Rikers Island Fight Club

Turns out, exposing the fight club at Rikers 4 years ago didn’t change too much. If you’re new here, the fight club called “the program” is run by inmates and was condoned by correction officers until 2 staff members went to jail for not intervening when an teenaged inmate was beat to death. Now the program is just supported by C.O.s by way of passive complicity. 

…hundreds of teen inmates (were interviewed) concluded that under a practice known as “the Program,” guards were deputizing inmates, often in the teen jail, and pitting them against one another in fights as a way to keep order and extort them for phone, food, and television privileges.

Maybe because the inmate operated control hierarchy seems to be taking a load off of the staff, officials can’t really be bothered, and that this is somehow acceptable when talking about paying your debt to society for many people reminds me of Kolber’s unintentional punishment paper:

…we use the term “punishment” to capture not only intentional harsh treatment but certain unintentional harsh treatment as well. This means that the widely accepted view that punishment is an intentional infliction requires substantial caveats. It also means that any purported justification of punishment that addresses only the intentional infliction of punishment is woefully incomplete.

The Voice article is here including graphic shots of both teen and adult inmates slashed or beaten. So even if you believe they get what they deserve, you’re still way off as per the definition of punishment under the law. 

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