What life is really like in Rikers Island

It’s a short trip across a bridge to get to a 413-acre parcel of landfill — Rikers Island, New York City’s most notorious lockup — situated like a 19th-century penal colony in the middle of the East River.Ranked as one of the 10 worst correctional facilities in the US, inmates there await being shipped to a federal prison for long stretches, or are short-timers doing what’s called “City Time.”One former Rikers resident, the disgraced septuagenarian film producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who had been awaiting trial on sex crimes charges, claimed the Big Apple’s pen was rotten to the core.

He sued the city in November for $5 million, charging “deplorable conditions” there where he feared for his life.Now David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan — both of whom spent time in Rikers — have collaborated to write “City Time, On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island,” (New York University Press), an expose about life at the nearly century-old Rikers, the island that once served as a military training ground during the Civil War, and today has a view of LaGuardia’s runways and the Mets home ground, Citi Field.Arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, Shanahan served a brief Rikers sentence and wrote a historical study of the prison after his release, while Campbell, convicted in 2018 of “brawling” at an anti-fascist protest, served a year of city time.  Their book reveals first-hand accounts of the brutality and banality of everyday Rikers life. “The violence and utter meaninglessness of short-stay incarceration is reflected in every facet of city time.The crushing boredom that suffuses daily life is symptomatic of a social order that simply has no use for the people locked up there — in a dangerous, disgusting place that will leave them worse off than when they entered,” write the authors.Both college-educated and heterosexual, they luckily avoided the violence that accompanies Rikers trans and gay sexual subculture.

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