For thirty-four years, a lawyer in New York City named Jonathan Chasan has been trying to stop officers from beating up inmates on Rikers Island. He started working at the Legal Aid Society when he was thirty-one years old, in a unit known as the Prisoners’ Rights Project. The job could be very depressing: fielding calls from inmates who reported being attacked by officers; collecting medical records describing broken bones and perforated ear drums; studying photos of prisoners’ bruised and battered bodies; filing lawsuits that dragged on and on. For years, nobody paid much attention to what he was trying to do; Rikers was off the radar of most politicians and reporters. But this year that has started to change—due, in part, to aggressive reporting by the Times—and finally, this week, Chasan acquired the ultimate ally: the Department of Justice.
[For more of this story, written by Jenniger Gonnerman, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...uit-end-abuse-rikers]
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