How a notorious prison became a literary hotbed
A female prisoner falls for a handsome guard. He's actually a former witness protection con man. Their forbidden flirtations smolder towards a climax: murder!
It didn't happen on Rikers Island, it happened on 'Rikers Island'.
The book, a 406-page romantic drama which sells for $18.99 on Amazon, is part of an expansive genre inspired by New York's troubled prison complex. The authors are inmates and correctional officers who have written dozens of Rikers books, most of them self-published, available online, at convenience stores or from the trunks of the authors' cars in New York City.
This particular entry in the canon was self-published in December by Michelle Evans, who began writing it while serving 18 months at Rikers. She had an eye for detail, a consultant's pencil and materials everywhere.
“I knew I had gold in terms of content,” said Ms Evans, whose real-life crush on a prison officer inspired the storyline.
Riddled with dysfunction, violence and lawlessness, Rikers has produced a constant loop of lurid headlines, as well as a decade-long movement to close it. But it has also produced a lot of literature.
The books include gripping memoirs from guards, inspiring accounts from teachers, and thinly veiled fictional tales of inmate hell. There are romances, fights and prison escapes. What the stories lack in polish, they often make up for with details they observe firsthand.
The books often mention the name of the prison: 'Rikers Island Revolution', 'Rikers Island Memory', 'The Seagulls of Riker's Island' and of course the French language 'Dans l'Enfer de Rikers Island'.
Despite the complex's horrific conditions, or perhaps because of them, it is a literary breeding ground, a stark counterpart to rural writers' retreats like Yaddo, where creativity is pampered, says David Campbell, who is working on a memoir of his years in of abuse. . An agent has already agreed to sell it to publishers.
“You have a lot of time to think about things, and your basic needs are met with three meals a day,” says Mr. Campbell, a writer and translator. “When I was a starving artist in New York, I spent most of my time trying to make ends meet.”
There is a long history of literature written by long-serving authors, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jean Genet to Oscar Wilde and EE Cummings. Add to those names Deborah “Sexy” Cardona.
Ms. Cardona began writing in 2001, while serving a year in jail for drug possession. She produced two manuscripts at Rikers, and then another eleven during six years in state prison. She self-published all thirteen and, she said, “sold 100,000 books in six months.”
“You have a lot of talented people there who started writing there and became urban fiction authors,” she said.
The 413-acre Rikers complex, with its squat prison buildings behind fencing and barbed wire, lends itself to that genre. With about 6,200 inmates, it is one of the largest busts in the United States and one of the city's most devastating problems. Last year, nine people died in the prison system.
Mayor Eric Adams says conditions at Rikers have improved dramatically under his watch, and he is fighting a federal attempt to take over the complex. The trial has produced thousands of pages of evidence about the horrors there. Prisoner authors have added thousands more.
Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale University who specializes in prison literature and culture, said prisoners were often motivated to write about their rehabilitation, either to expose horrific conditions or simply to get something spicy and entertaining out. to bring.
“In all cases there is a feeling that no one has listened to my story, not during the trial or the investigation, so now I am taking the opportunity to tell it myself,” Professor Smith said.
“The public in New York City has a huge appetite for Rikers stories, and there are so many people in and out of jail, so it makes sense that many inmates would jump at the chance to get their stories into the hands of the public,” he said.
In 2021, Steven Dominguez published “Across The Bridge: a Rikers Island Story,” a drama steeped in the corruption, violence, drugs and sex he says he witnessed while working at Rikers as a corrections officer until his arrest in 2014 for drug and narcotics smuggling. other contraband into the complex.
Mr. Dominguez, who is trying to have his book produced as a television series, said he started writing while serving six years in prison because “I knew the jargon and protocol on both sides of the bars.”
Because Rikers is “the most infamous prison in the U.S., as well as being culturally identified in hip-hop and rap music,” the name alone will likely sell books, he said.
Ms. Evans said her fiction describes the Rikers experience in a way that journalists cannot.
“A lot of people read the articles, but they don't understand what's going on there,” said Ms. Evans, whose book mentions the prison's “big, rust-rimmed trash cans” and corrections officers dressed in riot gear who “appear to on a battalion of armored turtles.”
She describes the regular searches of female prisoners in rooms where the air becomes “thick with a sense of degradation and helplessness.”
One of her book's subplots concerns Fonna, an inmate who dies in solitary confinement, a practice the New York City Council approved in December. Ms Evans said the storyline was inspired by the real-life experience of Layleen Polanco, who died after suffering an epileptic seizure while in solitary confinement in 2019.
The book describes Fonna's mental breakdown in a “cold, grim box” with a barred window. Ms. Evans, who was at Rikers on charges of assaulting a husband she described as abusive, said the details emerged from her own stint in solitary confinement around Christmas in 2022. She said she sat in her own vomit for hours and that water had spilled out. an overflowing toilet.
For prison authors, there are plenty of obstacles even in obtaining writing materials.
Cindy Eckard Wakefield, who self-published the memoir “Roses and Rikers” last summer after serving time at the complex following a drunken car crash in 2011, said the safety pins provided to inmates were hopelessly flimsy, so she wrapped shampoo labels around it. to make them useful.
Mr. Campbell, who was in jail after pleading guilty to assault in connection with a 2018 protest at a far-right event, said he tried to use a typewriter at a Rikers law library but found that half of the keys were missing.
When other prisoners discovered that he was a good writer, they bartered with each other to have him write grievances or Valentine's Day poems for their girlfriends, paying him in provisions such as packs of fish. He traded packets of coffee for good pens he stole from prison, and protected the valuables by sticking them with toothpaste in hidden places, such as the inside of a mop handle or under his bed.
Without the influence of a publisher behind them, Rikers authors are becoming resourceful in promoting their books.
A former corrections officer, Gary Heyward, was promoted “Corruption Officer” while wearing a blue and orange jumpsuit: part guard, part prisoner. The book, which chronicles Mr. Heyward's 2006 arrest for smuggling drugs into the complex, did so well that it was picked up in 2015 by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Mr. Heyward is now working on “Copstitute,” a book about a security guard who runs a prostitution ring at Rikers.
A former inmate, Shayvonne Jenkins, said she has sold hundreds of books by promoting them on social media and in person at churches and lectures.
“People want to read about that in life,” said Ms. Jenkins, who began writing two books during her seven months at Rikers on charges of drunken driving and a parole violation.
Her 2017 collection, “Poetic Memoirs of an Incarcerated Black Princess,” includes “Amongst the Isolation,” a poem describing the loneliness of solitary confinement and her views from a small cell window at planes taking off from nearby La Guardia Airport. She is completing her fourth self-published book, “Shebillionaire of Wall Street.”
Thomas LoFrese, a private investigator from Long Island, recently self-published the novel “Escape from Rikers Island,” selling about 300 copies in a few weeks, including 50 at a meeting of the Knights of Columbus.
Mr. LoFrese was never held at Rikers, but was familiar with the complex after interviewing inmates there for attorneys.
His book is about an unlikely prison break to free Joey “Chop Shop” Terelli, a gangster on trial for murder. In choosing the storyline and title, Mr. Lofrese said, it helped that Rikers was constantly in the headlines as a matter of public debate.
“That was an important consideration,” he said, “what's been going on with Rikers lately.”
But much of the Rikers-related literature is written with a heightened awareness of small things.
In Gone 'Til November: A Journal of Rikers Island, the diary that rapper Lil Wayne published in 2016 about serving a gun possession charge, the reader is given an inventory of the modest items the author was given when he arrived. : a towel, two sheets, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a green cup.
In Mrs. Eckard Wakefield's memoirs, she writes about a garden where some inmates work in horticulture. Stanzas from a poem “by prisoner #210-11-00753” are an ode to a single rose: “I see what it has made you/this prison full of hate/chained to this island/no choice but to wait.”
Audio produced by Jack D'Isidoro.