City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island

Campbell, who spent a year at Rikers Island after being convicted of “brawling” at an antifascist protest in 2018, and Shanahan (Captives), who spent 30 days at Rikers after being arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, provide a riveting portrayal of everyday life at the prison. The authors depict Rikers as a world unto itself that blurs time and diminishes inmates’ humanity: the food is deplorable, privacy is impossible, the clothing never fits, and random searches result in the loss of hard-won personal items. Decisions made by correction officers—when not exhibiting a “violent compulsion”—are frequently arbitrary, as they attempt to balance tight control with a flexibility that forestalls rebellion. Such innumerable but unpredictably applied rules make simply maintaining order and dignity the full-time preoccupation of prison life, according to the authors; inmates self-organize to regulate shower use and telephone access, and to compel guards to remove disruptive inmates. The authors’ unhurried cataloging of seemingly endless quotidian deprivations fascinates (“It is easy to forget how often fingernails... must be cut, until one is deprived of the means to clip them.... Most inmates’ nails remained... talon-like, which made [scratches] a common side effect of fistfights. A frustrated neighbor once gestured to his fingernails, remarking to Jarrod, ‘Why don’t they want to confiscate these dangerous weapons?’ ”). Readers will be rapt. (Jan.)