On June 17, Ruben Rodriguez got two brightly colored envelopes in the mail. His grandmother had sent a card with a silly cartoon. His mother wrote a more sentimental message on her card and tucked a folded piece of loose-leaf inside it. That was a letter from a girl letting Ruben know she was pregnant with his child and planned to get an abortion.
Otherwise, the south Bronx teenager spent his 18th birthday as he’d spent the previous 30 days — killing time in punitive segregation, aka “the Box,” on Rikers Island. Ruben liked to listen to his portable radio, but correction officers, known as COs, had confiscated his only AA batteries. The Department of Correction refused to comment for this story.
So he passed the hours doing what he could. He wrote letters. He dropped to the concrete floor and did push-ups to get strong. He paced around his 7-by-12-foot cell. Occasionally, he would yell back and forth to other inmates locked in solitude.
And, he thought about his childhood.
[For more of this story, written by Theresa Fisher, go to http://jjie.org/one-kids-love-...penal-colony/107884/]
Comments (0)