This is the second of six reviews chronicling the pseudonymous Fred S. Kreider’s Rikers Island Series, a horror franchise set on present-day Rikers Island. In the first installment we met narrator Nicholas Billings, a rookie guard whose scrupulous recounting of guard life at Rikers is often more grim and terrifying than the book’s horror story, […]
mass incarceration
Pennsylvania Sheriff Warns: Accept No Imitation
Earlier this month a mysterious call came through to Dr. Mark Cruciani’s office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The caller identified himself as a sheriff’s deputy from Lackawanna County and informed Cruciani that he had missed a court date, and now had two options: he could pay an outstanding fine of $1,000, or he’d face a criminal […]
The Secret Lives of Rikers Island Jail Guards
“Corrections should rehabilitate the inmates,” writes C. René West in Caught in the Struggle, “but who has the time. The officers are so busy trying to sift through all the confusion in the parking lots, locker rooms and in the corridors with all the animosity and foolishness that there is no time or consideration to […]