Clark Kissinger (left) and Miles Solay (right) with their attorney Kenny Gilbert.
What is #ShutDownRikers? On October 23, 2015, as part of #RiseUpOctober, 100 protesters
Clark Kissinger (left) and Miles Solay (right) with their attorney Kenny Gilbert.
What is #ShutDownRikers? On October 23, 2015, as part of #RiseUpOctober, 100 protesters marched to the entrance of Rikers Island, holding portraits of people who had died at Rikers. They spoke out, sang and danced energetically, and some sat down chanting "Shut It DOWN!" The NYPD had put up barricades across the road leading to Rikers Island prison. For more than an hour access was blocked.
Rikers Island is compared to the prison the United States ran in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the site of scandalous prisoner abuse. This is no exaggeration. Decades of deaths in custody at the hands of guards, brutal and widespread sexual violence, solitary confinement for years, denial of medical care, and abuse of children are routine—a part of the genocide of mass incarceration. Of those imprisoned at Rikers on an average day, some 90 percent are Black or Latino.
Just 300 yards from the runways at LaGuardia Airport, just a few miles from a glistening city, an island sits dedicated to confinement, brutality, and torture of our youth and others. Human beings languish for weeks, months, sometimes years awaiting trial. Almost all Black or Latino. Many simply for lack of money for bail. Many locke