Reflections on Rikers by Grace Ortez
Image courtesy: Edwin Santana / Tuff Art Media
I'm a proud daughter of the Bronx, and I serve my NYC community as a peer crisis responder, restorative justice practitioner, and reentry advocate. My commitment to social service work stems from my survival of complex violence in my childhood. I’ve experienced a high degree of physical, psychological, and sexual brutalization in my lifetime, the details of which are stomach-turning. Due to the suffocating weight, I've carried in the aftermath of my experiences, I meet every single sunrise with anxiety medications to quiet the c-PTSD that wakes up with me, and I end my days with antidepressants to fend off nightmares, and to give the next day a fighting chance.
I’m moved to share these explicit details about my life experiences because I’ve seen others, including Mayor Eric Adams, insist they’re speaking on my behalf - on behalf of victims - to justify cyclical cruelty and the outright inefficacy of their carceral approaches to violence in our communities. Every time Mayor Adams and his allies in power speak on victimization in defense of keeping Rikers Island alive, I hear them hijack a narrative that does not belong to them.
The ongoing crisis at Rikers Island presents a crossroads at which we have the chance to march toward a new horizon in New York City. This moment asks of us one fundamental question: Are we interested in building a society that will continue to respond to violence with retribution at the expense of continued victimization, or one that builds social structures which lessen the likelihood of future victimization by funding restorative, rehabilitative community resources?
Decisions made in our city’s budgeting should exclusively reflect the recipe of good outcomes. We’re all well familiar with the social determinants which predictably lead to positive life outcomes: loving, safe, and stable home environments, adequate resources, and interconnected communities. Rikers, on the other hand, has for generations produced isolation, desperation, and recidivism. As a place where violence mutates and multiplies, how could we expect anything else?
Children who grow up with adverse childhood experiences are significantly more likely to struggle with substance use disorder and increased likelihood of experiencing incarceration. When children are abused, they face emotional responses far before the point at which their brain has reached maturity, and as a result, traumatized children often struggle with mood regulation and maladaptive social behaviors because they are trapped in a survival mode, a perpetual coping, rather than getting their fair chance to psychologically develop at a healthy pace.
The same conditions, the same trauma that so often leads a person to commit an act of violence mirrors the contexts which led to my very own victimization — an unsafe home environment, a habitual deficit of supportive community resources, the impact of unaddressed trauma running rampant in our bloodstreams. I have far more in common with those who end up incarcerated than those who judge them. Given the rates of adverse childhood experiences present in the lives of the majority of people who end up trapped in the criminal legal system, I know that more often than not the accused, the condemned, the banished and the victimized come from the very same soil.
Image courtesy: Edwin Santana / Tuff Art Media
Rikers Island is a place in which we warehouse and criminalize trauma, deepening and extending its roots. It needs to be recognized as a machine of perpetual mass-scale destruction and as the physical embodiment of bad policies and squandered funds that could have been invested in community resources that would guarantee positive social outcomes. Prioritizing the closure of Rikers means prioritizing a reduction of violence in NYC. If we’re continually warehousing humans in hyper-violent environments as a form of punishment and subsequently stigmatizing them, limiting their opportunities upon return to our communities, we cannot continue to be surprised that the cycles of violence in our most impacted communities never close.
Jails and prisons do nothing to keep us safe — they merely uphold the illusion of safety by satisfying a hunger for retribution. We can either be a city that invests in resources to create safer communities, or one which insists on revenge as a guiding principle. But not both. I acknowledge fears and frustrations about the harrowing realities of community violence we face, but we must commit to having conversations that allow us to be able to address this violence at its roots, lest we continually do nothing but react to its aftermath. What broke us will never heal us. The violence of incarceration only begets more violence in communities, and where there is violence there are victims and the pervasive shadow of complex trauma.
As Mayor Adams is tasked with major budget decisions, I wonder if he’ll decide to spend our money building a city that commits to closing the cycles of intergenerational trauma of incarceration, or if will he use that same money to repeat a failed pattern that ensures many more victims?
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The above essay was originally published in Spanish on the El Diario website. The original text can be found here.
Grace Ortez is a member of Freedom Agenda and a staunch advocate in the Campaign to Close Rikers.
Grace is a systemic transformation, decarceration, and abolition-minded human rights advocate, activist, community organizer, writer, and challenger of the punishment paradigm. She is a proud Bronx Native with Indigenous Salvadoran refugee roots. An outspoken survivor of childhood abuse, violence and complex trauma, she pours the lessons of her lived experiences and survivorship into her advocacy to bring stories and conversations at the intersections of racial injustice, poverty, addiction, abuse, mental illness, neurodivergence, generational wounds and complex trauma out of the shadows and into the public discourse and consciousness. She lives by the principle that none of us are defined by our worst moments in life, by our challenges, by our obstacles - and that absolutely not a single one of us is beyond redemption.
Grace is a proud member of the Re/Creation Writing Collective, Freedom Agenda, the Campaign to Close Rikers Island, and the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA).
