Photo: Kodi Barth Security signs like these dot the last stretch to Rikers Island.

Ex-inmates have a joke: There is only one hassle-free way to get to Rikers — getting arrested. Rikers Island is surprisingly difficult to get to. Even if you find the right bus, which is harder than it sounds, you may still not get in. "You're not the first Rikers' visitor to make the mistake. You should have taken the Q101 Express," a bus operator told a passenger, referring to the Steinway Transit Corporation bus marked Rikers-Island-Limited Stop-Service. That bus starts out on the south side of the Plaza between 27th and 28th Streets. All its passengers, who are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, tend to have the same destination — the jail on Rikers. Driving beyond the Q101's last stop on 19th Avenue, the Rikers bus mounts a two-lane bridge rising from the northwest side of Queens and extending more than a mile over the East River. To inmates, the bridge separating the land of the free from the land of the jailed seems like the longest bridge in the world: it takes just minutes to cross over, but an eternity to cross back. Corrections officers guard this road round the clock. Planes flying in or out of LaGuardia Airport's northern runways roar overhead incessantly, while thousands of cars and buses commute past this steel-and-concrete roadway each day. Yet the bridge remains unknown to most New Yorkers. Even one M60-bus driver who repeatedly travels the road to LaGuardia, only 100 yards away, did not know where that bridge heads. Signs prohibiting cameras, tape recorders, cell phones, beepers and weapons are everywhere along the last stretch of the road to Rikers. The prohibitions also plaster the walls of the Control Building at Rikers, where visitors are frisked before being given access."If you don't have the right identification and right reason to travel, you go right back to the bus," said Bob, 51, who recently visited an inmate. And you don't get to visit an inmate unless you're a relative, and even then, you can only see them if they've put your name on a list. Otherwise, one must channel a request through the desk of the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, who receives about 1,500 such requests each month. There are no surprise visits on Rikers. By Kodi Barth

An Island Slow to Reveal Its Secrets
By Kodi Barth

he advice discussed in the dark
corridors of New York's most infamous island, Rikers, is inspired by great strategists. "Ask Napoleon Bonaparte," says one career criminal. "Never disturb your enemy when he's making a mistake."

Pop star R. Kelly also wrote a song about the lifestyle that spawned Rikers' best-known guests. "How loud quiet nights in the mist of crime," he sang in his 1997 hit, "Gotham City." "A city of justice, a city of love, a city of peace; we all need it, can't live without it."

There are as many tales of Rikers Island, New York's largest jail center which lies on a 415-acre plot of land in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, as there are visitors to it. And the island evokes powerful emotions, from philosophy to song. <Click here to take a photo tour of a trip to Rikers Island>

For first-time inmates, like Johnny, 31, the island shouldn't even be on the map. Johnny, who got out only recently from a 12-day stint in Rikers' jails, says that if he could, he would sue everyone who mentions Rikers.

"Everything on that island is jail," he says. "There's no rehabilitation; it's all incarceration."
Johnny spent time at Rikers after being convicted of a $1,200 credit card fraud. "It's a different world; there's nothing like it."

For Jennifer Gonnerman, a Village Voice writer who roamed the island for a week in the summer of 2000, Rikers is a dump. "Rikers prisoners refer to their home as 'the Rock,' but from an archaeological point of view it's more accurate to call this place a dump," she said.

According to Gonnerman, before Rikers Island housed inmates, it served as a repository for what no one could use — broken boilers, old sofas, horse manure, garbage, tin cans, street sweepings and earth from subway excavations. This mountain of refuse burned all day, attended by hordes of rats feasting on the city's leftovers.

In the modern era, the island has only been transformed into a different sort of disposal ground, where society's unwanted humans are dumped.

With a budget of $860 million a year, Rikers could be its own town. Taxpayers foot the island's bill, yet most New Yorkers have no idea where it is. "Like most jails, it performs an expert magic trick-it makes people vanish," says Jennifer Wynn in her 2001 book, "Inside Rikers."

In the books of the New York Department of Correction, which runs Rikers, the island is the best thing that ever happened to the city. It keeps people who are perceived as threats to the peace of the city safely away. And the department claims to do this efficiently, employing just over 10,000 officers and 1,500 civilians to manage an annual inmate population of up to 130,000. "The world's boldest correction officers," is what the department calls its staff.

But for the officers who actually run the show, Rikers can either catapult a relatively modest career into a celebrity, or bury a chief. In August 2000, the city elevated Rikers' chief, Bernard Kerik, to Commissioner of the New York Police Department. But last February, one of its three-star chiefs, Anthony Serra, was convicted of over 80 criminal counts he committed while running the island.

Episcopal Bishop Mark Sisk of New York is a critic of Rikers for other reasons. He says that New York prisons and jails, including Rikers, are big business in the state.

alling "our deeply misguided prison system" a threat to the very core of society, the bishop points out that, "to a stunning degree, our prisons have become a major industry whose primary purpose is to provide jobs, and even, in some contexts, profits, from the warehousing of young black and Hispanic men." Up to 99 percent of inmates at Rikers are black or Hispanic

PHOTO: Kodi Barth

The gates to Rikers, right before the bridge.

On the other hand, Jennifer Wynn is trying to make things better for inmates on Rikers. Wynn, the director of the Prison Visiting and Prison Mental Health Projects at the Fortune Society, was once what she called "a dispassionate journalist." It was as a reporter that she first entered Rikers Island in 1991. "When a correction officer asked me to pull my bra away from my body to see that I wasn't concealing drugs, I closed my eyes and swore I would never return," she wrote.

But she did return — many times. Today, Wynn teaches a writing class to prisoners at Rikers and advocates the reform of the criminal justice system.

"I returned because working behind bars offers a glimpse into a hidden work, a world of contradictions and extremes, a world where little is sacred and anything can happen," she says. "I return because my students show me that untapped talent languishes behind bars and that good programs save money and lives."

People who fly over Rikers Island or who catch a glimpse of it on their bus ride to LaGuardia wonder what secrets lie over there. Those who have set foot on the island say there are, indeed, many secrets.

"It doesn't take many visits to 'the Rock,' as the inmates call it," says Wynn, "to see that Rikers Island is the dirty secret of the richest city on earth; a caged city floating in the East River that most New Yorkers couldn't find on a map."

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