Jennifer Wynn\'s Inside Rikers Stories

Jennifer Wynn's views and opinions come through clearly in chapters 5 through 7 of Inside Rikers. Chapter 5 begins with the author receiving the news that a former inmate is heading back to the island -- but not for another stint in prison. He is volunteering as a cook to show the inmates inside that one can actually make it on the outside: he has a job ($20k a year), a wife, and a baby. The author congratulates him on the good news, but inwardly wonders whether it is really all that great. $20k a year is nothing terrific -- and is hardly enough to support a family. But being an ex-con, there are limits to one can do on the outside. Society is not really set up in such a way that a former inmate can ever really be a normal citizen or achieve what others can who have never been on the inside. Wynn shares this with the reader, while supporting the former inmate with congratulatory expressions. The truth is that stability and familial support is good for the former inmate: it has meaning. And even if his socio-economic condition is never likely to improve, he at least has something. That's his view and it is reasonably optimistic. Wynn's is guarded and if not outright skeptical at least saddened by the reality of life for former inmates. The terms are not that great.

Jennifer also knows how hard it is for ex-inmates just to achieve that much. With Carlos, she shows this. Carlos is afraid of not making it on the outside -- so she turns to her friend Paul to see if he can help with giving Carlos some meaningful work. Paul being an ex-con friendly employer (even though he's been burned before) agrees. It is a moment in which Jennifer acknowledges fully the sad reality of life for ex-cons. They are followed by a stigma everywhere they go -- they essentially wear a Scarlet A in so far as their record is concerned. Carlos, however, rises to the challenge and becomes indispensible to Paul.

Her view of the reality of life for these individuals is made even clear in the following two chapters which describe how hard it is for other ex-cons who can't make it on the outside and end up returning to Rikers. Something comes along, some strain, some stress that compels them to deviate from the path that they have attempted to follow on the outside. The fact is, as Jennifer shows, that there are few supports on the outside for these individuals. Some seem to be lucky in finding the right people, the right set of circumstances; others seem to be buried beneath issues that come from both external and internal sources.

This is shown again in the way the two worlds are set up: there is the prison world and then there is the real world of New York. They are like isolated realities. They do not interact, though they are near together. They do not want to know one another. Those who leave the real world of New York and enter into the prison world are stamped -- they are marked -- so that when they leave and go back to the city, they are known. It is as though there were some cruel, unjust, unforgiving thing about the real world that did not want to acknowledge the awful truth that was brimming just below the surface: the fact that no one was perfect, that it was hard to stay upright, that sometimes people needed help.

And sometimes, as Jennifer shows, it takes attitude and discipline to stay sober, to stay upright. She points to Dwayne, who left Rikers and stayed free: he said to his counselor, "The streets didn't get me again . . . I didn't give them time to catch me" (Wynn, 2001, p. 164). In a sense, it comes down to that grit -- that desire on the part of the individual to keep from being caught by the forces that pull people down. They are out there waiting, Jennifer shows. They have to be avoided.

References

Wynn, J. (2001). Inside Rikers. NY: St. Martin's Griffin.