Five Mualimm-ak is a Rikers Island survivor. Rikers is the largest and most infamous New York jail. we interviewed him on the bank of the East River in The Bronx, just a few miles away from where he spent most of his adult life. Yet, Rikers is only a piece of a wider puzzle. The U.S. has been holding the record for the highest incarceration rate in the world for several years. The African-American and Latino communities are those paying the highest price. Such a situation, far from being accidental, is the deliberate result of years and years of policies.
1. In the beginning was the prison
5min circa
From the pathways of Barretto Park in South Bronx, on the opposite bank of the East River one can glimpse an imposing construction consisting of several buildings, at least a couple of smokestacks and an array of fences. It looks almost like a factory or an over-militarised industrial island: this is nothing other than Rikers Island, New York City's historic prison. The penitentiary is renowned for being among the largest and most dysfunctional ones on the planet: poor health conditions, violent assaults and suicides are commonplace. Over the last few years, its name has filled pages of newspapers around the world, referred to as "torture island", "prison of horrors", "hellish prison" and so on. There have been discussions about its potential closure by 2027. Yet, this terrible reality has set a standard and served as a model for American prisons and beyond.
Activists in front of the gate of Rikers Island in Queens demand the closure of the prison and protest against the system that discriminates against the poor by demanding bail before trial. February 28th, 2022. New York City, New York (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis)
Five Mualimm-Ak spent twelve years of his life in prison, four of them served in Rikers Island. In 2012 he was released and since then has dedicated his time to fighting against prisons and supporting detainees. In 2015, he founded the association Incarcerated Nation Corporation. It is he who tells us how the prison institution is a central and pervasive factor not only of his life, but of the entire American society.
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The very foundation of the state of New York rests, in a certain way, on two structures of social control: Rikers Island and Ellis Island, respectively intended for the detention and the registration of individuals. The prison on Rikers Island was built between 1932 and 1935, but the island on which it was constructed has behind its back a disturbing history related to the slave trade. The Dutch Riker family acquired the territory around 1650 and used its power to hold free African-Americans without any kind of trial and send them to the south as slaves. Until today, the prison carries the racist matrix of its name.
Ellis Island, renowned for the reception and registration of migrants, was only formalised in 1892, but there are at least eight million people who’d passed through there before the facility was regularised and opened. The state of New York, on paper, was founded in 1776, and had policies of control and punishment at its core, rather than the much-vaunted American freedom. According to Five, it is precisely the prison system that shapes life in the United States.
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