The
New Yorker
February 19 & 26, 2001
How
do you teach teen-agers
in a New York City jail?
by
Adam Gopnik
Although
Riker’s Island, in New York City, is the
biggest jail in North America, most New Yorkers who don’t
have to go there don’t know where it is. A lot
of people seem to think that it’s in New York Harbor;
others confuse it with Randalls Island, the the Cosmos
used to play; and others will tell you that it’s
the huge scary fenced-in building you see just off the
approaches to the Triborough Bridge. (It isn’t;
that’s the Manhattan Psychiatric Center.) On most
familiar New York maps, Rikers is a blank. On the subway
map, its existence is artfully hidden by a long legend
about the intricacies of the Nos.2 and 5 trains, and
on the map of New York in the back of taxicabs it is
just left out.
Most
comfortable New Yorkers have seen Rikers Island, though
and many times. Rikers Island is right across the bay–no
more than a decent outfielder’s throw–from
the runway opposite the American Airlines terminal at LaGuardia.
If you are arriving at LaGuardia from the west, you see
it in great detail out of the right-hand window. You will
know it when you pass over it because it is one of the
few places in New York where the street grid is completely
broken. The buildings are set in disordered lots, at strange
angles–laid out as if at random. Two long, snaking
chain-link fences topped with razor wire wrap around the
the jails and give the island, seen from above, its only
continuous shape. There are five strands of razor ribbon
on the inner fence, and five more on the outer fence. The
people on the island who are allowed to get around get
around in cars or busses, as in Los Angeles. The absence
of people is reassuring to birds. There are flocks of Canada
geese, and it is not unusual to see a pheasant loping along
in the fence’s shadow. Not long ago, there was a
rare sighting of a turkey vulture.
Rikers
is an island of weary confinement and elaborate euphemism–is
a place where, though there are many prisoners in a jail
under the eyes of guards, those three words are never spoken.
Prisoners are inmates, jails are facilities, and guards
are officers. It contains, on average, fourteen thousand
inmates, eight thousand officers, two boats, eleven kitchens,
and one good school for boys.
The school is called the Austin H. MacCormick Island Academy, or, usually,
just the Island Academy. It is an official New York City alternative
high school, and has been in existence for fifteen years. (An earlier
school there got rechristened). It is one of the few places in New
York, and maybe in the nation, where the exhausted vocabulary of rehabilitation
and reform is still vital–where people still say the words, and
still believe in the words they are saying. It offers math, English,
and social studies, classes in cooking, television production, and
computer programming; it has a poetry magazine, The Slammer, and even
an alumni association. Although it has been called by cynics “a
Dalton for delinquents,” most people who know crime in New York
feel that the school, along with its crucial alumni organization, Friends
of Island Academy, may be the best hope a sixteen-year-old kid who
ends up on Rikers has not to end up someplace like Rikers again.
Continued
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