It is part of the largest municipal detention system in the world. It is only the people here who are penned up. They are indifferent to what is going on around them their domain remains inviolate. Sometimes you can see a spectacle as beautiful as it is unusual: pheasants of magnificent color and grace. disturbed only by the passage of cars and airplanes, birds of all kinds, mostly gulls, who are taking possession of the place. The prison, in thought and action, is truly a distant world, set apart, clothed in armor.īeyond the prison buildings there is silence. In this "total institution," this massive drive for autonomy adds to the isolation. We have in place the means to carry on and survive. An electrical blackout, for example, like the one that darkened all New York in 1977, would not affect us here. Rikers is a kind of global village, very precisely organized under a mountain of laws and rules, but also designed to be self-sufficient and self-contained. Here is the somber monotony of a world created to lock up everything with security, suspicion and certitude, to put everything in boxes and pigeonholes, far removed from every kind of fantasy or initiative. In the context of Rikers, as in every prison, this is a very banal gesture and easily explained. I sometimes see the wardens having to show their credentials to their own employees. For design and informational purposes, relevant images have been added and captioned by the webmaster. The Raphael book has no images illustrating the text. It is a necessary verification, it is quite legal to demand it, and it expresses the reality of the place very quickly. This routine sometimes takes a long time. From the first stop onward, visitors have to accept being at the mercy of constraints and controls, state their business, get a clearance, open their bags, and so forth. Security and identity controls begin before the bridge, the one access route tying the prison to another world, in this case Queens. It is forbidden to walk between the buildings. Then the walls of Rikers vibrate and conversations stop, for we can neither listen nor hear ourselves speaking. On one side it is very close to La Guardia Airport, so at irregular intervals there is the furious noise of planes landing or taking off. Huge cubical structures, graceless red brick boxes, miles of barbed wire stretched four or five yards high and electrified here and there - the exterior serenity of the penitentiary complex of Rikers Island is disturbed only by the incessant comings and goings of the Department of Correction bus or of cars transporting prisoners or employees.
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