Bronx teenager Kalief Browder spent three years of his life on Rikers Island, nearly two of them in solitary confinement, for a petty charge that was ultimately dismissed. Browder's ordeal was the subject of a gut-wrenching profile in The New Yorker last fall, and today the magazine has released surveillance footage documenting two beatings Browder received at the hands of Correction Officers and his fellow inmates.
The first clip shows Browder being escorted out of his cell by a Correction Officer. After exchanging a few words, the officer throws Browder to the ground. “I just felt him tighten a grip around my arm,” Browder told The New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman, who played the footage for him. “In my head, I was wondering why he tightened it so tight, like he never usually does, and that’s when he swung me and kept trying to slam me.”
The second clip shows Browder, who was never in a gang, being spit on by a gang leader. Had he not retaliated and punched the gang leader in the face, Browder told Gonnerman it “meant they could keep spitting in my face. I wasn’t going to have that.”
Roughly ten other teenaged inmates pounce on Browder, while two Correction Officers try in vain to pull them off. Browder finally escapes into a separate room, and has an exchange with another inmate, who eventually kicks open the door; a slew of inmates pour in and continue to beat Browder while the overwhelmed Correction Officers scramble to restore order.
Last summer, the U.S. Department of Justice released the results of their two-year investigation of minors held on Rikers Island and found “a deep-seated culture of violence," where Correction Officers used beatings to "control the adolescent population and punish disorderly or disrespectful behavior.”
The report stated that the environment on Rikers for minors like Browder was "more inspired by Lord of the Flies than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention."
Mayor de Blasio and his Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte have assured the public that they're taking steps to reform the jail, including tripling the number of cameras in the jail to 10,000, outlawing solitary confinement for juveniles, and reducing the jail's overall population.
Many violent incidents on Rikers occur in areas without cameras. Last July, two Correction Officers and a Captain were charged with beating an inmate in a stairwell with a baton, knowing that the area lacked cameras.
