The illustrator Medar de la Cruz captures his experiences working as a library assistant at Rikers Island, one of the world’s largest and most notorious jails.
For more than a year, I’ve been working in New York City jails as a library assistant for the Brooklyn Public Library. I started out at the jail complex on Rikers Island. Now I work at the Vernon C. Bain Center.
Phones and cameras aren’t allowed on Rikers, but I’m an illustrator. Sometimes I saw things that I felt compelled to draw from memory later. The Vernon C. Bain Center, which everyone calls the Boat, is a jail barge across the water from Rikers. It smells like fish and trash. On the second and third floors of the infirmary, the hallways were so narrow that the book cart barely squeezed through. Men here were caged by themselves in “protective custody” and could rarely leave their cells. I passed them books through a slot.
I could only imagine how lonely my patrons felt when they didn’t speak the same languages as those around them. Our books became their main sources of entertainment and escape.
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