Inside Rikers: Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Rikers Island--just six miles from the Empire State Building--is one of the largest, most complex and most expensive penal institutions in the world, yet most New Yorkers couldn't find it on a map.
Jennifer Wynn, the director of the Fresh Start program at Rikers, takes readers into the jails and then back out-to the communities where her students were born and raised. She chronicles their journeys as they struggle to "go straight" and find respect in a city that fears and rejects them.
Part memoir, part social commentary, Inside Rikers details the author's experiences on Rikers. Wynn offers a compelling portrait of its 18,000 inmates and how Rikers was transformed from one of the most violent jails into one of the safest.
Jennifer Wynn
Jennifer Wynn is the director of the Prison Visiting Project at the Correctional Association of New York, the oldest criminal justice agency in New York City, and editor of the Rikers Review for the Osborne Association. She has visited over thirty state prisons and interviewed hundreds of prisoners—in solitary confinement, in prison yards, and in mess halls. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York, and is a doctoral candidate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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Reviews for Inside Rikers
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The author doesn't get entirely inside Rikers, the island-jail-city adjacent to New York's LaGuardia airport, but she comes close. Wynn is a teacher and counsellor, working inside Rikers, and with former inmates in New York. For the most this is a collection of stories of inmates, how they got there, and how they (mostly fail to) re-integrate back into society. Here perhaps her book is at its weakest. We know their tales are full of lies and self-deception, and to give her credit she knows it as well. There's something terribly depressing about hearing time and again how inmates, and the city's poor, are set up to fail. The only people in the process who seem to not 'get it' are the criminals, but that supposes that you think you know what's going on, and really you don't. Just as Rikers is its own little world alongside New York, with its own set of rules and logic, so also is the world of the criminal within New York - and in fact they shade into each other. Jail becomes just another neighbourhood. To give Wynn credit she tries to make this point, and tries to get inside the strange set of relationships between civilians in prisons, Corrections Officers, and prisoners. And she notes the futility of the so called war on drugs, many years before it became acceptable to admit the truth. I'd recommend this book, even highly, but with one caution, and that is that it is not a story of 'inside', so much as a look inside. But having said that, Wynn has indeed seen more than most of us will get a chance to (or will want to), and faithfully recorded that much. If you can, read Wynn alongside a good 'authentic' account of life on the inside - such as Karpis's 'On the Rock'.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5written by a woman who worked there for several years. she follows several men as they try (and often fail) to escape the revolving door of NYC jail