Scope and arrangement
Between 2018 and 2021, the Rikers Public Memory Project (RPMP) conducted oral history interviews featuring the voices of formerly incarcerated individuals and their relatives. This collection contains audio recordings of the interviews, transcripts, and photographs of the narrators.
The trauma-informed interviews were recorded by trained volunteers with RPMP at various locations around New York City. These locations include New York Public Library branches and supporting non-profit organizations such as The Fortune Society, The Doe Fund, Prison Reentry Institute, Exodus Transitional, College and Community Fellowship, and JustLeadershipUSA, as well as Zoom (audio only), phone, and street interviews. Trauma-informed interviewing aims to make sure people who've experienced trauma feel safe and supported during an interview. By contributing their oral history, narrators may feel empowered to reclaim their narrative of incarceration and further legitimize their story as a historical record.
Each narrator discusses their connection to Rikers Island and answer questions that address daily routines, experiences of court transport and family visits, resources that were provided, and reflections on cultural/systemic changes over time and the plan to close the jails. The narrators range in age, some recalling their incarcerations from the 1970s to some as recent as the 2020s.
Narrators discuss topics that include intake and visitation processes, prison conditions and sanitation, violence between incarcerated individuals and correctional officers, coping mechanisms, systemic racism and mass criminalization, the impact incarceration has on one's family, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Rikers Island, among many other related subjects. Interviewers conclude most interviews by asking how the public should remember Rikers Island and how the city should move forward if Rikers Island closes, including prison reform and abolition. Many narrators stress the need for rehabilitation, healing, and justice for those who have had to endure the harsh and inhumane conditions of Rikers Island.
The individual audio recordings vary in length from twenty minutes to over two hours. In addition to the recordings, each file contains an accompanying transcript transcribed and audited by RPMP volunteers, including an English translation for the interviews conducted in Spanish. Some of the files also include the narrator's photograph.
Arrangement
Alphabetical by last name.