Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

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0:52This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Take a moment and think back to your high school years, where you lived, who your friends were, what you were into. Now imagine that your junior and senior years of high school never happened. And instead, you had spent those years trapped in a jail cell without ever being convicted of a crime. This is not a story out of Kafka. It's what happened to Kalief Browder, a teenager from the Bronx. When Browder was just 16, he was held for robbery and assault charges after allegedly stealing a backpack. He spent three years on Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, waiting to go to trial.

1:36New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder in 2014, and the case put a spotlight on all the failings of New York City's justice system. Delays in the courts, the overuse of solitary confinement, teenagers charged as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. Two years after Browder got out of jail, he took his own life. The suicide became national news and was mentioned by President Obama in an op-ed condemning the overuse of solitary confinement. Shortly after Browder's death, a court ruled that conditions at Rikers Island were so bad that the jail was put under federal oversight.

2:17Things did not improve. So far this year, seven people have died at the jail or shortly after being released. And last month, New York City lost control of the jail when a federal judge said she would appoint an outside official to run it. The 10th anniversary of Browder's death was on June 6th. Jennifer Gonnerman went back to the recordings from her hours of interviews with him. And you can hear her pen scratching in the background as she took notes.

2:52I met Khalif about nine months after he got out of jail. This was early in 2014. Here, eat your food now, it's hot. Yeah, no, so I just have like a bunch of little questions that are mostly just... We get together near his lawyer's office. Usually Khalif showed up wearing a hoodie with one earbud in his ear, the other dangling down. All right. I have a whole list of stuff I'd type in. He came across as shy and quiet, but when I would turn on a tape recorder, he would talk, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch. Not just about his time in jail but about his life before when he was still just a sophomore in high school.

3:27I'm not going to talk to you and tell you I was a good kid and did all my work. I did do my work but I did fool around with the girls and the kids playing in the hallways. I was a kid doing what kids did. We were playing around in the bathroom. Sometimes get the hallway patch play around in my friend's classroom or whatever the teacher would be like, get out. I'm like, all right, all right, all right, I'm chill, miss. I'm going to go to my class. Stuff like that. Like flirt with girls in the hallway, that kind of thing? Right. Khalif's life as a high school student ended late one night in May of 2010.

3:59To be honest, I thought it was just a routine stop and search, or stop and frisk. When they came out the car, they told me and my friend to put our hands on the wall, and I just thought it was a search. Yeah, don't worry about it. You're just going to go to the police. You just want to figure out some things. it's most likely you're going to go home. I know I didn't do anything, so I said, all right, I'll go to the precinct, but then I'm going to come home. But it didn't, I never went home. Khalif was taken over the bridge to Rikers Island, where he entered a whole different reality. That whole Rikers Island thing is one big misunderstanding.

4:36Like, the right and wrong is weird in there. Like, what's right to them isn't right, and what's wrong isn't wrong. It took a whole lot of getting used to it in there. For most of Khalif's time on Rikers, he was in solitary confinement, usually a 12-by-7-foot cell, for at least 23 hours a day. He got sent to solitary for fighting with other inmates, but once you got there, it was very easy to rack up more and more days. And the worst time of year was the summer. They have a vent, and it blows heat for some reason. I don't know why. You would think that it would blow out cold air, but it's heat.

5:14If you put your hand next to it, it's heat. The vents did serve another purpose, though. All day long, inmates had conversations through them. I'll fake befriend somebody. What do you call it, fake befriend? Right, because I'm not really trying to become your friend, but I'm talking to you. But then they feel like they're your friend, and then they want to talk about all this other stuff. I don't want to talk about that stuff. Who does they want to talk about? gang stuff or I robbed this person or I shot this person. A bunch of dumb stuff and I don't want to hear that. And then there's times when they talk to themselves and yell at themselves and bang their heads on the wall all day and they're very loud.

5:56You know it's real because they'll be in an event with you for about a month or two and they do it all day every day. So you know it's not a game. What if it's 11 o 'clock at night? that could be going on 11 o 'clock at night? No, 11. It'll be 4 a.m. in the morning and the dude will be kicking, yelling to the top of his arms. Then you try to talk to them, but they don't understand what you're trying to say because they're mentally disturbed, so they get mad and then they start doing it more. I mean, I have one dude, he was talking to himself all day, every day. He used to actually have, like, how we're having a conversation, just like that with himself all day.

6:33That's the type of person where where Once in the Blue Moon I'd really listen to and just laugh to myself. Like there was a time when, you know, he was talking about a video game, Grand Theft Auto, and one of the Grand Theft Autos that he was talking about, I actually played it. So when he was talking to himself about it and the stuff you do in the game, I was actually laughing because he was telling the truth. But when you're trying to go to sleep and he's yelling and that goes out the window, you're like, it's not even funny no more, it's really annoying.

7:04Jennifer Gonnerman speaking with Kalief Browder. More in a moment. This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. WNYC Studios is supported by Hero Bread. It's back to school time, and busy days can lead to some shortcuts when it comes to your health goals.

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11:28The way I see it was like they put me in jail for something I didn't do. I might as well try to do something. So I used to take the school thing serious. I used to really be looking forward to taking a test. And the CO would come and then she'll pick up people's schoolwork and I'm on the top tier. and I call her, yo, miss, come to such and such cell on the top. I got work for you. Hey, I'm coming up there right now. Then they don't come. Then you call the captain. Captain, my work, what's going on? I'm going to find out. Just give me an hour. I'm going to come back and see what's going on. Then nobody, before you know the shift's changing, you're like, dad, you're trying to really progress.

12:06You really, this is school. You're not talking about anything else. You're talking about school and they still don't even respect it.

12:20All day I'm thinking about that, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I used to actually beg this correction officer. They would finish surfing the food and there's always extras. But it would be, you know, two, three slices of bread left over. But I'm hungry. So I would ask him, I would say, you know, can I get that bread? And he would tell me no. You don't want that. Why not? Because it's the end piece of the bread. I don't care if that's the end piece of the bread. I'm hungry. I want that bread. Nah, you don't want it. And they'll tell me no. Khalif endured violence on Rikers Island at the hands of correction officers and other inmates.

12:56But when I asked him what was the worst part of being on Rikers, he didn't say the violence. It was the hunger. Sometimes, if you made a guard mad, when he came around with the meal trays, he'd skip your cell. You're just stuck in a cell and you're getting starved. And you're hungry. and then at nighttime, you can't even go to sleep because your ribs are touching. Literally, how can you not get angry at that? Just being in a situation where you can't do nothing and you know you're helpless, that's very stressful. Like, and you're just powerless. When it's hot and the walls are sweating, the heat's coming out the vent, you didn't get in the shower past two days, your cell's dirty, and then you've read all your books already, and you're just sitting there, that's very stressful.

13:45Like, it's crazy. Do you feel yourself changing? Like, I don't know, getting more angry or short temper or...? The anger would come when I would be in my cell and I would get starved. And then when I try to talk to their superiors, when I try to talk to them, they just walk away from me and then I'm in my cell, so it's not like I could tap his back and be like, hey, I'm talking to you. There was one way to get the attention of a captain. When the officers delivered the food trays and picked them up, they had to unlock the slot in the cell door. If you were quick enough, you could shove your arm out through the slot and keep it there.

14:23The inmates called this holding your slot. Because if you don't hold your slot, you're like an unheard voice. Correction officers will not put you in the shower, and they'll disrespect you or do all types of stuff to you, and you can't tell nobody. You try to talk to the captain, they'll just keep walking on you. Nobody wants to hear you. You have no voice. If you hold your slot, they give you more days on that? It depends because you got some captives that they talk to you. They work it out with you like, what's going on? Like a regular person. Right. But then you got some of them, oh, you're holding your slot.

14:56I don't care. Write him up. So when you take matters into your hands, and it's like a double-edged sword, it might work and it might not work. I used to tell my mom stuff the correction officers used to do to me. And it's like, I remember the days when I used to be able to come to my mom and be like, Mom, I need help. Something happened to me in school. My mom would be there, get me out of trouble. But now I'm in jail and the correction officers are violating my rights. My mom can't even help me. It's a weird situation. My mom was always able to help. And now my mom was just crying on the phone.

15:31It was out of her hands. So it's stressing, especially during the times like Christmas and Thanksgiving when I'm in solitary confinement. And I call my mom and they're telling me, we're eating this, we're doing this, we're doing that. And I'm just sitting in solitary confinement for something I didn't do.

15:55A few times the stress seemed to overtake Khalif. One night he tied his bedsheet into a noose and tried to hang himself from his light fixture. By then, he had been on Rikers for almost two years and was still waiting for his case to go to trial. Every six or eight weeks, he was brought to the Bronx to stand before a judge. Every time with the court, it was always that side of me that telling me, like, you can go home. But then I tried not to hype myself up, because it hurts when you think you're going home and then you don't go home. That's all I used to cut in my mind. I can't wait to go to trial so I can prove I didn't do it.

16:30That's all I used to tell myself. I want to go to trial, I want to go to trial, I want to go to trial. and no trial, no trial. And I used to tell myself, why aren't they ready for trial? I don't understand. Finally, after Khalif had made 30 trips back and forth to court, a judge told him that he could go home today. All he had to do, she said, was to plead guilty. The first thing that came to my head is for them to offer me something like that, they have to know they're wrong. So they know they're wrong, there's no point in taking it. And I told her I didn't do it. I'm not saying I did something I didn't do.

17:01She's like, I'll let you go home today. You won't have no probation. She said a bunch of things that sounded good. And it really was tempting, too. It was a lot mentally because half of you wants to get out of there. And the other half don't want to leave just over the strength of a principal. You know, all of that put together just made my head go crazy.

17:26It's astonishing, but Khalif turned down the offer. Even though he knew that if he went to trial and lost, he could get up to 15 years in state prison.

18:03You think I'm going to just take that and it's okay and I'm going to just go home? No. So all the other guys on Riker's, they don't understand what you're talking about, right? They didn't make any sense to them. They called me all types of names. You're dumb. You're stupid. If that was me, I would have said I did it. Went home. And I'm not going to lie. I mean, it did get to me. When they used to talk like that, I used to go to my cell and lay down and think, like, you know, maybe I am crazy. or maybe I am going too far, but I just did what I felt was right.

18:38At his next court date in the spring of 2013, the judge dismissed the charges against Kalief Browder altogether. He moved back home into his mother's house in the Bronx and enrolled in a GED class. But he could not stop thinking about that day in court, how nobody had apologized to him or even acknowledged the fact that he had just lost three years of his life. You can't understand it if you've never been to Rackers Island. It's not like out here. Out here, you just live life and go about your business. And there, there's no living life. There's no life at all in there. It's just a hell. It's one big hell.

19:18There's no happiness to it at all. If we weren't sitting down and I wasn't asking you about this, Do you think you'll be thinking about it otherwise? I think about jail and the stuff that happened in there and the stuff that I've seen in there every day. I just feel as if there's no way that somebody could possibly tell me to just get over it and stop thinking about that stuff. There's no way. Is that something that people say to you? I mean, some people feel as if I need to get over it, but, you know, it's not easy to get over it.

19:58In the spring of 2014, Khalif found out that he had passed his GED exam on the first try, and he was ecstatic. He enrolled at Bronx Community College, eventually earning a GPA of 3.5. But his mental health problems continued. He had attempted suicide, and a few times he was confined in a hospital psychiatric ward. On a Saturday afternoon, I got a phone call. I saw that it was Kalief's attorney, and I knew that it was bad news. He wouldn't usually call on a Saturday. Kalief had killed himself.

20:35We went to his house that night. His parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles were there, and everyone seemed to be in shock. On the second floor, his father showed me where Khalif had pulled an air conditioner out of the wall, looped a cord around his neck, and pushed his body out through the opening. He was 22 years old.

21:02Now, when I listen back to my interviews with Khalif, I wonder why did he spend so many hours confiding in me, a stranger, about the worst experiences of his life? I know he wanted his suffering to count for something so that other people wouldn't have to go through what he endured. But I also think about how in the end, Khalif never got his day in court. And I think he really just wanted the chance to finally tell his story.

21:29My friends that was in school, they didn't know anything because I bumped into a few of them. They would ask me, where have you been? I haven't seen you in a while. I told them I was arrested, I got locked up. And I had to tell them the sob story. What do you tell them? Like, how do you tell the short version of that story? I would tell them how I got arrested for something I didn't do. It took me 37 months to prove that I didn't do it.

22:05Kalief Browder, who died 10 years ago this June, talking with The New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.