Rikers Island, New York (2011) | rblfmr / Shutterstock
Not only is Rikers Island geographically isolated—a landmass situated on the East River between the Bronx and Queens—but what happens there is kept out of the public’s sight. Journalists are given limited entry into day-to-day life on the island, which houses the city’s largest jail. Now, in City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025), authors David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan—two political activists imprisoned at Rikers for “protesting activity”—offer something new: an account of their daily lives inside, situated within a sociological discussion of mental health, substance use, the racial disparities extant in the carceral system, and stereotypes about Rikers (and jail more generally).
“City time” is a criminal sentence named for its function to “alleviate” the burden on the state-run prisons. New Yorkers serve city time sentences for nonviolent petty crime. The authors observe that the most common charge among the inmates was misdemeanor minor theft, meaning that the items stolen totaled less than a thousand dollars in value. The next most common charges were misdemeanor assault, drug possession, and criminal contempt.
In City Time, Campbell and Shanahan find that their time is taken from prisoners in quotidian ways: Tasks as essential as securing a toothbrush, shaving one’s beard, showering, receiving a prescription for eyeglasses, and getting toilet paper required inmates to jump through bureaucratic hoops and negotiate with correction officers—some indifferent, some more sympathetic. In addition, inmates knew which correction officers let the drinking of hooch (made with oranges and sugar packets stolen from the kitchen) or the smoking of K2 (packed into paper ripped out from facility-provided Bibles) slide during their rounds.
Alongside their account of the prison’s official routine and systems, Campbell and Shanahan discuss the novel social norms and community made necessary by the inmates’ forced proximity. Campbell and Shanahan remark on their initial surprise at overhearing “snippets of conversation with upbeat phrases like ‘Four months? You good,’ ‘You outta here,’ and ‘You right there, bro’ … several times a day.” Sometimes inmates shared drugs, or the crafters of the resource-heavy morir soñando—a milk- and orange juice-based drink, directly translated “to die dreaming,”—occasionally doled out free portions to their compatriots.
Satisfying basic needs became a community-wide endeavor. Every night, after eating the facility’s largely tasteless and nutritionless “chow,” the inmates would concoct “crackhead soup” in the dormitories: Packages of instant ramen are boiled using a hot plate, with a plastic trash bag acting as a pot. Crackhead soup is divvied out equally. In addition, milk stolen from kitchens and kept cold in jury-rigged ice buckets was a source of protein available by barter.
Particularly useful to readers is Campbell and Shanahan’s deliberate separation of stereotypes and systemic truths—distinctions revealed through narrative, like anecdotes about food and hygiene, directly sourced dialogue, and sociological research.
For example, the authors counter the stereotype that people who receive city time are dangerous and deserve to be locked away with the fact that most of Rikers inmates doing city time are working-class Black or Brown New Yorkers targeted for petty crimes that white people can—and do—get away with. These include drug possession, low-risk theft, assault, and theft of services. (The authors, both white political activists, had no previous criminal records before their sentencing.)
In response to the stereotype that prisoner-on-prisoner violence runs rampant in jails, the authors counter that inmates check in with each other, share their goods, perform favors for one another, and generally care about the well-being of their fellow inmates.
Or there’s the stereotype that jailhouse showers are to be avoided; the truth, Campbell and Shanahan write, is that Rikers inmates are socially ostracized if they shower naked. Most men shower in their underwear and cover up as much as possible.
In offering access to incarcerated perspectives on Rikers Island, City Time is a crucial addition to debates about the US carceral system—which detains about 2 million Americans at any one time, and is the most aggressive such system in the world. Campbell and Shanahan explore the factors contributing to the incarceration crisis, like a lack of social safety net for mentally ill or impoverished New Yorkers: According to a September 2016 report, they write, “Rikers Island holds more mentally ill people than any psychiatric hospital in the country. This is in keeping with the national trend of jails and prisons displacing psychiatric facilities … as the largest institutional repositories for mentally ill people.”
Campbell and Shanahan hash out factors that contribute to Rikers overcrowding and danger, like inadequate access to community resources and New York’s systemic inequities. Their particular vantage point allows them to marry lived observations with research into corrections officer demographics, salaries, and training; jail conditions; gang violence; and social order. City Time is successful in showing how the injustices of incarceration on Rikers are informed by systemic injustices outside the prison.
The perspective afforded by City Time will hopefully supplement carceral reform, especially as the deadline for the shuttering of Rikers approaches. The New York City Council passed the law in 2019, mandating that four smaller, borough-specific jails replace the complex by 2027. Even as the deadline approaches and dangerous conditions compound, New York’s politicians don’t seem to be in any rush, claiming that Rikers already has too many inmates to outsource to the smaller jails. The borough-specific jails are already being built, but politicians are reluctant to hire new staff and figure out the logistics of inmate relocation. But perhaps a copy of City Time for Eric Adams is in order, so the 2027 mandate comes to fruition—and so that there doesn’t need to be any more firsthand accounts of Rikers Island.
