Book Review: ‘Rikers: An Oral History,’ by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau

Rayman and Blau have each worked for The Daily News, among other New York City papers. Blau now works for The City, a nonprofit digital news site. They cast a wide net in “Rikers: An Oral History.” They’ve interviewed not just former inmates but officials, correction officers (guards hate the word “guards,” they tell us), lawyers, social workers, chaplains, gang leaders, mob guys, clinicians.

The result is a bit chaotic, as oral histories tend to be. But the chaos feels true to the experience of prison; this impressive book throws a lot at you, and much of the reading is difficult.

The authors break their material into chapters: “First Day,” “Race,” “Gangs,” “Violence,” “Solitary,” “Food,” “Riots,” “Escapes,” “Death” and so on. There is no section on rape, and curiously there’s relatively little here about sex, forced or otherwise.

The authors are apparently excellent interviewers. They get people to say extraordinary things, like the retired guard who admits to having beaten a prisoner for “four hours straight” because he’d been disrespected.

And nobody came to help him. Nobody. He screamed. Nobody said two words. It was quiet, but he was screaming. I got tired. I took a break. I came back and I did it again. Remember the old James Cagney movies when you see the head in the toilet. I did that too with my Black bitch for the day.

The authors were shocked and followed up with the guard, who changed one detail, claiming this had occurred “for about an hour.”

There is so much material in this book that it’s hard to condense one’s impressions. “Futility” is the first word that comes to mind. Everyone knows that Rikers is worse than a hellhole, the kind of place a civilized society should not countenance, but its problems, despite decades of sound advice from special commissions and elsewhere, seem intractable. Everyone, at this point, stares out at their intellectual opponents like boxers at the start of the ninth round. Reading “Rikers,” you begin to understand those who have called for closing the prison entirely.