Mary E. Buser worked in the Mental Health Department on Rikers Island from 1995 to 2000. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Nothing I learned as a master’s student in social work could have prepared me for what I saw in my five years at New York’s 10-jail, 14,000-inmate Rikers Island, where I started out as an intern in the Mental Health Department and quit as an assistant chief of mental health in the 500-cell solitary confinement unit. I worked at Rikers, a jail now notorious for inmate neglect and abuse, thanks to a storm of scathing media reports and lawsuits, at the height of the Giuliani administration’s celebrated crackdown on crime—when the inmate population ballooned to a record 24,000 inmates. I saw a woman chewing on a strand of Christmas lights, the colored shards of glass mixing with blood as she registered her sentence of 25 to life on a drug-related charge; I saw a dazed and moaning male inmate, who had obviously just been beaten, being propped up by guards, his legs bouncing off the steps as they carted him to the clinic. And I also saw things that were less sensationalist, but just as devastating; things that reminded me that I was only seeing up-close a defunct justice system that operates every day on an enormous scale.

One of the hardest lessons during my five years at Rikers came in the case of 23-year-old inmate Chris Barnett, who was driven by the brutality of the jail to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Chris hobbled into the clinic on crutches, and his referral read, “Just came from hospital—evaluate for depression.” A slight young man, the 23-year-old carefully eased himself into the seat across from me and tearfully told me that two weeks earlier, he’d been out for a carefree motorcycle ride when a teenager darted out from behind a bus. “It was like he fell out of the sky and was on top of my bike. Before I knew what happened, it was over.” An accident, it seemed to me—but, I would learn, that was a distinction that didn’t really matter to the over-worked, over-crowded 10-jail complex that now exemplifies so much of America's criminal justice dysfunction.


Despite the Sixth Amendment’s heralded guarantee of a speedy trial, I learned at Rikers, trial is often years away. This would be a long wait for anyone, but for the detainee who can’t afford a couple thousand offhand in bail—which is a lot of detainees—the pretrial years must be spent behind bars. The only alternative would be the expedient plea bargain, frequently offered by the district attorney: If the accused foregoes trial and accepts some measure of guilt, he will typically receive a lighter sentence than what would have been handed down had he gone to trial and lost. But what it also means is that detainees will agree to it, not necessarily because they’re guilty, but because the pathway to trial is just too daunting.

And, Chris would teach me, it’s especially daunting at Rikers. (It still is—according to figures from late March, over 400 people had been held there for more than two years without being convicted.)

Chris sustained a broken hip, broken collarbone and internal injuries, but the teenager was dead. Chris denied he’d been drinking, and a Breathalyzer confirmed it. He also said he hadn’t been speeding, which was borne out by eyewitnesses as well as a police test on the tire marks. Though Chris had been neither drinking nor speeding, he still was arrested for vehicular homicide, which perplexed me, as this seemed like a clear-cut accident. But I assumed there had to be more to this. After all, I only heard the inmates' version of things.

In the sessions that followed, I learned that Chris, like most at Rikers, had been raised in a poor neighborhood, had dropped out of high school and was involved in minor skirmishes with the law. But after a couple of misdemeanor charges, he went back to school, earned a GED and was thrilled to have landed an entry-level position on Wall Street. The pay was low, but the future was promising, and Chris was smart enough to see the possibilities.

“They’re still holding my job for me,” he said, proudly.

Chris’s father was out of the picture, and his mother was not well. His family lacked the resources to pay his bail, but he did have a steady girlfriend who promised to see him through the ordeal.

Considering his life circumstances, Chris had done remarkably well. And on a personal level I liked him and felt for him and the predicament he was in. An accident like this could have happened to anyone. And based on his continued impressive behavior, I was convinced that this was, indeed, an accident. But what especially intrigued me about Chris was that he didn’t have a prior felony. A lifelong black mark, the felony forever casts suspicion and serves as a permanent barrier to job opportunities, regardless of positive changes made as an individual matures. Virtually all the inmates had at least one felony, mostly for nonviolent offenses. Many had ruefully told me it had been their dream to become a fireman, or even a policeman, only to realize—too late—that because of the felony, this could never be. This one difference set Chris Barnett apart from thousands of others I saw.

The district attorney was offering Chris a plea bargain of two to four years. If he accepted it, he would serve two years in prison upstate and remain on probation for the remaining two. But as part of the offer, he would also have to accept the felony. If he insisted on a trial and lost, his sentence could be in the range of eight to 10 years. There was a lot at stake here. More than anything, Chris wanted to hold on to his job and the life he was creating. But if he accepted the felony, he could say good-bye to Wall Street, and frankly most other job opportunities, forever.

As Chris hashed it over with me, he became angry. “I’m sorry this kid is dead—but I didn’t do anything wrong. He ran out from behind a bus. I wasn’t drinking and I wasn’t speeding. It was an accident! I’m not accepting this offer! Doesn’t he have any responsibility for what happened? I got hurt too! I’ll take my chances at trial.”

I was delighted by his decision. Although I knew that difficult days lay ahead for Chris, I vowed to provide the moral support he would need to see his day in court. “You’re not alone in this,” I told him. “I’ll help you in any way I can. If an issue comes up between our sessions, have your housing officer call me. I’m only a phone call away.”

We stood up and shook hands, and a determined Chris Barnett positioned himself on his crutches and was on his way.

***

“Miss Buser,” Chris Barnett told me one day, “my girlfriend came to see me the other day and she got hassled by the officers in the visit house. Now she’s not coming out here again.”

“I’m sorry, Chris,” I said. “A few people bring drugs in, so they make it hard on everyone. But you can’t let that get you down. This will all be over after your trial.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to make it to trial.”

A week later, Chris was visibly upset when he arrived for his session. “On court days, it’s four in the morning when they wake you, and you wanna know how they do it? The CO kicks the cot and yells, ‘Get up, asshole!’ All I did was drive a motorcycle down the street!”

But things took a decisive turn when his lawyer, who had long supported Chris’s plan to go to trial, suggested the plea bargain instead. “I don’t understand it!” Chris told me. “After I got arrested, he was all gung ho about trial. But the other day in court, he did a complete turnaround. Now he’s telling me to take the cop-out. I don’t know what to think. He told me to call him and we’d talk, but when I do, I just get his answering machine. Here I am, going to the law library every day, trying to get smart about my case, and now this! I think I need a different attorney. But the guys in the law library tell me that only the judge can assign a different lawyer because the lawyer is court-appointed. And they say judges won’t do it ’cause everybody’d want different lawyers.”

This was true. The inmates were constantly rejoicing or bemoaning their luck when it came to their court-appointed counsel. With so much riding on the competence of the lawyer, an inmate unhappy with his attorney will go to great lengths to persuade a judge to reassign the case. Most are unsuccessful and need to factor in the quality of the lawyer in any trial decision.

With Chris’s resolve eroding, I had the sinking feeling that he’d never see his day in court and would instead accept the plea bargain and the accompanying felony. If this was the case, there would be no return to Wall Street. Far from it, he would be scrambling for employment, forever faced with trying to explain away the felony. Here was a bright young man with a promising future who was involved in what appeared to be an accident. I couldn’t help thinking: This wasn’t justice.

***

When I left the jail each evening to go home, my goal was to turn off my workday. But more often than not, it was impossible. If my mind wasn’t churning with images of another bruised face, beaten up at the hands of either inmates or guards, then I was angry at a criminal justice system that would never allow detainees like Chris Barnett a fair shake.

But if I was angry, I was also starting to feel lonely and cut off from friends who had little real understanding of my workday world. One summer afternoon I was at a barbeque with friends, and we were chatting about the usual topics of politics and the economy. But when the conversation turned toward crime, I saw my opportunity. Without going into too much gory detail, I told them about the brutality and tried to explain just how the criminal justice system treats people who don’t have money for bail. Everyone was listening. Emboldened, I pointed out that Rikers Island was a microcosm of jails and prisons across the country, a nation that led the civilized world in incarcerating its citizens, with a record of more than 2 million behind bars. My little speech was going well until I noticed the husband of one of my friends mouthing the words, “Bleeding heart.” “No,” I protested, “these aren’t liberal or conservative issues. These are human rights issues!” Although everyone nodded politely, the afternoon ended awkwardly and I left the party feeling a little foolish. Talking about just how screwed up the system was far more difficult than I realized at the beginning.

But there was one person in my life who well understood. Although he’d been unenthused about my Rikers mission from the beginning, I was now speaking regularly to my father, who provided not only comfort, but insights as a lawyer. He patiently listened as I described my efforts to help inmates like Chris resist the plea bargain and see their day in court. “Good luck,” was his dry response. “The system’s unfair, Mary. If you don’t have bucks, you’re out of luck. Simple as that. None of this plea bargaining is law. When I first started out on Wall Street, we were all thrown pro bono cases now and then, and we did a damn good job with them! It was a nice change-up from the usual contracts we did. But now, with everything so over-criminalized, the volume of cases makes it impossible to try them all. Everything gets plea-bargained. It has to. And these prosecutors and defense attorneys that do these deals, they shouldn’t call themselves lawyers. This isn’t law! And furthermore, I’d like you to get the hell out of there!”

Ignoring those last wishes, I zeroed in on my father’s observation about the volume of cases and read a book by a prominent New York judge that shed an interesting light on the plea bargain process. In Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice, Judge Harold Rothwax states that in the mid-1990s, in the borough of Manhattan alone, the annual volume of criminal cases averaged 125,000, but the physical capacity for courtrooms, lawyers, and judges allowed for only 1,350 trials! “Of necessity,” Rothwax says in the book, “the overwhelming majority of cases must be plea-bargained.”

The simple matter of clogged courtrooms explains much of the crushing pressure on the detainee to take the cop-out. I’d sat with many an inmate hysterically telling me of some witness or piece of information that could establish an alibi or affirm his innocence. But the lawyers brushed it aside. Court-appointed lawyers, with neither time nor resources to track leads, pay for expert witnesses, or search for evidence, push the plea bargain. Alex Lugo, a former patient who shocked me with his story of being forced to fight against other inmates for the viewing pleasure of prison guards in California, once told me the mantra of the lawyer is “Take the cop-out!”

Yet the public understands none of this, believing, as I once had, that acceptance of a plea bargain can mean only one thing—guilt. But what the public never sees is an impoverished detainee who doesn’t have the luxury of sitting behind bars for a couple of years awaiting trial while a family depends on him. They never see that the court-appointed lawyer is inept, or doesn’t want to try the case, and they would never understand that a detainee, terrified in his housing unit, will take the plea as a means of getting on a bus and getting out—to stay alive. The only thing visible is the choice not to go to trial.

***

When I next met with Chris Barnett, he was getting closer to the decision I dreaded. “You know, Miss B, I could get through all this Rikers bullshit if I knew I had a good shot at trial. Even if I had to sit here two years, I’d do it, but now with this lawyer, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

But I did know, and sure enough, less than a week later, his housing officer called and said Chris needed to speak with me. As soon as he arrived, he made his announcement: “I can’t take it. I’m taking the cop-out. I have to get out of here. They had a search last night and they beat somebody up bad. I have to get out of this place.”

“But Chris,” I argued in a last-ditch effort to change his mind, “I’m sure they have searches in prison, and unfortunately, people get beaten up in prison too. Leaving Rikers isn’t going to get you away from any of this.”

“Yeah, but everyone says upstate is different. You work, they have programs … but bottom line, I’ll know exactly when I’m getting out. Here, I just sit around all day not knowing what’s happening. I can never reach my lawyer. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going crazy.”

“Yes, I know it’s very hard,” I said softly. “And I do understand your decision.”

“I must have been nuts to think I was going to trial. In the time it takes to sit here and wait for trial, I could serve the same amount of time upstate and go home. It just doesn’t make sense. If I had the money for bail, it would be a different story—I could wait it out. But I don’t.” Hesitating for a moment, he added, “I know I’ll have to take the felony, Miss B. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll lose my job, but I’ll get something else. I’ll find something.”

“I understand, Chris.” He was in the terrible position of having to forego his future for the sake of surviving the moment, and I told him so.

“That’s right, Miss Buser, that’s exactly right,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore—I just can’t. I have to get on with my life.”

He accepted the plea bargain and two weeks later, during the predawn hours, Chris Barnett was whisked away to an upstate prison.

***

I don’t know what happened to Chris after that—once an inmate is bused to an upstate prison, all my contact with him would cease—but I know what happens to countless others like him. Over 97 percent of all criminal convictions today are the result of plea bargains (those jury trials that people think are so central to our justice system hardly ever happen anymore). Of the 2.2 million people in prison right now, about 2 million of them are there as a result of plea deals. And calculus of plea deals—for an inmate facing murder chargers, life in prison under the terms of a plea deal might be bad, but the death penalty after a lost trial is worse—has apparently caused many people to plead guilty. Another layer to this is added by long wait times for poor defendants without cash bail, an issue that gained considerable attention at Rikers earlier this summer when 22-year-old Kalief Browder, who was held for three years on the island without being convicted of a crime, killed himself.

Long before the world knew Kalief Browder’s name, though, I knew Chris Barnett. Chris fell victim to the same injustices—but, like millions of others, in a case that didn’t attract much public attention. Because when you only have the trial space for a fraction of the criminal cases in a given district, you’re essentially setting up a system for millions of Chris Barnetts to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. And then, who’s to tell when the system is working and when it’s not?

This article is an adapted excerpt from Lockdown on Rikers: Shocking Stories of Abuse and Injustice at New York’s Notorious Jail.

