In Lockdown on Rikers: Shocking Stories of Abuse and Injustice at New York's Notorious Jail, Mary E. Buser looks back on her time working in the Mental Health Department on Rikers Island, from 1995 to 2000. Buser not only examines a particularly trying time at the jail--or, more accurately, the huge complex of 10 facilities that covers the island--but connects appalling conditions on the island to failed policies that have stayed in place through the present day.
Buser worked at several locations on Rikers, eventually rising to become acting chief of Mental Health at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center. The OBCC is prominent in Buser's narrative because it incorporates the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, a "five-story tower of nothing but solitary confinement cells, one hundred per floor" known colloquially as "the Bing"--"Rikers folklore has it that the term Bing was coined to describe the human brain under the strain of solitary--it goes... bing!" Buser makes a particularly strong case that solitary confinement is a form of psychological torture, and she paints a hellish portrait of "blood-smeared cells, makeshift nooses, and... agonized, shell-shocked faces."
Apart from the horrors of solitary, Buser ably covers the problem of prison overpopulation--exacerbated by unforgiving drug policies and "broken windows" policing that disproportionately affect the poor and minorities--and a dysfunctional judicial system that makes plea bargain deals all but inevitable even for apparently innocent inmates. Lockdown on Rikers is a valuable piece of evidence in the case against the current system of incarceration. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books