Look at this face. No, I do not believe this is the face of a kid that stole a bag. But because a goddamn cop thought he did, people basically took his life. Yes, he took his own life by hanging himself Saturday. But he was murdered, by a bunch of fucking monsters.
Never mind the solitary confinement, let alone the fact that a teenager was thrown into one. (Heard a story on National Public Radio of a prison warden who voluntarily put himself in a solitary cell for 20 hours. Contrary to popular belief, the big misconception that he had dispelled in his experiment is that because you are alone, things are going to be quiet. The warden actually suffered sensory overload because the walls were too thin. He heard everything, at all hours of the day and night, and couldn't get away from it.) Kalief Browder was held for three goddamn years. Why? Because his parents could not afford to pay the $3,000 in bail to get him out. So they just locked him up for three years, a Kafkaesque nightmare being played out for real at Rikers Island, without due process? Hell, get him to court and find him guilty, for God's sake. But he has to go through something, not just be put away (and by himself for some reason) for some petty theft simply because he's poor.
The worst thing about all this bullshit, though, was the abuse he took while in jail. There is a video of Browder getting jumped by a corrections officer and some inmates while being led from his jail cell. Why? Unless Rikers Island comes up with some proof that he was acting unruly, those sons-of-bitches jumped him because they could. And it seems like he got assaulted a lot. This is a hell of a lot worse than me getting bullied in junior high. As bad as I had it, Browder was held against his will for three years, basically getting dehumanized all hours of the day. He had not a minute of peace in there, and then he was cast out to freedom, seemingly out of nowhere, three years later, a broken, paranoid young man who needed pills after his illegal incarceration. And with all the beatings he took in there, they robbed him of his mind and his hope for the future. Seeing as he going to be haunted for the rest of his life, that he will forever be imprisoned on Rikers Island, he decided he couldn't take it anymore.
This really pissed me off. It really does. I want people held accountable for this. I am becoming more of an advocate for prison reform, and very recently I was one of those people who said to lock them up and throw away the key. But moreover, I want everybody who hurt that boy -- prisoners and guards -- to pay. And I am so mad right now that I don't care if it's legal or not. Those bastards picked on that boy just because they wanted to, and because they knew that they could get away with anything they want because no one would be around to save him. Prison assaults like this -- of a teenager! -- have to stop, and to do that people have to be found and made to pay a price, a high one.
Sometimes I wonder how in the hell a misdemeanor, a never-proven accusation of theft, could turn into what amounts to a three-year prison sentence, in which Kalief Browder was tortured. But it's that conservative mentality of "fuck those criminals" that allows this to happen, and probably more often than we even know. And this has to stop. Right fucking now. For Kalief.
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