It may seem somewhat perverse to rank the injustices perpetrated against the black community at the hands of the American penal system within the past year, but the death of Kalief Browder undoubtedly deserves special attention. At 16 years old, Browder was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault after being randomly arrested one night in 2010 and accused of stealing a backpack. At his Supreme Court arraignment weeks later, Browder pleaded not guilty, but was remanded without bail to Rikers Island to await trial. Three years of waiting later – much of it spent in solitary confinement – Browder was informed that the District Attorney’s Office had dismissed his case, and he was…
It may seem somewhat perverse to rank the injustices perpetrated against the black community at the hands of the American penal system within the past year, but the death of Kalief Browder undoubtedly deserves special attention. At 16 years old, Browder was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault after being randomly arrested one night in 2010 and accused of stealing a backpack. At his Supreme Court arraignment weeks later, Browder pleaded not guilty, but was remanded without bail to Rikers Island to await trial. Three years of waiting later – much of it spent in solitary confinement – Browder was informed that the District Attorney’s Office had dismissed his case, and he was released. He never faced trial, and none of the charges pressed against him ever went on his criminal record. On paperwork, and in the District Attorney’s Office, it was as though the case had never happened, but for Browder, three years of his adolescent life had been lost in unjustifiable abuse as an innocent man behind bars.
Browder died earlier this month, after hanging himself from the air conditioning unit in his mother’s apartment on a date almost exactly two years after his release. His death represents a gross failure of New York City’s penal system at the policing, prosecutorial, and carceral levels. The physical and psychological violence inflicted upon Browder from arrest to release by the same institutions which purport to keep us safe is a stain on the consciousness of every New Yorker as it was carried out in our name as the mangled byproduct of our collective democratic will. The culture surrounding police activities, prosecutors, prison guards, drug policies, stop and frisks, and three strikes laws is a reflection of uniquely American values, fears, and ideological beliefs. While we can condemn the prison guards who pummeled Browder as he lay, handcuffed on the floor of his cell in solitary confinement, we must also recognize that this abuse of power is an incidental cause of a system to which we not only tacitly consent in our silence, but actively choose in our election of officials who deem the solution to crime, poverty, joblessness, drug addiction, and mental illness to be the increased use of penal force, rather than the installation of social and economic reforms.
To say that Kalief Browder’s case is an isolated incident would not be naive. Among the thousands of men shackled behind bars on Rikers Island, suffering unimaginable abuses as they await trial, Browder was the only one lucky to have an incredibly gifted columnist from the New Yorker, documenting the injustices of his involvement with the the penal system. The tales of his contemporaries will remain untold. The incursion of the carceral state as manifested through the abuses exacted upon each and every incarcerated body on Rikers Island is covert, occurring behind heavily guarded walls, which cultivate a culture of violence and secrecy. While we cannot be privy to the discourses of punishment that occur within the confines of isolated Rikers Island, we are forced to bear witness to the effects of these discourses on the individuals who are released back onto our streets, bearing the psychological burden of their abuses. It is these individuals who find themselves without economic opportunity, struggling to reintegrate back into society, and thus prone to reoffend. The criminal behavior of such victims of a negligent carceral system falls squarely upon our shoulders as we continue to remain silent about the penal practices that encourage their recidivism.
It is a psychologically damning practice to condemn an individual to spend thousands of consecutive hours in stultifying isolation, but to impose such unimaginable torture on a 16 year old is a death sentence. Thus, what is most appalling about Browder’s ordeal, however, is that he was subjected to these physical and psychological abuses not only as an innocent human, but as a child. The failures of lopsided policing and prosecutorial systems, which disproportionately target young minority men, were made manifest when the presumption of innocence was cast aside as Browder awaited trial in a Kafka-esque world of certainty in guilt.
Today, it becomes ever more clear that the illusory concept of a lawless, criminal America is propagated not by delinquent realities, but by a penal system that inherently presumes culpability amongst alleged offenders from the black and latino communities. The severe carceral punishments to which these men are unjustly subjected – whether they innocently await trial or are convicted with minor drug crimes – do not need to be justified insofar as they are exacted upon a community that is largely disempowered and disenfranchised. The extent to which any punitive measure is legitimately warranted is rendered meaningless within a system plagued by a chronic lack of transparency and accountability.
For this reason, it is incumbent upon the American people, and upon New Yorkers especially, to remember the name of Kalief Browder and to interrogate the discourses of punishment that so overtly indicate a profound need for systemic reform. Kalief Browder’s incarceration and subsequent death could have been prevented.
The detention of defendants awaiting trial in overcrowded, under resourced facilities like Rikers Island is one of the most inhumane, inefficient, and costly penal practices in use today. In Colorado, Ohio, Kentucky, and Washington D.C., such practices have been replaced with pretrial supervised release programs, saving millions of dollars and providing rehabilitative justice for those who are awaiting trial but do not pose a significant risk to public safety. Pretrial supervised release uses services such as drug testing, curfew setting, mandatory mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, and job training in order to provide an alternative to incarceration to primarily nonviolent felony defendants awaiting trial.
According to research conducted by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, in the pretrial supervised release program in Kentucky, supervised release was shown to drastically reduce the rate of recidivism – particularly for low risk offenders – even two years after disposition. Furthermore, in a pilot study conducted by the Criminal Justice Agency of New York in Queens last year, pretrial supervised release services were shown to reduce the length and severity of sentences, resulting in conditional discharge, fines, or probation far more often than incarceration. In at risk families, where the incarceration of any working age family member can mean the loss of a significant source of income, the intensification of marginality, and a rapid decline into poverty, homelessness, or substance abuse, it is absurd to incarcerate individuals awaiting trial simply because they cannot afford the bail necessary for their release. In such a system, incarceration serves more as a punitive measure against poverty than as a deterrence of future crime or a provider of safety and security.
Browder, arrested at 16 and still a sophomore in high school, had no financial means of making the $3,000 bail offered to him by the judge at his Criminal Court arraignment before he was later remanded to Rikers Island. In this sense, though by most measures Browder would be considered a low-risk defendant, given his negligible criminal history and his unlikelihood to commit new criminal activity, the punitive mechanisms of New York City punished Browder for his indigence rather than for his criminal threat. In an incredibly expensive carceral system where the detention of a single inmate costs New York City taxpayers almost $32,000 per year, Kalief Browder’s incarceration seems to be an immense waste of money, prison resources, and life. Rather than suffering through a psychologically brutalizing incarceration, which cost taxpayers almost $100,000 for a trial that never occurred, Browder could have been placed in a pretrial supervised release program. He would have been able to continue his high school education, he would have been able to support his mother and father, and he would have been able to receive any number of rehabilitative treatment services to ensure his productive success in society. Ultimately, instead of undergoing a dehumanizing and psychologically maiming period of incarceration, Browder could have been a kid.
As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pledge to commit $130 million to reduce unnecessary arrests and incarceration begins to develop into real, institutionalized programs, it is imperative that such programs include the institution of pretrial supervised release. In a country with some of the most inhumane carceral practices, where 25% of the world’s prisoners are housed, where one in 12 working age black men is behind bars, where children and the mentally ill are regularly incarcerated, and where more than 80,000 incarcerated individuals are serving time in solitary confinement, reforms such as pretrial supervised release programs that begin at the prosecutorial instead of the carceral level are essential. As more liberal penal policy around the country proceeds to interrogate the discourses of punishment that both facilitate and underlie social and economic inequality in the U.S., the brutalities exacted by these discourses against the body and the psyche of men and boys like Kalief Browder cannot be forgotten. His death – as a child consumed by the cruelty of the prison industrial complex – will continue to mar American morality, undermining how other countries view us and how we view ourselves, so long as such contemptible penal practices remain in this country.
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The Tragedy of Kalief Browder and the Merits of Pretrial Release
