Kalief Browder and a Change at Rikers

Author: Jennifer Gonnerman in The New Yorker (April 14, 2015)

Mayor Bill de Blasio tours an enhanced-supervision housing unit on Rikers Island in March.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SETH WENIG/AP

Last year, Kalief Browder allowed me to interview him many times about his experience in the New York City criminal-justice system. At sixteen, he had been arrested in the Bronx for a robbery that he insisted he hadn’t committed. He endured three years on Rikers Island before his case was dismissed. When I met him, a year ago, he was out of jail and not eager to revisit his time there—but ultimately he did, describing what it was like to spend months in solitary confinement, to miss the last two years of high school, to become so despondent that he tied his bedsheets into a noose.

Although recounting these memories was often traumatic for him, Kalief told his story for the same reason that many journalistic subjects do: he held a vague hope that politicians would find out what had happened to him and implement changes, so that no one would suffer as he had. There is never a guarantee that anything will change, and often nothing does. This morning, however, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the state’s top judge, Jonathan Lippman, will announce a plan to speed up the city’s courts, so that fewer people will remain in jail without trial for as long as Kalief did. In the first part of the plan, everyone who has been held in the city’s jails for more than a year without being convicted of a crime—about fifteen hundred men and women—will have their cases fast-tracked, with the goal of resolving half of these cases within six months.

“Kalief Browder’s tragic story put a human face on Rikers Island’s culture of delay—a culture with profound human and fiscal costs for defendants and our city,” de Blasio told The New Yorker in a written statement. “We promised to find ways to improve the quality of justice in New York City and cut down on unnecessary incarceration—and this reform package showcases a commitment from the City, the courts, district attorneys, public defenders, and law enforcement to root out unnecessary case delay.” The Mayor is describing his initiative as the first component of a multi-year effort to “modernize” the city’s criminal-justice system and reduce the number of people held in its jails. (His office has given the effort its own name: Justice Reboot.)

About de Blasio’s initiative to reform the court system, Sam Braverman, a veteran defense attorney who serves as president of the Bronx County Bar Association, said, “It’s a good thing to try and do. I’m not sure it’ll work.” For Bronx lawyers, the initiative recalls a high-profile effort from early 2013, in which judges from other boroughs were brought into the Bronx to clean up its particularly egregious backlog. Did these efforts have a long-term impact? “No whatsoever,” Braverman said, “because we never gave the Bronx the sufficient resources to make it a sustainable thing.”

“The criminal-justice system is good at launching initiatives, but often not as good at sustained, systemic change,” said Elizabeth Glazer, who, as head of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, is overseeing de Blasio’s new reforms. In her view, however, this latest effort is more likely than previous ones to succeed. “It’s not just one judge or a number of judges who have a special mission. It really becomes the way of doing business for all of us,” she said. Starting today, her office will post charts online that show how many detainees are in jail and for how long they have been confined. It’s a small, but significant, first step—and will provide a way for the public to track how effective the Mayor’s efforts prove to be.

Kalief Browder, now twenty-one years old, lives at home and takes classes at Bronx Community College. When I called him last night to tell him the news about the Mayor’s reform plans, he had just arrived home from school on his bicycle. “That’s great,” he said. “Because the way I remember it, that was crazy. Very, very crazy. Every three months was a different court date.” Even he seemed to have a hard time believing what he had lived through: the thirty-one court dates, all those trips he made from Rikers to the Bronx courthouse and back to Rikers again. The memory seemed to discourage him for a moment, but no longer. “I feel good that I spoke up and got my story out there,” he said, “so the public could know what goes on in Rikers Island and the court system.”

DMU Timestamp: April 29, 2015 20:40