I spent my last morning at the Mental Health Center clearing out my desk and saying hasty good-byes. At noon, Kelly Gordon picked me up and we drove off the island for lunch at a local Chinese restaurant. Though small in stature, Kelly was an administrative dynamo. “We have a great staff,” she said excitedly. “The last chief quit so the place has been in limbo. It’ll be up to us to rebuild and get things stabilized. We don’t have a clinical supervisor yet, but Hugh Kemper is interviewing for one now, so when that spot’s filled, we’ll be in good shape. Hugh is our liaison with Central Office, and we’re lucky—he’s okay. At least we’re not stuck with Yankee Doodle Dandy!”
With that, we both smiled and then started laughing. But when the laughter subsided, Kelly fell silent, and in a measured tone, she said, “Mary, there’s something I should probably tell you.”
This had the same ring to it as George’s announcement when I arrived at the Mental Health Center. “Let me guess. You’re quitting?”
“Well, not right away,” she stammered. “I mean, I’m hoping things will work out, but if something else comes up, I’m out of here. Everyone’s trying to get out—you ought to think about it too.”
I just sighed. We drove back in silence.
But as we pulled up to the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, my spirits picked up. The relatively modern building was bordered by a neatly manicured lawn, and just down the hill the East River sparkled. I had a good feeling about this place. Maybe this was the new beginning I was searching for.
The lobby held the requisite pictures of Mayor Giuliani, Bernard Kerik—newly installed as correction commissioner—and Otis Bantum, the jail’s namesake, a popular former warden. A couple of “trophy cases” showcased dozens of confiscated weapons. Made from odd scraps of metal sharpened to a razor’s edge, some were long and pointy, resembling ice picks, while others were small and compact. The weapons were crude but deadly, a reminder that as nice as OBCC appeared, it was still jail.
Just inside the entryway gate, a picture window revealed an interior courtyard where inmates played basketball. Except for the watchful presence of correction officers, it could have been any city playground.
Kelly steered me to the clinic, where nurses in colorful uniforms that always reminded me of pajamas moved in and out of examining booths, loaded down with stacks of charts. In the center aisle, a row of hapless detainees awaited treatment. Keeping an eye on them was the clinic traffic cop, Officer Pepitone. Another gruff CO, he was on the phone, barking orders to an officer in an outer waiting room. “Send in three more bodies . . . no more than three!”
The clinic captain, standing next to Pepitone, fumbled with a hand-held radio. Two blue chevron patches stitched to the sleeve of his white shirt indicated at least ten years with the department. A chunky man in his late thirties, Captain Ryan put the radio down, and with a ruddy smile pumped my hand. “Welcome to OBCC!”
“He seems kind of nice,” I said to Kelly, as we stepped away.
“He is—and everybody here likes him.”
At the rear of the clinic, an inner recess led to our office, where I met Dr. Ismael Sackett, the chief physician. Wiry and nervous, he shook my hand with an iron grip and informed me he wouldn’t be chief much longer, that he was just waiting on his “demotion.” As a creative alternative to quitting, administrators distrustful of the new regime were lining up for demotions, seeking safety in the union ranks.
The Mental Health office was clean and comfortable, the cinder-block walls painted a soft blue. Around the perimeter of the rectangular room were three desks: one for Kelly, another for me, and a third for our eventual clinical supervisor.
Out in the clinic, Pepitone shouted the start of the afternoon count, and a few minutes later, the Mental Health crew meandered in, and it was with high hopes that I met our staff. Theresa Alvarez and Kathy Blakely, two recently hired young clinicians still fresh with ideals inculcated in school, were eager for managerial stability and support. Lynn Cosgrove, a longtime Montefiore veteran, was older and a bit jaded, but still friendly and receptive. Pete Majors was another clinician from the Montefiore days; he and I knew each other from GMDC, where he’d worked the night shift. Dr. David Diaz, a psychiatrist, was a hefty man in his early fifties who worked exclusively in the Bing. Originally from South America, his ability to flick into his native Spanish was a huge asset in treating the jail’s large Spanish-speaking population. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Christian, was warm and chatty.
We pulled up chairs and, over the next hour, discussed our future work together. As ideas and suggestions were tossed about, it was with a sense of camaraderie and goodwill. An evening meeting with the night staff was equally encouraging. When we locked up the office for the day, I felt that this was it, that I’d finally found the team I was looking for.
* * *
Over the next few days, I became acquainted with the jail, starting off with its Mental Observation Unit, a single fifty-bed dorm. “We’ve got no cells here,” Kelly said, “so if we get a paranoid schizophrenic who needs a cell, we have to send him to an MO in another jail.”
Conveniently located across the hall from the clinic, the Mental Observation Unit was airy and spacious. An abundance of natural light streaming through the mesh-covered windows lent a mellowness to an otherwise depressing scene. Even the cigarette smoke wasn’t as thick here. With the warmer weather, the windows were open, allowing a gentle breeze to flow across the rows of cots where the patients were reading, writing, or dozing. Toward the rear, a suicide prevention aide was engrossed in his paperback.
“It’s calm in here,” I noted. “Where’s the gang? Where are the malingerers?”
“In general population!” Kelly asserted. “This dorm is for the mentally ill only—and I intend to keep it that way!”
“Good!”
In the dayroom, older men played cards while the usual bunch sat around the TV watching a kung fu movie, a jailhouse favorite.
Perched on the edge of a suicide observation cot, an older man with a trim build and closely cropped white hair smoked a cigarette. Behind his dark glasses, his right eye was distorted. “His name’s Roy Evans, and he’s one of those murder-suicide deals,” Kelly whispered discreetly. “He’s here for major depression.” Roy Evans had apparently shot and killed his wife, but the bullet to his own head did little more than mildly affect his speech, disfigure his face, and put him in jail for murder. He nodded at me but did not smile.
Next to Evans, Teddy Gibson smiled shyly. Barely out of his teens, he was lying on his cot, jiggling his legs to the tune on his Walkman. Gibson’s forearms were covered with pink crisscross scars. Kelly told me he was highly impulsive and that, after suffering chronic sexual abuse as a child, the undercarriage of his personality was so fragile that the slightest negative nuance sent him into a self-destructive tirade, as his cut-up arms attested.
As we toured the dorm, we’d acquired a quiet tag-along in the form of George LaRoche, who spoke like someone who was well educated. Wearing canary-colored sweat pants that draped from his thin frame, he became our unofficial guide. Ushering us up and down the rows of cots, he introduced me to Victor, a plump thirtyish fellow in a New York Mets baseball cap and a pair of oversized, jail-issued eyeglasses. When Victor looked up, his eyes went off in different directions. Mentally limited, he’d emptied out a bag of potato chips on a patch of smoothed bedding. “I don’t think they gave me the right amount,” he explained. As he lined up the chips, he told me about himself. “My mom got shot in the belly when she was pregnant with me. The bullet went right through my head. Yeah—that’s what happened. Well, I have to count my chips now. Bye.”
Kelly said that Victor had been arrested on a drug charge, either as a lookout during a drug deal or as an unsuspecting courier. It wasn’t unusual for drug dealers to exploit those with limited mental faculties for various low-level tasks.
George steered us to Ruben, another pal of his with a Jamaican accent. Ruben jumped up to show off his inside-out jacket, its Ralph Lauren label barely clinging to the collar. “You see this?” he said, twirling around. “When I’m here, I wear it like this. But when I go to court,” he said, removing the garment, turning it right side out and slipping into it, “I’m all ready for the judge.”
“Very nice!” I applauded.
“He even wears that jacket to sleep,” chirped the patient next to him.
In any other setting, I would have attributed this jacket routine to an eccentric aspect of Ruben’s mental illness, but in here, I had to admit it was a creative solution to the problem of holding on to one’s court clothes.
Off to the side were two small interview rooms cluttered with old furniture. “I don’t know how they got to be so junked up,” said Kelly, “but they need to be cleaned out so we can use them for sessions—if for no other reason than confidentiality. Right now, the sessions are taking place in the corners of the dorm—no good!”
Kelly also mentioned that group therapy had fallen by the wayside, and patients were only being seen individually. We agreed that we needed to get therapeutic groups back up and running as quickly as possible.
On our way out, we stopped by the bubble to visit the MO officers, a big, sandy-haired CO and his smaller, freckle-faced sidekick. Not exactly hard-nosed officers, Hartman and Burns came off more like a Laurel and Hardy comedy act.
“Welcome to the nuthouse!” Hartman grinned.
Burns, with one hand tickling the top of his head, and the other patting his stomach, hopped around the bubble. “Hooh, hooh, hooh.”
“Meet our steady officers,” Kelly said wryly.
“Sooo,” said Hartman, “you just met a few of our nuts?”
“I prefer to think of them as our patients,” I countered.
“You say potahto—we say potato!” joked Burns, with Hartman slapping his knee in laughter.
Although their sentiments were no surprise—the same as their correctional brethren—these two were essentially good-hearted and well-meaning, a very good sign for us.
As we departed the dorm, I figured managing these fifty beds would be a breeze compared to the 350-bed Mental Health Center. Of course, the tradeoff was that I’d be administering services to general population. And then, of course, there was the matter of the Bing.
I was anxious to finally see the infamous jail within jail, and after a meeting was coordinated with the punitive unit’s newly installed deputy warden, Kelly and I set out for the five-story tower, which was structurally attached to OBCC.
“I’m glad we’re meeting with him,” said Kelly. “It’s really important that we have a good relationship with the dep. I hate to tell you this, Mary, but our biggest challenge in here isn’t the mentally ill or the guys in GP. Far and away, it’s the Bing. Those five hundred cells are always full, and most of these guys are on psych meds—for hallucinating, crying, talking to themselves, defecating, refusing to eat.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so. All four of our psychiatrists carry heavy Bing caseloads. Thank God for the meds. But even with them, a lot of times they reach a point where they can’t hang on anymore, especially if they have long solitary sentences. They get to the end of their rope and start banging their heads, cutting their arms, and trying to hang themselves.”
“And then what?” I asked uneasily.
“Well, obviously, we try to calm them down, talk to them, maybe change the meds. But if we think somebody’s really going to die, then we pull him out and send him over to MHAUII.”
“Sounds like a tropical island.”
“Yeah, hardly. More like ‘Mental Health Assessment Unit for Infracted Inmates.’ Sort of an MO for Bing inmates. All it really is is eight cells in another one of the jails, but it’s smaller and closely monitored by Mental Health staff. It gives them a little relief. But once they’re better, they’re bused right back here to finish the sentence. We’re under a lot of pressure to keep them in, though, because once we send one out, they all start threatening suicide. On the other hand, we can’t have anyone dying. It gets tricky—you’ll see.”
I got the feeling there was a lot I was going to see that I might have preferred not to.
At the end of a long corridor, a lone officer sat in an elevated Plexiglas booth. Heavy black lettering along the wall spelled out the words central punitive segregation unit. We held up our ID badges and the officer inspected them closely. He nodded and the heavy black gate started moving open on its track. We stepped inside, turned a quick corner, and came to an elevator bank.
“They connect to the higher floors,” Kelly explained. “We have a few minutes before our meeting, so let’s peek in at the first floor.”
Kelly rapped on a long tinted window positioned between two plain doors. “The door on the left is 1 South,” she said. “The one on the right is 1 Southwest—fifty cells on each side. It’s the same layout on all five floors.” A CO thrust out a logbook and we signed in. Kelly told the officer that we wanted to go into 1 Southwest. A loud buzz followed, and we pulled open the door on the right.
Cavernous and dimly lit, 1 Southwest was nothing more than rows of sulfur-colored steel doors, one after the next. At the top were little windows, and on the bottom a narrow flap for food trays. The windows were all empty. “They may look empty,” Kelly whispered, “but it’s full capacity in here—they’re still sleeping. This is the only time it’s quiet in here—the only time there’s peace. They’re in these cells twenty-three hours a day—no TV, no radio. They’re entitled to one hour of rec, but most don’t bother with it. They’ve got to be cuffed, shackled, and taken to an outside cage to stand alone and ‘recreate.’ It’s a joke.”
Along the walls, cameras were conspicuously mounted. All Bing activity was carefully monitored, the fallout from a class action suit brought against the city for brutality in the punitive unit when it was located in the House of Detention for Men, the original Rikers jail. Among other horrors, Bing officers had routinely inflicted “welcome beatings” as inmates arrived to serve their sentences. Reports of fractured skulls and perforated eardrums were rampant. As a result, the punitive unit in the old, decrepit jail was shut down and the infracted were transferred to this modern tower, where all activity was monitored by camera.
A set of stairs led down to a processing desk and shower area. At an empty shower stall, Kelly made a glum announcement. “This—is the Mental Health Office.”
“A shower stall?”
“Yup. Pretty pathetic, huh? Up until recently, we’ve been seeing these inmates by going from cell to cell and talking through the doors, but Legal Aid’s complaining that yelling through doors violates confidentiality. And they’re right, but it’s not an easy fix. So, the solution DOC came up with is to give us an escort to take these guys out of their cells and bring them down here for privacy. Problem is, we’re not always getting this escort. That’s what I want to bring up with the dep. Then maybe I can work on getting us a real office in here.”
Kelly looked at her watch. “Let’s go.” We departed the eerie 1 Southwest, ducked into a side stairwell, and walked up to the second floor to the dep’s office.
I don’t know what I expected of someone in charge of a punitive segregation unit, but I definitely didn’t expect the warm and friendly deputy warden Alfred Mancuso. Seated behind mountains of paperwork, a trail of cigarette smoke curling up from his ashtray, Dep Mancuso jumped up to shake our hands. “Hello!” he smiled. In his mid-forties, he was of medium build, sported a dark crew cut, and was well educated, as his framed master’s diploma attested. Beside the diploma were citations, certificates, and ribboned medals for completed marathons; Mancuso was a dedicated runner. On the wall adjacent to his desk, five long rows of TV screens captured the activities on each floor of the Bing.
Pushing papers aside, he issued directives to a couple of captains who’d followed us in and motioned for us to sit down. “So, Mary,” he said after we were introduced, “what do you think of the CPSU so far?”
“Kind of quiet,” I replied.
“Quiet! Hah! It’s still early. As soon as the meals start, the mayhem begins. Just as soon as we unlock the slots to put food trays through, out come the arms—swiping, hitting, grabbing. And lately it’s been really bad. They all know I’m new here, so I’m being tested. We’re getting a big increase in use of force. At the beginning I expect it, but once these guys see I’m consistent and mean what I say, the numbers should come down. That’s what usually happens when there’s a change of guard—least that’s what I’m hoping. I’ve been with the department for close to twenty years, and nothing prepares you for this. But there’s no getting around this post if you want to become a full warden. You first have to prove yourself in the Bing. Let’s see if I survive it,” he smiled.
He paused as a scene on a monitor caught his attention. His eyes narrowed and he dragged hard on his cigarette, watching as a handcuffed inmate was led out of his cell. Satisfied with how it was being handled, he returned to us. “Okay, where were we?”
“Well,” said Kelly, “our immediate problem concerns confidentiality.” She outlined our dilemma and explained that the warden had promised us an escort. “The thing is, the escort isn’t always showing up.”
“Well, now, I can see how the cell-to-cell arrangement would work well for the department. It’s a hassle to pull these guys out—they’ve got to be searched, cuffed . . . but if the warden’s made that commitment, then I guess that’s how it’s got to be.” He thought for a moment and said, “How’s this: I’ll make sure you get an escort every morning. If nobody shows up, call me immediately.”
“That’s great,” Kelly said with a note of relief.
“Happy to help. After all, it’s the psych meds that make this place even slightly manageable. Plus, I’d really, really like to avoid suicides. So, if you have any issues in here—anything at all—my door is always open.”
“Thank you,” we said.
With business concluded, Mancuso dared us to sample some of the hot peppers he kept in colorful jars on his desk and told us a couple of corny jokes. As we laughed, I was uncomfortably aware that just outside his office, hundreds of human beings were awakening to another day of grim isolation.