Opinion: Closing Rikers Island is a matter of life and death
Isaabdul Karim wasn’t sentenced to death. In fact, he was never sentenced at all. But after the father of two was accused of a non-violent parole violation and sent to Rikers Island, on Sept. 19 he became the 11th person this year to die in a New York city jail.
A wheelchair user with health complications, Karim was kept in an intake cell for 10 days without adequate access to food or medication. His lawyers asked for early release in a hearing cut short when Karim suffered an asthma attack; before Karim could return to court, he contracted covid-19 and died.
Karim is just one victim of Rikers’s horrific conditions. Nearly 6,000 people are detained there, most of whom await trial. Detainees have gone without food, water, toilets, showers, or access to lawyers and doctors. And chronic mismanagement — staff shifts are still organized on index cards — has left the prison unable to handle hundreds of employees calling out sick, even though the remaining officer-to-prisoner ratio is well above the national average.
It’s a civil rights emergency, of the kind endemic in U.S. jails and prisons. Millions of incarcerated people face conditions so violent they trigger PTSD, and so unhealthy that covid-19 has spread in jails and prisons at more than five times the rate it spread through the U.S. population. Increasingly common climate disasters such as Hurricane Ida force even more incarcerated people across the country into unsanitary, dangerous facilities.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/05/rikers-island-death-crisis/