1.) How are you connected to this movement?  

The Close Rikers movement affects me personally, because I spent six months there, which is not nearly as much time as a lot of people I know, that have had to deal with going to trial and all that other stuff. But, yeah, so living it firsthand. It's important to be able to support the notion that it's gonna change, right?

2.) Why should Rikers close?  

Rikers itself is a penal colony that has become its own separate type of monster than what it was supposed to be. So a place to hold people while they're awaiting trial, fine, that's necessarily a function of the criminal justice system. But when you start stockpiling them and warehousing them in facilities like that, like an island, it just becomes something else. It's something completely beyond the scope of what criminal justice should have been, or should be, or what we as reasonable people can imagine. 

Besides the unions and all these other things, it's just to the point that it’s unjust, and it's completely biased and prejudiced to begin with. I don't want to see people lose their job solely - that's not the aim.  

I'm not looking to see people out on the street, and not being able to make money and not able to survive. That's not the point. But on the other side, and this is an argument that I used to hear all the time when I was upstate and people complaining about closing prisons and state workers losing their jobs, the only reason most of them have a job is because there was this mass incarceration, which was in some cases unlawful, but at least illogical. So now that it's shifting back to what, would be more “normal,” now they're upset because people are losing jobs, and they can't get that part of it. But just think about the 40 years of fortune that people have accumulated as a result.   

3.) What is your vision for a more just and equitable post-Rikers New York City?  

I'm going back to Angela Davis and anybody else who's talked about prison abolition, and us, right? We do, right? We talk about it as well. But that language of abolition, to me feels like it's somewhat counterproductive. Because it calls to mind one thing, right? And completely doing away with a thing. And so when we use that kind of plain language, it makes it difficult to then really present what could be a moderate response, right?  

And so that's why I'm not completely opposed to the need for a criminal justice system, and even a prison system. But it can't look anything like it is today, where there's profiteering off of it. Then there's also got to be awareness of reimagining bail. You can't give people lifetime sentences. Like, what good does that actually serve the community? To just warehouse a person? And even those who don't have lifetime sentences, but you warehouse them in a way that doesn't actually prepare anybody for when they're coming home? Guess what, we're coming home! Here I am, I'm home 17 years later, and people may have forgotten all about me. But now I'm home. Now, did you really think that all your little mandatory bullshit programs actually did anything to get me prepared for the real world? I had to do that on my own, through my connections with school and any other program that I did for myself for my benefit, not because the state actually was beneficial in that. 

The whole big, colossal machine needs to be reimagined into something more streamlined and more focused on the fact that, if you're going to put somebody in prison as a consequence for negative action, you have to then provide actual therapeutic programming, and it's not just programmatic, in a sense of applying it to everyone with a broad stroke.  

So those are some of the things that, I would say, really need to be focused on.