This project aims to tell the story of the jail complex on Rikers Island: it focuses on the history of the island itself from the early 1860s when it was used as a training ground for the 20th Colored Regiment and as prisoner of war facility for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, to early debates on prison reform and discussions on the penitentiaries of New York City, to the need to build a penitentiary on the island through to the present day

Today the plan to close Rikers Island captures headlines, and the mere mention of its name conjures up arguments about the exponential growth of the prison industrial complex in the age of neo-liberalism. But on Rikers, controversy is nothing new. For over a century Rikers has been the subject of one scandalous headline after another, as well as being a temporary residence for millions of people.

Rikers is the main jail for New York City, housing the vast majority of the Department of Correction’s detainees and inmates in one of the most racially and class concentrated inmate populations in the country, with 96 percent coming from Black and Latino families, and 56 percent never having graduated from high school. Upwards of 80% of those held on Rikers on a given day are awaiting trial, mostly due to being simply too poor to post bail. Rikers has, as New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito declared in her 2016 State of the City Address, “come to represent our worse tendencies, and our biggest failures”. The tragic deaths of Kalief Browder, Jerome Murdough, and Bradley Ballard have brought attention to the horrors of Rikers, giving weight to a clamour of voices arguing for the DOC to stop using the island altogether. A plan to shut down Rikers, spearheaded by Mark- Viverito, earned the approval of Mayor Bill de Blasio, with the intention that this will be gradually implemented over the next ten years. This was approved by the City Council on October 17th 2019. Part of the plan is to replace it with smaller “state of the art” jails.

But, like the $9 million, 5,000 foot bridge connecting Rikers to the mainland that was dubbed the “Bridge of Hope” by the Democratic Mayor John Lindsay upon its opening in the 1960s, the historical road to the Rikers Island of today was paved with good intentions. The ‘Bridge of Hope’ is now known as the ‘Bridge of Pain’.

The historical path to Rikers begins with the construction of the Publick Workhouse and House of Correction in 1735. Built on a budget of £80 and 80 gallons of rum for the workers, it was located where Manhattan’s City Hall stands today. Since 1730, concern amongst the upper echelons of New York society had been growing over the numbers of so-called “vagabonds and idle beggars” roaming the streets. The city had undergone a period of rapid growth – between 1700 and 1735 the population had more than doubled, reaching 10,600 – and the class divide was widening. The Publick Workhouse and House of Correction served as a means of alleviating social crisis by removing from the streets many of these “vagabonds and idle beggars”, meaning the unruly poor and the unemployed. John Irwin’s (1985) “rabble classes”. The Publick Workhouse and House of Correction soon out grew its premises and was moved to a spot on the East River at 26th Street, which became known as the Bellevue establishment.

In 1814 one of the Bellevue buildings was officially designated by the state legislature as The Penitentiary of the City of New York. New York City and State’s penitentiary system was largely established due to the efforts of Thomas Eddy. Eddy, a Quaker philanthropist, was heavily influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of Montesquieu and Beccaria, and the English penal reformer, John Howard, together with the Pennsylvanian legislators and reformers who had pioneered the penitentiary in America. The penitentiary system would, Eddy rather grandiosely asserted, “reflect lasting honor on the State; become a durable monument of the wisdom, justice, and humanity of its legislators, more glorious than the most splendid achievements of conquerors or kings” (1801, p. 70). However, as the city grew, its prison population became too big for Bellevue, which was so overcrowded that there was barely enough room on the floor for people to sleep. Condemned for its conditions by the City’s Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, reformers proposed to move the Penitentiary of the City of New York, and the populations of other small jails, to Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), which was to open in 1832.

Blackwell’s was to house not only the Penitentiary of the City of New York but also hospitals for the poor – the workhouse, the mental asylum, the small pox hospital. The penitentiary opened in a spirit of optimism. The Board of Managers of the Prison Discipline Society declared that, ‘the residence will be delightful’, the island had lovely apple orchards. But like Bellevue, it soon became overcrowded; its conditions unsanitary and dangerous. Eventually, the conditions deteriorated to such an extent it was denounced as “the worst prison in the world”– despite attempts to rebrand it as “Welfare Island” in 1923 to remove the stigma attached to those confined there – the “connotations of disease, death, misery and corruption”(New York Times, 1/23/1923) . It was described by the Prison Association of New York as “one of the largest schools for crime in the country, a serious menace to society and a threatening factor in the present crime situation” (New York Times, 1/21/1927, p. 19). In 1934 the new Commissioner of Correction, Austin Harbutt MacCormick described it as representing, “a vicious circle of depravity that is almost beyond the ability of the imagination to grasp!” (Time Magazine, 2/5/1934, p. 17).

After one shameful incident, after another, and special investigations by journalists, reformers, and government agencies –not dissimilar to that of the present moment in relation to Rikers - the penitentiary at Blackwell’s was closed and its prisoners moved to the new, modern facility at Rikers Island, with the promise of job training, meaningful work, psychiatric care, and rehabilitation. The planning of Rikers had proceeded in a series of fits and starts since the late 1800s. Its original architects had spent over a year in the study of the best prisons in America and Europe and the design for Rikers was to ‘represent the highest type of prison that the science of criminology has developed’ (Stokes 1926). In 1928 New York Times reporter Virginia Pope, under the headline “Model Prison Planned for Rikers Island”, described how its construction “would relieve congestion and correct evils of present penitentiary” on Blackwell’s. Rikers was thus celebrated for its modern architectural design. And with the appointment of the “dream team” of Austin MacCormick, and Warden Richard McGee, both well-known and highly respected for their work on prison reform and commitment to rehabilitation, especially educational initiatives, it would surely as I.N. Phelphs had written come, ‘represent the highest type of prison that the science of criminology has developed’ (1926). It was to be the embodiment of a ‘rehabilitative ideal’. Although it should be noted that there had been correctional facilities and a prison farm on the island for some years, Rikers formally opened in the early 1930s to much enthusiasm: this was the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. So we have to ask – what happened? When Bellevue proved unworkable a solution was needed, that solution was Blackwell’s, when Blackwell’s failed, the solution proposed was Rikers.

The pockets of optimism within Rikers’ history fail to mask the fundamental problems within the complex. Rikers was built, using prisoner labor, largely on reclaimed land that consisted of waste from the city, and the dumping of rubbish on to the island continued long after it had opened to the extent that the Prison Association of New York argued that the “foul odors generated by the decomposition of the fresh rubbish constitute cruel and inhuman treatment of 25, 000 prisoners who pass through the penitentiary gates annually” (The New York Times, 11/24/1938, p. 32). Concerns were also raised that the high recidivism rates were showing no signs of abating.

Jails and prisons are much more, as Mary Bosworth puts it, than ‘bricks and mortar’, for in addition to being physical spaces isolated from society, they “exist as a set of ideas that are continuously debated’, through which ‘the form and nature of our society are articulated” (2010, p. 10). We must be wary of seeing penal institutions as separate entities, outside of the historical, social and political context in which they exist, and which in turn shapes them. The problems of jails are not confined to their bricks and mortar, but are symbolic of greater social problems that lie outside of the walls. Throughout the history of New York City’s penitentiary and jail system the inmate composition - while there are variations corresponding to waves of immigration - has remained overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately Black (1). Not surprising, one ex-detainee that I interviewed described Rikers as the ‘band aid’ solution for the failure of the United States to deal with the country’s historical legacy of racism. As this ‘snap shot’ of the history of Rikers Island reveals there is an incredibly rich and complex story to be told.

@Jayne Mooney,2016, ‘Imagining Rikers’, Report, PSC CUNY Award Program A

See also Tom McCarthy’s hugely informative NYC Correction History Site at: http://www.correctionhistory.org

(1) In 1930, the DOC’s Annual Report reported that the early penal institutions on Rikers, had,’ the largest percentage of colored prisoners of any of our prisons, approximately 50 per cent being negros (sic).’ (p. 99).

Partial funding for this stage of the project was provided by the PSC CUNY Award program

Project Design “The Road to Rikers” involves a detailed examination of archival material, including official reports, records, pamphlets, newspaper reports, memos, personal papers, illustrations and photographs, together with oral history interviews of ex-prisoners, guards, staff, visitors and those involved in corrections policy for New York City.