Rikers 2.0: Inside the battle to build four new jails in New York City
Donna Hylton, who spent 13 months at Rikers Island. Photograph: Daniel Medina
“There are a lot of conversations now about abolition that just weren’t being had before...the No New Jails group is forcing those conversations.”
On clear days, Kevin Steele would peek through the cracked window of his six-by-eight foot solitary confinement cell on Rikers Island to get a glimpse of his Bronx neighbourhood and mentally escape.
Steele was just 17 years old in June 2010 when he was brought to Rikers Island, arguably America’s most notorious jail and the nation’s largest penal colony. He had been arrested for his involvement in a fight and had no means to pay an assigned $85,000 bail. He spent three years at Rikers awaiting trial, 13 months of that in solitary confinement.
“The conditions I faced on Rikers were really horrendous,” says Steele. “Looking out of that window was my way to survive.”
The progressive prosecutors blazing a new path for the US justice system
“We’ve accomplished enough so the institutions woke up...this is what happens when you have moments for social change and they start to change. There’s a commotion.”
On a muggy August afternoon nearly five years ago, criminal justice professor Wesley Bell saw protesters march past his front porch in Ferguson, Missouri.
The killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by the white police officer Darren Wilson set off protests in the black-majority city over police brutality and long simmering tensions around racial inequality. The unrest transfixed a nation and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into the political mainstream.
Bell joined the demonstrations demanding justice for Brown.
The grassroots coalition that took on Amazon…and won
Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Guardian
“We all understood that the only way we could win was to trust each other, work through our differences to be united to take on this massive corporation...this was the fight of our lives.”
On the morning of February 14, Maritza Silva-Farrell was on a call in her Lower Manhattan office with a fellow climate activist when she noticed a New York Times news alert pop up on her phone.
Amazon was pulling out of New York City. The tech behemoth had cancelled its plans to build a second headquarters, and create a reported 25,000 jobs, in Queens barely three months after choosing the city. The decision to select New York as one of the chosen cities – the Washington, D.C. suburb of Crystal City, Virginia was the other – had marked the end of the company’s two-year-long American-Idol style HQ2 contest where over 230 cities from across North America doled out major tax breaks and other corporate freebies to lure Amazon.
Immediately, Silva-Farrell was flooded with requests from journalists seeking comment on what was a stunning turn of events. She hastily convened a conference call with members of the anti-Amazon coalition she helped lead.
Drone markets open in Russia, China and rogue states as America's wars wane
“The United States has been using drones as a weapon of warfare for a decade and it was only a matter of time before other nation-states were going to do the same.”
Last October, in a private ceremony held at a stately mansion on the campus of the California Institute of Technology, the Aerospace Historical Society awarded the reclusive, 78-year-old CEO of General Atomics, Neal Blue, with the prestigious Von Karman Wings Award, a sort of Nobel Prize in the field, for “pioneering novel applications" of military drones.
For Blue, whose life reads like a thriller of private jets, oil profits and secret sorties to the Nicaraguan jungle, and whose company makes military drones with names like Predator and Reaper, the award capped the dominance of profits from drone manufacturing for his company and for the US drone industry at large.
Stop and frisk: NYPD's 'broken windows' policing 'criminalizes' young black men
“Instead of fixing a broken window, you have criminalized those who live in those communities,” said Foy. “It’s a very dangerous policy; it slowly dehumanizes a community.”
On an ordinary evening last November, Keeshan Harley left his mother’s walk-up apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and headed to his weekly volunteer-cop watch patrol in nearby Bushwick. He was equipped with a backpack crammed with two handheld video cameras, know-your-rights pamphlets, and flyers advertising an upcoming protest on Staten Island for the late Eric Garner. He also made sure to keep a low profile.
As he turned the block, however, there was an ever-familiar sight: two NYPD officers hopping out of their unmarked navy blue Chevrolet Impala. Within seconds, Harley was in handcuffs.
Undocumented New York students undeterred in their fight for higher education
Of the estimated 4,500 undocumented Dreamers who graduate high school every year in New York state, only 5-10% go to college. The reason: lack of access to financial aid. Monica Sibri, herself undocumented, wants to change that
“Many people don’t understand what it means to be undocumented, and they don’t want to understand.”
On a recent bitterly cold afternoon, Monica Sibri hunches over her laptop in the College of Staten Island’s student center. Between constant phone calls, texts and emails, the senior student hardly manages to catch a breath.
She tends to every request before returning her attention to preparing talking points for a Latino civil rights conference she is attending the next day. Sibri, who is 22 and undocumented, says she manages 14- to 16-hour days. “I barely sleep,” she tells me in a rare pause from her duties.
Sibri is the chair and founder of the CUNY Dreamers, a citywide student group with chapters on many of New York City’s public university campuses dedicated to advocating for the rights of 6,000 undocumented students in the CUNY system.
New York City foster care: stories from children and parents the system failed, A Guardian US investigation
“For me, it was better to not be in the system than to be in the system.”
“I was removed from a safe environment at home with my mom where I wasn’t abused or neglected to a situation where I was very much unsafe,” said Angelo Clement, 21, who signed himself out of the foster care system at 18.
Clement’s story is one of more than 75 collected in recent months through a phone hotline set up by the office of the New York City public advocate, the city’s watchdog agency, where current and former foster care children, relatives and social work professionals anonymously called in and shared their personal stories of hardship with the New York City foster care system.
I interviewed close to a dozen of these individuals, all former foster care children or current birth parents whose children remain in the foster care system. Their stories of frustration with ACS largely portrayed an inflated city bureaucracy that has at times abused its mandate in city family courts, failed to secure a safe living environment for children and in recent years not directed adequate resources to programs focused on providing children with a permanent living situation, known as permanency planning.
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