Rikers, what good do you think you do?

The Brooklyn Rail, June 2022: Rikers, what good do you think you do?

“When Johnny Cash performed for the inmates of San Quentin prison in 1969, he wrote a song especially for the occasion. The first several verses ask why the prison exists and what good it could possibly do for those imprisoned there or society as a whole. Its last verse concludes, to a roar of applause:

San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell
May your walls fall and may I live to tell
May all the world forget you ever stood
And may all the world regret you did no good.

“At the time, the song was considered naïve pandering. This was still the era in which liberal academics and politicians believed in ‘penal welfarism,’ that America’s carceral institutions could be transformed into something better than the torturous dungeons described by Cash. A notable example was the planned expansion of New York’s Rikers Island from a small penal work camp to a state-of-the-art facility of human rehabilitation. Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives, the first history of Rikers written in what may be its final years, explains why the project failed, why renewed progressive efforts to replace facilities like Rikers today will fail again, and why Cash was probably right.”

Additional reading:

Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage by Jarrod Shanahan on bookshop.org

Truthout, October 17, 2021: Rikers’ Forceful Guard Union Is Deepening the Jail’s Humanitarian Crisis

Jacobin, August 8, 2019: When Incarceration Kills