My name is Vidal Guzman. I was on Rikers when I was 16, and this is how crime works. The nicknames that it
has, the Bridge of Pain, Gladiator School, Torture Island, the name speaks for itself. Eighty-five percent of people who are on Rikers Island are just awaiting trial. That means that majority of
people there are still waiting to be sentenced or
maybe even get released. I worked for the Close Rikers Campaign. We heard of stories, people
waiting to be seen for 10 years. When I got locked up, I got
locked up for a robbery. I got picked up one morning, it was, like, 5 in the morning, and my family didn't know their rights. They put the cuffs on you,
they put you on the bus, and all you see is this bridge, and you're like, "Where are we going?" They're like, "We going to Rikers. We're going to Gladiator School." C-74 is on the island itself. The facility that kept the 19-to-24, that age bracket. Everybody was facing hard
time. Three years, four years. When we was supposed to
be thinking about prom or thinking about picking out our suits or picking out what colleges
we're going to go to, that wasn't it. I never knew that, you know, when I got incarcerated, that Rikers Island
existed for 16-year-olds. At that time in 2007,
there were so many youth. It was overpopulated with youth. I had to go in there
and be the most violent so I can be able to survive. And I learned that my first day when a youth put a spoon in
my oatmeal in the morning, and what the kids told me was, "You were supposed to swing at him." And I was like, "Yeah?" He's like, "Yeah, man. You don't
let nobody disrespect you." Next time, I said, "You know what? Let me corner him and
tell him how I feel." If we feel some type of way, we do what we have to do. And I started slowly learning that if I want to live and survive here, then I really gotta lose a piece of myself that I try to hold on, right? The human side of myself. I started learning about "the program." We always knew what correctional officers were the one that was
upkeeping the program. They could say, "Well,
we couldn't put our hands on the youth, so we needed to figure out how to keep them under control." Basically, it's this power structure on Rikers Island that had people that fight for
these positions to be good. You know, to not worry about
somebody taking their stuff or not worry about
somebody attacking them. He'll get more calls to
call his family, right? Because he'll take calls from people. If you're not in that power rank, that means you're not having cereal or you're not even having a muffin. Their commissaries get taken away. Their sneakers get taken away. So I had to come in these areas and be the most violent, right? Grab a TV, try to throw it at people. Attack someone first, right? Get jumped first. Some fights I lost, some fights I won. But No. 1 thing I always
learned in jail, in prison, as long as you never turn
down that fight, you good. Even when I was 16, the
fight club was real. Like, if you want to get in the team or you want the housing
complex, you have to fight them. So sometimes the CO might fall asleep and not pay attention. "Yo, yo, the CO's sleeping,
yo, go ahead, go fight." You go right in the back,
the back of the dorm, and people fight it out. It'd been stuff like that. And in Rikers Island,
like, when I was in C-74, there was always this little corner from where the cameras at
one time wasn't able to see. Things like that happen now. There's still fight night on Rikers. They know that this
correctional officer might turn a blind eye, or they might
not even do anything at all. I mean, Rikers is falling apart, so it's easy to make a
weapon out of anything. Breaking a piece of the
heater. Even razors. A lot of times people get razors to shave, and that means somebody got that razor. Weapons are usually never really brung in. They're usually made
inside the facilities. Correctional officers, they knew, 16-, 17-year-olds, they couldn't put their hands on them. So this fight club was
the way for them to, in some way, uphold power, right? You know, I would have black eyes, and correctional officers
won't even say anything. They'll say, "OK. You OK? Did you win? Did you swing? Did you duck?" Just, like, make fun of you. We knew what correctional
officer was Blood, was Crip. We knew what housing complex they favor the most. We knew all that. You know, when people don't
got nothing to provide, the struggle get hard. Tattoos does happen in there. It's dangerous, but people gotta hustle. That's the black market. You know, selling
cigarettes, selling T-shirts. People figure out their way. I remember one time somebody even started a business of selling Shabangs. It's these chips on Rikers
Island that was super good. This person was buying these chips, created a online account, and sold them for, like, $3 more, because nobody could buy these chips but everybody loved these Shabang chips. You use the money from whoever sent you, or if you're working for $0.12, $0.16, you use whatever you
can to go to commissary. People start tapping
into some of the skills that they probably never
used outside, and use inside. I remember I used to write, at the time, with my
loved one at the time. I'll have them design the
envelope to look cool, right? Like, have some Mickey Mouse
or something like that, or something really cartoony, and I'll pay somebody, like, two soups or three soups to do it. But then you have an
individual go more deep into the underground or the black market. From there, they're trying
to bring drugs in, right? They're boofing. Basically, boofing means you're literally throwing the whole drugs, and ... yeah. So, there's always stories of even correctional
officers bringing stuff in. Even when Rikers was closed to visitors, how was weapons and drugs
still getting in there, right? I remember when that — we would call it the red alarm. You would hear it all the
time because of the youth. "Woo, woo, woo, woo!" Basically
that means the "turtles" — the turtles are correctional
officers with extra gear. Their job is to deescalate,
but that never happens. Every time I have dealt with the turtles have been them just getting their stick and start hitting anyone. Majority of the correctional officers on Rikers was Black and brown, so I was really expecting a lot of them to understand our struggle and to also advocate for us
for a better way to not just, to not be in a facility,
but return back to society. Some of the things that was done on Rikers when I was younger, or even now, was done by correctional officers. Like, they'll put Crips
in Blood houses. For what? Not every single correctional
officer was like that. Like, I had a correctional officer who was actually pretty
good. His name was [bleep]. He was a former, I think
he's still a Black Panther. When he came into the space,
he came with hair grease that you're not supposed to have, some comb to comb out your hair, smell good so the dorms smell good. So there were people who was trying to do the inside work. They gave too much oversee for correctional officers
for Rikers Island that they haven't gave the
opportunity for therapists, counselors to be in these spaces. You're hearing stories of people who are correctional officers
getting mental-health problems because of the issues
that they had to deal with trying to survive on Rikers. And that happens, right? It's stressful. You know, they go home, but
they're locked up with us. I had to go through that same
process again at 19 years old. When I was incarcerated at
19, I was there for robbery. At that time, I was more gang-related. I was a member of the Bloods. I became a part of the Bloods
when I was in the streets. People around me was
already a part of the gang, like friends, close friends of mine, so I didn't feel like I was joining, you know, like, how the Bloods, or, you know, I wasn't joining the Bloods, I was joining my community who was Bloods, right? It's different from the West Coast and the East Coast, right? The Bloods in the East
Coast grew from Rikers. At that time, early '80s, '90s, it was a lot of Latinx gangs and a lot of Blacks who felt
that we needed to unite. A lot of different gangs grew there. The Trinitarios. They call
theirself the Patrias. I remember when they was called
DDP, Dominicans Don't Play. After they changed their name, they grew from Rikers Island. There are people who turn Blood or part of a gang while
they're in prison or jail, and for me it was a lot different, because I was already a part
of the Bloods when I was, before I came into Rikers Island. It was so much politics. They keep the Crips in a
certain housing complex away from us. We don't
have the same lunch. Maybe there's internal
gang beef in the facility. At that time, we had
too many gang members. We had the Bloods, the Latin
Kings, and the Trinitarios, and for me, it was like, yo, man, let's figure out how we
can organize these phones so we don't get into any violence. I've been in environments where
people fight off that phone. You'll go up to them and
say, "Yo, I want your phone. I want your time slot." And people will fight
it out for a phone slot. Always rules that you gotta follow. Make sure you work out every day. Make sure you're intaking your lessons. The brotherhood of
being around the Bloods. Don't mess with someone
in the LGBT community. Don't be a rat. There's always those codes, basically in almost every gang, right? The way that they might say certain things to say something, right? Majority of the letters that
are sent to Rikers Island are read, so they gotta
write whatever they mean in coding. So there've always been kites, letters. Let's say they're trying
to get the information to someone who might be close to them. They'll wrap up the
paper and make a square for it to be able to slide between doors. Because I speak Spanish,
I would always be able to relay messages faster
because I knew Spanish, and I was able to, if
I knew harm was coming, I was able to relay that fast to anyone. But wars can happen between gangs, and it can just change. Like, a letter will go out at what time, and what
time s--- needs to happen, and everybody gotta move. "Everybody gotta move" basically mean that harm has to happen, and it's a fight throughout
the whole facility. I think a lot of people don't really know what is Rikers, right? Like, they think Rikers is a prison, but Rikers is a collective of facilities that are not just on the island itself, but facilities that are close
to the courtroom in Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. I think people don't understand
how old Rikers Island is. Rikers is close to 160 years that it has been oppressing
Black and brown communities. Richard Riker was a
part of the Kidnap Club. He was a judge who broke
laws again and again by selling Black people
who was not enslaved back into slavery. In the 1930s, it was built by incarcerated people to extend Rikers. A majority of Rikers
Island is built on trash. When it rains, I mean,
it rains in the facility, you smell this, like, eggy, disgusting smell all the time. You can't drink the water there. You're fighting rats and
roaches all the time. I never seen collective
of detainees get together to get a mouse out of the cell housing complex. You know, we heard of people
dying, get heat strokes because of how Rikers Island
doesn't have air conditioners. I remember a lot of times, they would turn a fan on, a regular fan, and let it blow all the way down the tier, and everybody, all of us,
would be in our cells, on the ground, no shirts, in our boxers to at least feel the coldness of the floor so we can at least cool down. And you're in a cell where you're like, "I can't drink this water. I gotta keep throwing water in my face." There's dormitories and cell areas. So, in the cell area, it would just be me. So cells only have one individual. It's different from
different jails or prisons, but on Rikers Island, you had
at least, like, 20 people, like, you know, one per cell. In dormitory, it'll be, like, 50 people. And dormitory would be a little bit scary because the bed would be an arm's length of how close they was. If you want to wake up somebody, you can just reach out your
hand and just tap them. When it talks about
being in crowded spaces, the dormitory was one of the
most horrible places to be at. The population in 2020 was at 4,000. Now, today, it's at 6,000. The majority of those times when you see a collective
of detainees together is when they're probably going to court or when they're on the visiting floor or maybe for medical. When I was doing my
second bid, when I was 19, I actually came back to Rikers to try to get my cases
to run collectively. They was running wild. Three and a half year for
the case, the robbery, and then a year and a half
for violating probation. At that time, my brother was a member of the Trinitarios, and at that time when I
went back into Rikers, there was this beef between
the Bloods and the Trinitarios, and I found out he was
in a different dormitory, but I found out that there was, as they say, "money" on my brother's head to harm him from the Bloods. And I found out they was having a meeting at a lower library, and I was like, "Let me go in there and tell them that's not going to happen." When I sat down, I said,
"That is my blood brother that y'all talking about
trying to put hands on." They was mad because
he didn't want to give some tobacco to the Bloods. That was the moment where I was like, I felt that the change came, right? That gangs are, you know, sometimes they put family against family. And I was like, "Nope.
Nobody better not touch him, and if it does get in a situation, it should be a one-on-one." One day, you know, I
woke up the next morning. I was in a dormitory. My brother was in the same dorm as me. It was so sad. Not because — I was
happy to see my brother. It was sad because my
moms had both of her sons in prison. One doing 16, the other one trying to
finish their five years. It was that moment in my life where I just kind of
looked, and I was like, "Yo, it gotta be a different life for me." That meant that I decided
to drop being Blood. Advocates from the city are just tired of hearing stories of how much Rikers has slowly been killing our peoples, spiritually, mentally, and physically. And it hasn't changed. The only thing that changed is that the youth are not on Rikers. Rikers has became more violent. I turn on the TV, like everyone else, and I hear about somebody
losing their life on Rikers. I tear up just like them, you know? I tear up for their family because I know that I could
have been one of them. A lot of people who are
going to Rikers Island are individuals who have
mental-health problems, who are poor, can't be
able to pay their bail, and are individuals who
are coming from communities that are poor, overincarcerated,
and overpoliced. When you say you survived
Rikers, that's a real thing. Because even now, since 2020, close to 30-something deaths. I mean, it's going to keep going up. In 2020, some of the
legislation was introduced and passed was something
called the Kalief law. Kalief Browder was one of the
most knowledgeable individuals who experienced Rikers as a youth and started speaking about it. I just got lost with Kalief Browder because I think a lot of times when we think about Kalief Browder and everything that he went through, getting abused by
correctional officers, and, that one hit us the most. The Kalief law really got the population from where it was, 20,000, to the 4,000. But a lot of that right
now that has been growing is because of broken-window
policing, right? I think because of the Kalief law, when we went up to Albany, passed the speedy trial,
discovery law, and bail reform. Bail reform, the bail reform issue was you have people in there, they was in there for
maybe, like, shoplifting, and their bail will be, like, $5,000. They'll keep pushing his court date back, and they'll use the method
of keeping you incarcerated on Rikers until you give
up and cop out, right? Or take whatever they're
trying to give you. And that's a tactic that also gets used. What we're also seeing is
the population is growing because resources are declining. The resources that were needed to fully provide Rikers Island to the next chapter of
closing was not happening. I think what sent me to the
path on Rikers is poverty. People don't understand
how poverty impacts you. You know, when I was very young, me and my mom, we was homeless. I think for me, I get traumatized knowing that, right? And experiencing that with my moms, and then growing up seeing people around
you being in the street. At 8 or 9 years old, I was
already out in the neighborhood trying to figure stuff out, and, you know, 14, 15 years old, started getting harassed by police. Even being so young, you
know, walking down the street from middle school, from elementary, imagine you getting thrown on the wall by this big police
officer who's, like, 6'3", 200 pounds, and you're just a kid. My brother was incarcerated. He was incarcerated for 16 years, and my uncle was incarcerated for around 7 ½ years, but it's not just them, you know? Most of my family been
locked up all the time, and I grew up to be a man too early. Being tried as an adult meant that the judge
doesn't see me as a youth, that it doesn't matter
if I was 16, 120 pounds, that he sees me as
someone who's a grown man. I think I regret just the violence, right? Like, it's hard, right? Because you leave these spaces; you still gotta look
yourself in the mirror. I'm 32. I've been in
the system for 14 years. What I mean, "in the system,"
that means in jail, prison, under some type of parole,
probation, supervision. And I'm 32, so this past two years been my first two years to being free. It feels really good not reporting to anyone or, you know, being able to know I'm done, you know? In 2015 when I came home,
I worked for Drive Change, basically a food truck that, it hired formerly incarcerated youth. They got involved in a lot of
social-justice work, right? They help people out to also figure out, what do they want to do further in their life? And for them, they noticed that
I was always a good speaker. Like, "You need to get
involved with campaigns." So, the campaign is called
the Campaign to Close Rikers. They're led by a organization
called Freedom Agenda, and their goal was basically to keep continuing the organizing
until it finally closes. The city has closed some
facilities on Rikers and facilities that are a part of Rikers, like the Brooklyn facility, C-74. I can't wait till 2027,
because I'll be right there, right next to the bridge
trying to collect a brick.
