Opinion: Keep on the path to borough-based jails
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Angel Tueros, a Woodside resident and member of Freedom Agenda, called for the city to push forward with its plans to close Rikers Island. AP photo by Bebeto Matthews
By Angel Tueros
I have an old saying that I repeat frequently: You should always treat people the way you think they don’t deserve. For too long, New York City’s law enforcement has operated on the opposite premise, assuming people of certain races, from certain communities, deserve to be locked up in squalid, sequestered jails based on merely the accusation of criminal activity.
When I was 22 years old, I was one of those people who some would say deserved Rikers or the equally decrepit Queens House of Detention. I unfortunately got both. With QHD scheduled for demolition this year and Rikers set to close in 2027, we have the opportunity to vastly reduce the harms of incarceration and focus instead on restoring lives, even those we might not think deserve it.
I was arrested in Massachusetts and extradited to the Queens House of Detention in the summer of 1994. My cell was so small I could touch the walls with my toes while lying in bed, and I am not a tall man. The toilet and sink in my cell looked like they had never been cleaned, but this was where my food was brought to me. In my time at QHD, I never saw a mess hall.
Soon after arriving I fell ill, vomiting constantly. I spoke mostly Spanish, and no one there made an attempt to understand me. No one ever came to my cell to speak with me or approached me during the one hour a day when I wasn't in lockdown. I woke my first night to someone screaming in pain for probably an hour and a half. Listening to grown men crying scared me, thinking about no one being there to help us.
After the first couple of days, I tried to use my out-of-cell time well. I helped public defenders translate for Spanish-speaking clients, and went to recreation at the top of the building. Being at the top of that building was the only time I remembered I was part of a large city. Even though it was caged, at least I could look out. The windows inside the facility were far from the cells, and the ones they had were so gloomy you couldn’t see out of them. There were no programs, nor space for them - just long rows of cells.
I only spent a couple weeks at QHD before they sent me to Rikers, where I was kept for a year and a half from June 1994-November 1995. This was an intense period for me. Like so many people who’ve experienced Rikers, I was carted back and forth to court in Queens so many times I lost track before ever getting any resolution on my case. When I look back at that time, I think of one word that connects my experiences at both QHD and Rikers: corrupting.
Operating a jail system that isolates, deprives, and tortures people corrupts the legal system as whole, and it corrupts the people who are held there. It also corrupts the society that condones it. It’s been more than 25 years since I was held at Queens House of Detention and Rikers Island, and the current situation at Rikers was so predictable from this experience.
From this informed perspective, I see reason for hope in the borough-based jail plan - a plan that will shrink the ability to over-incarcerate while also transforming the conditions that a smaller number of people are confined in. Having a re-designed facility adjacent to the court will move us toward correcting the corrupting influence of Rikers Island and the decrepit Queens House of Detention on the city in a number of ways. We can in the near future create a system that damages fewer lives, while we work toward a system of accountability that can actually restore lives and communities.
First, having a jail connected to the court can both facilitate swifter access to each person’s due process instead of torturing people for months and years to extract a plea from them, and serve as reminder that the people held in these facilities are not convicted. The isolation of Rikers has created the idea that people held there deserve to be banished far away from all of us.
Also, from a fiscal perspective, the city will save millions of tax dollars annually by not having to transport detained people back and forth from Rikers Island.
The replacement Queens jail will have space dedicated to programming, spaces to meet with lawyers (who may actually visit these more accessible facilities, which is a rarity at Rikers) and a layout that will provide more freedom of movement - in other words, a physical design conducive to recognizing the humanity of people detained there, rather than attempting to destroy it.
It is important to remedy abhorrent physical conditions, but it’s not enough. We need officials from both the mayor’s office and the City Council to also move quickly to ensure these redesigned jails are run differently than relics like QHD and Rikers, and we need to see more trained staff like mental health counselors and educators who understand people as human beings.
Like Rikers, QHD is a relic of a time best recorded in our history in the past tense. QHD is scheduled to be demolished in 2023, as it should be. Now is the time for vision toward decarceration, with a legal system that starts to bend toward justice. Having a court system that doesn’t rely on pre-trial detention at decaying, decrepit jails like QHD and Rikers is a great start.
Angel Tueros, Woodside resident, member of Freedom Agenda, holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Bard College, and currently works for NYC Health + Hospitals as part of the Test & Trace Corps team that responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
