Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!
Am I doing that right?? JK, sorry if you’re offended/happy if you’re affirmed, but one thing I am excited about is this great story from The Guardian US about watching Game 1 of the NBA finals at Rikers Island. Bryan Armen Graham spent the evening with a group of men in one of the housing units at the Vierno Center on Rikers, and the result is a thoughtful profile of some of the Knicks fans (and one Spurs fan) he met that evening.
There’s some tension in the piece, I think, for readers who oppose incarceration: there are questions about what we aren’t seeing, and, offstage, questions about why they’re there in the first place. Graham was specifically invited to an “honors house” for inmates—most of whom are, remember, awaiting trial and haven’t been convicted. Most of the men he watched the game with had “gone six months or longer without an infraction,” meaning they have been awaiting trial for at least six months. (The average detainee, per Graham, is there for about four months, “four times the national average.” Seeing the treatment these men with special privileges receive raises questions about all of the other men—the average daily population is 10,000 detainees—who might or might not have been watching the game in any of the other buildings in the complex without, like, cake and decorations provided by the staff. (The article notes that about 2,000 inmates likely got to watch the game that evening.)
At the same time, Graham probes some of the ongoing crises at Rikers Island. Four people have died at Rikers this year and more than a dozen died last year; the city has admitted that the plan to close Rikers in 2027 and begin transitioning to borough-based jails is “practically impossible to fulfill.” He talked with Stanley Richards, “the first formerly incarcerated person to oversee the city’s jails,” and discusses the jail’s status under federal receivership. And the piece is also a nice slice of life about an institution many people are shielded from and about the lives that men live there. The photography is also really nice: great portraits of some of the men he interviewed and some photos of the murals in the facility interior—and of the handprints painted on a wall with “PAT FRISK” stenciled above them.
If you’re interested in reading some of the writing incarcerated people are publishing online these days, The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series (what New Year’s looks like in prison; what the Fourth of July might mean in prison; a prison wedding officiant’s experiences) and the Prison Journalism Project (breakfast in prison; what it’s like hustling commissary goods; the magic of “the prison nerd room”) both have lots of great work about every aspect of life under incarceration.
See you soon!
