Beauty returned home to Oklahoma in December to seek refuge from the streets of the Bronx. A month later she was forcibly brought back, and today she remains trapped in an inflexible and overwhelmed legal system

Part One: Struggling with addiction, my friend Beauty still made it home to Oklahoma

Beauty was finally home with her mom, and for the first time in her 24 years neither had a need for drugs. Her mother was close to getting her three-year chip, after 30 years using crack. Beauty was only a few days free from K2, but intent on keeping that drug in the past: “If my momma can quit crack after 30 years, I can quit also.”



Beauty had detoxed on the car ride home, a two-day trip that took her from the Bronx to Oklahoma. She had arrived on a Saturday night in late December after a three-year absence. She was done with living on the streets, done with cops chasing her, and maybe – just maybe – done with chasing drugs.

On her first Sunday back home, she cleaned up in a proper bathroom for the first time in months, dressed in clothes borrowed from her sister, and went to church with her mother and brother.

The following Friday, trying to do everything right, she turned herself in on a prostitution charge from five years prior – charges she had forgotten about in the Bronx. “My momma is on probation. I wanted to do what’s right, don’t want to be riding in the car with cousins, get pulled over, have the police run my name, and end up in jail and disrespect my mom.”

The charge was a misdemeanor, and bail was set at $1,000 – too much for her mother’s tight budget. Beauty didn’t have $100 to lose to the bailsman either, so she was confined in the Oklahoma County jail as the courts restarted her case. In February, Beauty was brought from jail to stand in front of a judge, where she pled guilty. She was assessed a $30 fine and given 80 hours of community service.

She wasn’t allowed to walk, though.

While in jail, her name was run through the computers and a legal hold was placed on her. She wasn’t told the details, just that she couldn’t go home. Her court-appointed lawyer wasn’t much help; he was overwhelmed with the 80 or so other cases assigned to him.

Beauty worried though. Worried it was because of her arrest in the Bronx the prior September. Worried the police might come all the way from the Bronx and get her. She hoped, though, that her newfound determination and distance would protect her.



After spending most of February in jail, she was awoken suddenly early one morning and told to “get out of the bunk” and pack her belongings. She dressed in her old jeans and T-shirt and took her few items, assuming she was finally going home.

Beauty as seen by illustrator Vin Ganapathy, in Rikers’ visitation room. Illustration: Vin Ganapathy

Instead, a police car drove her to the airport, where two plainclothes officers who had come from New York were waiting for her.

They placed a metal belt around her waist, and gave her an oversized Green Bay Packers jacket with holes cut in the pocket so her handcuffs wouldn’t be seen by the other passengers. Before escorting her on the plane, they told her: “You can be nice to us and we be nice to you, or we can both be mean to each other.”

They sat in the last row, her between the two officers. She looked out the window while they read. It was only her second time ever on an airplane.

Ten hours later she was in a cell on Rikers Island, only a mile away from the place she had just driven a thousand miles to escape: the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, where she spent three years in an ugly cycle of drugs, homelessness and prostitution, and where she had been charged in September with selling.

She would spend March and most of April confined to Rikers, New York City’s main jail, as the legal system in the Bronx, overwhelmed with low-level drug charges like Beauty’s, slowly restarted and re-evaluated her old charge. She sat there because she didn’t have the money to meet her $5,000 bail or the $500 to lose to a bondsman.

Money wasn’t the only issue. I offered to pay her bail, but she declined. She didn’t have a support network in New York that wasn’t about drugs or prostitution. “Hunts Point was my downfall. I don’t trust myself out there again, and I don’t want to ever see it again. I will just be sitting there all anxious. I can’t be that close to my old lifestyle.”

That New York would use the resources to fly two officers all the way to Oklahoma to escort a first-time, nonviolent felon from her home didn’t surprise Beauty, didn’t surprise her mother, and didn’t surprise anybody in the Bronx. Almost everyone who lives in poverty views the courts and prison as another institution they have to deal with – just another part of their lives, like schools or hospitals.

That Beauty would spend two months incarcerated in Rikers without a trial or the prospects of one, without any evidence being given, also wasn’t surprising to her or anybody in the Bronx. Almost three-quarters of the 10,000 inmates in Rikers are there for nonviolent drug charges. They are in Rikers because they are too poor to make bail, which is often as low as $100.

So they sit, sometimes for close to a year, waiting for the Bronx courts to eventually deal with their case.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visitation hour in Rikers as seen by Vin Ganapathy – the whole process takes four to five hours for a visitor.

Justice: an endless shuffling of papers

The night of her Bronx arrest, in September, Beauty was sitting on the wall outside a park, hanging out and smoking marijuana with friends from the homeless shelter across the street. A block down the hill was the corner she stood at when she needed money, smiling at the passing semi-trucks and cars. A block up the hill was where she spent the money, a bodega that sold the K2 she liked to smoke.



She was wearing shorts and a beat-up hoodie. She didn’t dress up sexy like prostitutes do in movies, and certainly didn’t need high heels. Fancy clothes made it harder for her to disappear under a parked truck, or behind a fence, when the police came, or a car with a creep circled by too many times. The men paid her for sex regardless: “They pay for my body, not my clothes.”

That night the cops came undercover, pretending a need for drugs and sex. Someone, probably an old pimp who was said to be holding a grudge against her, directed the undercovers to the wall where she was sitting. Fifteen minutes later, the police charged Beauty and her friend with selling them two bags of crack cocaine, street value $20, a Class B felony.



Nobody who knows Beauty, not her pimps or the other prostitutes she works with, believed she was guilty: “Beauty don’t sell drugs, she only sells her pussy. Must have been a setup.”



Beauty had plenty of chances and reasons to sell; selling drugs to a stranger is better than selling sex. But Beauty only used K2, a drug that, although illegal, could be openly bought in most any corner bodega. She also hated crack, so the demand or the desire wasn’t there. “Other girls are flippin’ drugs, but I ain’t. I ain’t got that crack or needle habit. I don’t need money all the time. Those girls, when they get money, in five seconds it’s gone. I saw my mom mess with that shit. I saw her picking her arms. That shit is nasty.”

She was probably just holding the two bags for a friend. She was perfect for that. She didn’t have a habit, she wasn’t a snitch, and she trusted people, especially men who sweet-talked her, way too quickly.

Beauty didn’t think much at first of her charge. Everyone around her had arrests for selling. “They give out direct sales in Hunts Point like they give out parking tickets in Manhattan.”

She had been arrested before, for prostitution and disorderly conduct, and knew the routine. She would probably spend a day in Bronx central booking, a few days if it was a weekend, before getting pulled in front of a court, represented by an appointed lawyer dressed “fancy-cheap”, and released whenever. Sometimes that meant being dumped alone at 3am on 161st Street, a walk away from the 24-hour bodega where all the zombies hung, the ones who, like her, smoked K2 until they were absent.

But this was a drug charge, and drug charges are different. Her street mother Desire tried to explain it to her, but Beauty didn’t listen. “Selling ain’t bullshit. They take that shit serious. Throwing charges at us is how them lawyers, police, judges, corrections officers and counselors make their money. They need it to live. They addicted to the drugs like everyone else. Their thing is giving out tickets for it, not using it. They make money and we just do the time and take the shit.”

Desire’s husband, Steve, had a different take: “Fuck that. Drug charges is how they keep us controlled, how they keep us from getting anywhere. You can’t do anything if you got a felony, and they give everyone out here a felony.”

That first night, Beauty was dragged up from the police holding cell, cuffed, guarded on either side by two police and represented by a court-appointed lawyer who had just learned her name. She was given a $5,000 bail – way beyond her means – so she was bussed off to Rikers and placed in a cell with hundreds of other women.

From then on, as her case weaved slowly through a system calcified by a deluge of drug charges, her future was tethered to what happened in the Bronx County hall of justice.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beauty at the tribunal, as witnessed by Vin Ganapathy. Illustration: Vin Ganapathy

The criminal courthouse is central to life in South Bronx. It sits at its geographic center, a six-story modern building dressed up in glass spanning an entire block. It alone looks sleek; everything surrounding it is beat up, a combination of businesses feeding off the courts and others feeding them: liquor stores, bodegas selling K2 and single cigarettes, nonprofit legal services and 24-hour coffeeshops.

Hallway after hallway of courtrooms fill the building, all painted white and bright. Inside each courtroom is a scrum of lawyers, judges, court bureaucrats – all looking defeated, and all playing a giant game of paper shuffling.

Those papers, each representing another case, most for drugs, are everywhere, overflowing huge plastic boxes repurposed from the US Postal Service. The boxes are stacked on dollies and pulled and pushed from courtroom to courtroom, where they are unloaded on tables before lawyers and judges representing the state.

Another group of lawyers, representing the defendants, come holding their own piles of papers, held in bundles of yellow folders. They stand outside the courtroom and call names – “Rico, Takeesha, Mr Colon” – in hope of finding the person they are representing that day, having never seen many of them before. Most of the lawyers are court appointed and work for nonprofits, and are juggling up to a hundred cases at a time.

The defendants come earlier, to snake their way through a security line that spills onto the sidewalk outside and often takes over an hour to navigate. They are the ones lucky enough to have the resources to make bail, able to spend the time between court dates at home, able to freely call their lawyers. The others, like Beauty, are in Rikers.

Visiting Rikers is a five-hour ordeal filled with restrictions that few have the time or patience to navigate. Beauty’s lawyer never visits; he has far too many cases to be able to give her that attention. Beauty only sees and talks to him in one-minute conversations before court.

Those meetings come when her paperwork, shuffling its way through the system, lands on a judge’s docket and she is called to appear. On those days, she is woken at 4am, cuffed at the ankles and hands, bussed the five miles to the Bronx criminal courthouse and placed in a basement holding cell.

The days of her court appearance Beauty is an emotional wreck, hoping it is the day she will be released while dreading that it is just anther pointless exercise in legal mumbo-jumbo. Her lawyer isn’t always entirely sure himself what the judge or prosecutors know or intend, or what paperwork might have been forgotten about or lost. It isn’t his fault. He is operating in a system overloaded at every level.

On those days Beauty sits in her basement courthouse cell, waiting, eating bologna and cheese sandwiches. The bus rides over and the holding cells are the only time in the process that men and women mix and are able to talk. Men take the opportunity to find out her name and write her letters, inter-Rikers pimping memos:



“To: the new Love of my life. What happen if I get my people to bail you out? What would you do? Would you ride for a nigga or would you forget about a nigga. I need to know asap baby.”

When her name is called in court, usually towards the early afternoon, she is escorted from below by two guards, and allowed to exchange a few words with her lawyer.

She is then told to stand silently as her lawyer, the judge and the lawyers representing the state try to find a solution. Many times one of the three, and often all, gets confused about the details of her case. A few times the paperwork is missing or incomplete.

Almost always it ends, after a handful of minutes, with the scheduling of another court date weeks or months away. Once, unable to withhold her disappointment, she turned while leaving, tears in her eyes, and mouthed quietly to the entire court: “You don’t know what I am going through.”

Her words were lost under the sound of shuffling paper.

This process continues until it ends in one of three possible outcomes: upstate prison time, released with time served, or released into a program. Trials almost never happen.



For Beauty the first resolution came in October, following a handful of court appearances and a month in Rikers. A compromise was reached, and Beauty’s bail was lowered to zero and she was allowed to leave Rikers, with the agreement that she would check herself into a 28-day in-patient rehab facility.

That program was located in Harlem, just blocks from everything she didn’t have while in Rikers, including bodegas that sold cigarettes and K2. Everyone around her – the others in the programs and the people on the streets outside – were users. The temptation was too much. Beauty quit that program after only a few days.

Many people walk away from treatment centers before finishing. Few ever call their lawyer before they do. Beauty did. “I don’t disrespect people like that. He got me a deal, and I couldn’t live up to it.”

That night she went to a bodega, bought a cigarette and smoked it sitting on a bridge leading into the Bronx. She broke down in tears after recognizing a man from the program, one who had just finished it the day she arrived.

She walked over the bridge and back to Hunts Point, to find work so she could get some K2. Her street mom, Desire, was also working that night and tried to get her to go back. Her street father, Steve, insisted she leave the Bronx. “He tried dragging my ass all the way back to Harlem, he told me I was going to pay later, how it would end up ruining my life. I didn’t listen.”

She found a regular who paid her upfront and was willing to drive her to buy K2. She hadn’t smoked in over a month, and started vomiting. “He tried to kick me out of the car, and I am like, ‘Yo, there are police cruising around. You can’t have me vomiting out there.’ I had just run from a program.”

She was officially evading a charge, and her case was given to the warrant squad, who located people on the run.

Six weeks later, after a bad period of two months without nights in a bed (you can’t stay in a shelter with the warrant squad looking for you), I drove her back to Oklahoma, where she thought she might finally be able to be done with the Bronx.

‘I just want to go home’

At the time of writing, in mid-April, Beauty is still in Rikers. She is still awaiting a resolution. Since being brought back she has been to court four times, and each time it has ended with her returning to Rikers. Combined with her court appearances prior to leaving for Oklahoma, her one direct-sale charge has netted her close to 10 court appearances and nearly four months of jail time.

Visiting her requires two buses, four hours of waiting, five separate locked gates and four security checkpoints. For that I am allowed to see her for 45 minutes in a room filled with tiny, round tables built for kindergarteners. We must sit across from each other, and cannot touch, other than a first hug.

When I visited her in March she was wearing a baggy and dirty gray Rikers-issued jumpsuit. It had been three months since she returned home to Oklahoma to make a clean break from her past.

She broke down in tears, and then forced a smile. “I lay up at night and think about what I have done. I don’t regret turning myself in, but I do regret running from that program. I got to do right. I want to be living a normal life, I can’t be jailing at 50. Right now, the only thing I want is to go home. I just want to go home, to be with my momma. That is all. I just want to go home. Why won’t they just let me go home?”