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Maybe someday
45
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
54/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
January 17, 2023
What happens when you jam almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society's cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill, purposefully hidden from public view and named after the family of a judge who sent escaped slaves and free Black men to plantations in the South? Journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross-section of lives Rikers has touched-from detainees and their relatives to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The accounts that emerge call into question the nature of justice in America.
What The Reviewers Say
Even before opening to the first page, I suspected that an oral history of Rikers would be fraught because of who gets to speak. Would it just be those who suffered? Or would we hear from guards and how they treated people?.
A bit chaotic, as oral histories tend to be. But the chaos feels true to the experience of prison; this impressive book throws a lot at you, and much of the reading is difficult.
At 425 pages, the sheer number of voices in the book sometimes become repetitive and the speakers sometimes are incoherent. Nonetheless, the assembly of testimony presents a powerful portrait of a failed institution..
The authors create a vivid picture of what life on the island is like.
