Portside

Numbers alone can't convey what the justice system does to the individual black body. Kalief Browder was sent to Riker's Island when he was 16 years old for a crime he did not commit. He spent three years there without a trial.

Assata Shakur writes about her incarceration at Riker's Island in the 1970s. Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party who went underground to evade police repression, joining the Black Liberation Army. She was captured in 1973 and held as a political prisoner until 1979 (one year after this article was written), when she escaped and made her was to Cuba where she lives to this day, despite increasing pressure from the United States for her extradition.