Last year, Kalief Browder allowed me to interview him many times about his experience in the New York City criminal-justice system. At sixteen, he had been arrested in the Bronx for a robbery that he insisted he hadn’t committed. He endured three years on Rikers Island before his case was dismissed. When I met him, a year ago, he was out of jail and not eager to revisit his time there—but ultimately he did, describing what it was like to spend months in solitary confinement, to miss the last two years of high school, to become so despondent that he tied his bedsheets into a noose.
Although recounting these memories was often traumatic for him, Kalief told his story for the same reason that many journalistic subjects do: he held a vague hope that politicians would find out what had happened to him and implement changes, so that no one would suffer as he had. There is never a guarantee that anything will change, and often nothing does. This morning, however, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the state’s top judge, Jonathan Lippman, will announce a plan to speed up the city’s courts, so that fewer people will remain in jail without trial for as long as Kalief did. In the first part of the plan, everyone who has been held in the city’s jails for more than a year without being convicted of a crime—about fifteen hundred men and women—will have their cases fast-tracked, with the goal of resolving half of these cases within six months.
[For more of this story, written by Jennifer Gonnerman, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...d-a-change-at-rikers]
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