1.) How are you connected to this movement?

I'm impacted because of my son and my family members who have been on Rikers Island, and of course the youth that I work with, so hearing their stories, and they're younger than my son, I can relate. 

2.) Why should Rikers close?

People are not coming out better than they went in. If the whole system is to correct people's behavior, or when someone commits a crime is to teach them a lesson, then Rikers Island is not doing that. We don't punish our own kids, like that. As a mother, I don't lock my kid up, and not feed him. But no one's getting better. No one's getting better. People are getting worse, but are getting more violent. For generations, we can clearly see it's not working.  

You walk into your home and sometimes there's dishes or something - it bothers us, we got to get it done. So if I walk into a room and it’s dirty, and it's cold and dark, and it's violent, I'm not going to get better. It's gonna make me worse.  

And then the workers, they're not training. And this is a whole other subject but I know like with school safety and corrections, you give our people jobs, with great benefits that criminalize all people, when you can offer them in other areas, good jobs with great benefits. because if you look at it, our communities, our people are going for those jobs, because it's us that have been traumatized. And we want to go back and help, but we're traumatized. And so use our people to criminalize our own people. And so it's just a whole cycle of, it's just a vicious cycle that needs to end. 

3.) What is your vision for a more just future/New York?

If you give people what they need, they get better. Of course, as a mother, no one wants to jail. But we can't even think that you're going to close Rikers Island, and just let everybody out. Or just let everybody free. It doesn't make sense. You have to transition somewhere. And the conditions matter.  

I think that when you take a person, and you give them housing, as opposed to you see that they're homeless, you give them a ticket, and you arrest them for being homeless, and then they go back out, but they don't have money to pay a ticket, and because they didn't pay, you go back and pick them back up, knowing that they don't have nothing.  

I think if you start to look at people, and see what you can do, how you can help them and give them things that they need to start to make them better. Stop disliking people, stop asking people, Why are you doing this, and start asking them, What happened to you? Start looking at them like human beings.  

So when you're giving people the things they need, you tell them that they matter, you build up their confidence, then they don't have to worry about, Oh, where am I going? What am I going to do? What's the next step? And it's not to say that many won't make another decision. We are always growing. But it's up to us now to start saying, like as parents we look at our kids and we're like, How can I make this better? What can I do to help this case? Every kid is different, right? One, you won't do with one what you will do with the other because they're all different. You know, and I had to learn that as a mother.  

I come from a lot of trauma, but we grow and we learn. So you give people what they need. You tell them that they matter. And you help them get out of that.