens, which
allowed him to monitor every part of his jail. "It's very painful," he
said. "You're in touch with the fact that you're supposed to be preserving
life. It's something that always stays with you."

Nobody has killed himself in the Bing for several years, though there were
six suicides in the city's jails in 1999 and six in 1998. In the Bing,
Rivituso said, "We had two attempts in the last four months [of 1999], and
the SPA [suicide prevention aide] was the first to alert the officer. They
had torn sheets tied around their necks, [but] in both cases their feet
were on the ground. In one case, the guy was just sitting on the bed--he
wasn't even attached to anything." Rivituso explained that they report such
incidents to a central office only if a mental health worker determines it
was a "bona fide" suicide attempt.

"With inmate suicide attempts, we have nonserious and serious," Grant said.
"In both these cases, we viewed it as an attempt for these individuals to
avoid doing their time." Training for Bing guards includes warnings about
prisoners trying to feign insanity in order to escape their solitary
confinement and move into a less punitive setting.

"We call them Bing beaters," Rivituso added. "They play like they're crazy
so they can get out of the Bing and be in a dorm with people who really are
off so they can take advantage of them. We all saw One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest. McMurphy plays cards with all the M.O.'s [mental observation
patients] and wins their money. We have a lot of McMurphys here."

One minute later, an assistant opened the door to the warden's office and
handed Rivituso a slip of paper. Signed by a doctor, the form upgraded a
recent incident to a suicide attempt. In this instance, a Bing prisoner had
tied a sheet around his neck and attached it to a vent cover in his cell
around 2 a.m. I asked the warden and deputy warden if this was one of the
two suicide attempts they had just mentioned. "No," Rivituso said. "This
would be the third."

The interruption seemed to push my hosts slightly off-balance. On our tour,
Grant had used corporate jargon to describe his job. "We try to operate
from a preventive management approach," he'd said. "Our goal is to create a
win-win atmosphere." But suddenly the Bing seemed less a well-managed cell
block than a place of horror, where officers confront the seemingly
impossible task of keeping prisoners alive in a place designed to crush
their souls.

Rivituso handed the doctor's form to Grant, who stared at the sheet a few
moments. Neither the warden nor the deputy warden could recall the
incident, and they wondered aloud whether this particular inmate was
actually one of theirs.

Perhaps such incidents are hard to remember because so many Bing prisoners
engage in similar behavior. There may have been only two--or now
three--"official" suicide attempts in the Bing so far this year, but that
number tells only a fraction of the story. There were more than 30
incidents of self-injurious behavior in the Bing during the first five
months of 1999. In January, an inmate was found lying in his cell with a
string around his neck, saying that he heard voices telling him to hang up.
A Bing prisoner lit his jumpsuit on fire in February. In March, an inmate
sliced both his wrists with a razor and claimed to have swallowed seven
pills. Some of these inmates were sent to other jails, some back to the
same cell block, and some to the Bing for mentally ill inmates. These
incidents might sound like suicide attempts, but here on Rikers Island they
are called "manipulative gestures."

A Sense of Humor

Later that afternoon, I watched as 200 men marched single-file into a
cavernous tent, their backs straight and their arms stiff by their sides.
The inmates wore buzz cuts and army fatigues--the required attire for
Rikers' military-style boot camp, known as the High Impact Incarceration
Program.

On this August afternoon, the men were getting a break from their rigid
regimen and a chance to see an Off-Broadway show. They were not quite sure
what to expect. Six weeks earlier, they had sat through a concert of
classical music. In recent years, luckier inmates had seen concerts by dead
prez, Fat Joe, and Wu-Tang Clan, courtesy of Stress, a hip-hop magazine
based in Hollis, Queens.

Watching the parade of prisoners was Danny Hoch, a 28-year-old actor
sporting Adidas running pants and a baseball hat facing backward. The
inmates seemed not to recognize Hoch, though he had been making art out of
their culture for the past three years, touring the country with his
one-man show, Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, which had sold out for 14 weeks
at P.S. 122 in the East Village.

Today marked Hoch's first trip back to Rikers since 1994, when he'd
finished a five-year stint teaching drama classes to inmates. A few months
earlier, Hoch had filmed a scene for his new movie inside the prison barge
floating off the South Bronx. As a thank-you to the agency, he offered to
do a free show on Rikers. I asked Antenen, the jails' spokesman, if I could
join the audience, and though he'd never heard of Hoch, he agreed to let me
watch.

The last men to enter found seats and the show began. Hoch delivered
rapid-fire monologues in the voices of various characters--a stressed-out
prison guard, a flirtatious teenager, a Cuban street peddler. The crowd
laughed at Hoch's skits, but none got them hollering as loudly as when he
grabbed a broom and became "Andy," an HIV-positive inmate who passed the
hours of a long prison sentence by working as a porter.

As Andy pushed a broom around the floor, his speech grew faster, darting
from topic to topic, from the aggravation of working at McDonald's to the
prison's overcooked carrots. By the end of his 13-minute rant, Andy became
completely unhinged. "I'm dying!" the inmate shouted, slamming down his
broom. "I'M DYING IN THIS MOTHERFUCKER!"

Hoch-as-Andy paused, looking off to the side at an invisible guard. "Ay,
everything's all right over here," he said, forcing himself to sound calm.
"Don't push the button, Hal. There's no problem." He picked up his broom
and began sweeping again. "Hey, Hal, you don't gotta push the button, see?"
As if to prove he was still sane, Andy hummed as he swept. "Do-do-di-do."
Then Andy dropped to the floor, and the audience could almost see the guard
looming over him. "Go 'head," Andy said. "Search me. You wanna search me?
No problem. I told ya, there's nothin' wrong. No fightin'. Just got a
little excited. See? You don't gotta push the button."

This was the grimmest moment in Hoch's show, and when he spoke these lines
to an East Village audience, everyone was silent. But here on Rikers, the
men slapped their thighs and howled with laughter. In the back of the room,
several guards wiped tears from their cheeks. They all knew what would
happen if Hal did push the button, how the boom squad would arrive with
their riot vests and stun shields and wooden batons, how the guards would
remind Andy who was in charge.

They did not need to stretch their imaginations to understand why Andy was
so frustrated and enraged, to understand how the powerlessness of prison
had weakened his grip on sanity. Armed with only a broom and a monologue,
the actor had peeled away the layers of spin and laid bare the island's
constant tension between not only prisoners and guards, but also control
and terror. "That's what happens to you [in here]," one inmate whispered to
me later. "You start buggin' out."

Now, though, the prisoners watched Hoch and roared so hard they became a
sea of open mouths, all gold caps and missing teeth. It was, for me,
something of a mad dream--the inmates laughing at the depiction of their
own degradation, courtesy of their jailers, while their jailers laughed
too--and I left soon thereafter, having confirmed the wardens' boasts that
their mission was successful, that the incarceration of 14,600 souls was
complete. Not long afterward, Kerik left too, armed with the lessons of
Rikers Island as he stepped into the role of NYPD commissioner and into the
national media spotlight. Meanwhile, from the window seats of commuter
planes descending into LaGuardia, the view remains the same: refurbished
school buses carrying shackled New Yorkers back and forth across the Rikers
Island bridge.