(photo: imagery ©2019 Bluesky, Maxar Technologies, Sanborn, USDA Farm Service Agency, Map data ©2019 via Google Maps fair use policy)
As an organizer directly impacted by incarceration, I often ask fellow New Yorkers that have been previously incarcerated to imagine what it would feel and look like for our communities to have the resources we need to remain in our neighborhoods and thrive.
Our work will solidify New York City as the most decarcerated big city in the U.S. We have done the difficult work of significantly decarcerating New York City and State, forcing the city to shrink the jails system from 12 citywide to four borough-based facilities with improved conditions. Based on pretrial reforms we achieved at the state level, the city has also planned to reduce jail capacity from approximately 15,000 to 4,600 people — officials are estimating the city’s jail population can soon reach 4,000 and we are pushing to reduce that to less than 3,000 in the coming years.
The mayor has answered our demands with his proposed jails plan, which should be passed by the City Council, while improving the plan by supporting our push for further decarceration, a faster route to decarceration, facilities that respect people’s dignity and provide the resources and services every person deserves, and an end to the Department of Correction’s reign of terror.
While this work to decarcerate and to shrink and humanize the system is vital, we also demand that the mayor and the City Council provide the resources that enable us to build communities that flourish.
More than three years ago, I joined other leaders — who had directly experienced Rikers — on a mission to close Rikers and build communities, with the end goal being vibrant resourced neighborhoods and complete transformation of justice in our city. We drew inspiration from the plans for healthy communities laid out by the Black Panthers and Young Lords.
Drawing on a series of community forums (#buildCOMMUNITIES) held last year, we have worked with over 60 partners and advisors from more than 30 partner organizations and groups, along with more than 200 people representing families and communities impacted by incarceration in New York City to put together demands tied to our vision of shifting funds from law enforcement to community resources, providing a roadmap for New York City to make a bold shift from the status quo to a city that lives the values of equity and racial justice.
I was incarcerated for a total of seven years and was 16 years old the first time I was on Rikers Island. One of the things I learned about Rikers is it prepares you to go in, but not to get out. When I came home at the end of 2008, I felt less than human, which is actually the point of Rikers Island — to dehumanize. I didn’t know how to return back to the world, so I just kept doing the things that landed me on Rikers. I was incarcerated again at 19 years old.
I’ve been home for good since 2014 and I have dedicated myself to ensuring young people have more resources and possibilities than I once did; that means closing Rikers, shrinking the jail system, and building and investing in communities where no one should worry about coming into contact with the justice system.
Last week, I visited #CLOSErikers campaign member Sugah Tavarez at the Frederick Douglass Houses in Harlem — the neighborhood where she and her family have lived for many years. Despite the lack of wealth, there is something that the people at Douglass Houses have always had: their love for their community and for justice.
On the day I visited Sugah, she was planning to fight to preserve a community garden so that her neighbors can grow and have access to affordable fruits and vegetables. Community gardens are important in connecting people across generations and providing space for neighborhoods to grow stronger.
Sugah brings people together not just around wellness, but to learn their rights in an overpoliced and gentrified community where black and brown people are determined to stay and thrive. In communities that have always borne the brunt of the system of oppression, we see so much of what we don't want — jails, trauma, poverty, racist policing. Despite that, we've been able to build a vision for what we do want.
We are New Yorkers and we are fighting for the only home we know. Our communities are gentrified by people from all over the country, we invite newcomers to follow the lead of directly impacted people and support our vision for reinvestment.
We are fully committed to ending systemic racism and New York City's reliance on criminalizing people for issues that have solutions in public health, education, environmental, and economic justice. As we dismantle the injustices that harm us, we are building power and visibility of our collective humanity and our demands, as impacted people, who have agency to build communities based on our needs and healing.
There can be no more delays. Closure has been delayed in the past, leaving people to continue to suffer and die at Rikers. The City Council must move forward with the current plan along with the important conditions we have laid out. Our communities cannot wait.
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Vidal Guzman is an organizer at JustLeadershipUSA. He was incarcerated on Rikers and has been a leader on the #CLOSErikers campaign since 2016; he is from Harlem and a leading architect of the #buildCOMMUNITIES platform. On Twitter @iamvidalguzman.
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(photo: Rob Bennett/Mayoral Photography Office)
Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), on which we served, released its second report calling for all students to have access to enrichment opportunities as a forward-looking replacement for the city’s antiquated system of “gifted and talented” education programs. This provoked a significant volume of responses from a variety of stakeholders who have come to see G&T programs as legitimate and needed. But it is essential that anyone considering what the SDAG is recommending have the full picture -- of both the group’s recommendations and the research they are based upon -- before judging the conclusion.
As SDAG and other critics have noted, the separate and unequal G&T programs are problematic on several levels, in large part because most of them admit students based on an arbitrary cut-off score on one standardized test. In addition, they are disproportionately located in affluent areas of the city and relatedly, serve a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.
This racially and ethnically segregated G&T system reflects the biases that work against the broader understandings of intelligence, ability, and giftedness that sustain our culturally diverse city and our creative and entrepreneurial economy. Research on child development, learning, and culture tell us this is the wrong way to organize schools and label children.
As members of SDAG, New York City public school parents, a researcher (Amy), and a Community Education Council President for District 16 (NeQuan), we argue that New York should lead the national movement to shun so-called gifted education programs in favor of universal enrichment programs that allow all our children to reach their highest potential.
It is important to note that SDAG’s recommendation is holistic -- not simply to throw away G&T and leave everything else as-is -- and grounded in a vast body of evidence about the appropriate uses of standardized tests and programs that separate those labeled “gifted” based on test scores alone.
For instance, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education released a joint statement on the uses of standardized testing in education, proclaiming that, “Decisions that affect individual students' life chances or educational opportunities should not be made on the basis of test scores alone.”
This joint statement issued by three of the most prominent research associations in the field of education sums up the research evidence on standardized tests and their appropriate uses. It echoes the frustration of millions of parents in New York City and elsewhere who know that their children’s intelligence and ability, their gifts and their promises, cannot be measured by one test taken at the age of four.
The inaccuracy of one standardized test to measure individual “giftedness“ is reflected in the stark racial disparities in enrollment in New York City’s G&T programs, which are less than 25 percent black and Latinx in a school system that is 75 percent black and Latinx. These demographics are testimony to not only the racial disparities in income, parental education levels, and access to educational resources. They also reflect the cultural biases inherent in standardized tests that only accept one right answer to questions that could be open to different interpretations when examined through different cultural lenses.
We know, for instance, that the research on how people learn concludes that intelligence is shaped by culture and experience, and that the best test-takers have had life experiences most culturally aligned with the test-makers. A cultural lens through which tests are written and perceived suggests that rather than measure a pure or objective form of “intelligence,” they measure a culturally-shaped understanding of who has knowledge that is aligned with those who wrote the exams.
A 2018 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine concluded that the cultural contexts in which students grow up affect their ability to answer test questions. When these tests have dire consequences for students’ access to educational programs, they can also have a deep and negative psychological impact on students’ sense of themselves.
Even researchers and educators who once advocated for separate G&T programs for those students with good test scores have changed their minds, calling on more parents to “rethink” gifted education and consider whether these narrowly defined programs even make sense. In research that The Public Good Project has conducted in New York City on racially diverse schools, we have studied schools that have eliminated their G&T programs, and they are thrilled.
As one teacher noted, echoing all of her colleagues: since the school eliminated the G&T program, there is much more diversity at the classroom level and the parents who choose the school now really value that diversity over a label. She said that when the school had the G&T program, the students were more segregated and isolated. Now, she said, “I have a few students who I think would probably test into talented and gifted but their families don’t even bother, and I think it’s because they know that’s it’s great instruction and it’s a nurturing environment…and it’s a truly diverse school and I know that’s rare in the city.”
But why is it so rare in a city like New York, when these research findings are but one reason why a growing number of educators and parents are rejecting the “gifted” labels for programs and students? Through experiences as parents in New York City public schools we know that G&T programs within a racially and ethnically diverse district like District 3 in Manhattan lead to unacceptable levels of racial and ethnic segregation between and within schools. They also lead to skewed understandings of which schools are “good” even when schools that enroll students with lower test scores have stronger curricula and better teachers.
In the predominantly black and Latinx District 16 in Brooklyn, parents fought to bring G&T programs into their schools. Nevertheless, when a new program was added, it was underfunded and low quality in part because the teachers were not well prepared. Thus, the addition of this G&T program led to more divisiveness within the district as only a small number of students gained the “gifted and talented” label.
This divisiveness occurred even when the program used broader criteria and admitted students for third grade instead of kindergarten, making it less problematic than the majority of G&T programs in the city. While the D16 parents thought they were achieving more equity by gaining a G&T program, they soon realized that adding G&T created a bigger set of equity issues, making many of the district’s constituents eager to pilot the new, SDAG-recommended Enrichment for All program.
For the sake of our children, our city and our racially and culturally diverse nation, we hope that District 16 can provide the model we need for an enrichment program that will lead the way to a more humane system that identifies the multiple gifts and talents of 1.1 million students. It’s time to let go of our 20th century model of educating a small number of students with poorly-defined academic "gifts" and adopt a 21st century model of appreciating the many different gifts within students and the family and community cultures that foster them.
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Amy Stuart Wells is a Professor of Sociology and Education and the Director of Reimagining Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. NeQuan C. McLean is the President of the District 16 Community Education Council in Brooklyn. They are both members of the Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group.
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(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Not long ago, closing the Rikers Island jails was a radical idea. Today, however, less than four years after we launched the #CLOSErikers campaign, New Yorkers have reached political and popular consensus that closing the jail complex is morally imperative. Yet, they are increasingly opposed to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s visionless approach to executing this important mission. Today I write to join that opposition.
The purpose of the #CLOSErikers campaign was not only to shut down a horrific penal colony, but also to decarcerate New York City and spur investment in communities most harmed by mass incarceration. Our principal target was Bill de Blasio, who as mayor oversees the city jails and is empowered to close them.
From the beginning of 2016, we pursued the mayor across the city, in the streets, and at City Hall, in the press and through social media, at his fundraisers and even at his gym. Closing Rikers became a rallying cry for progressives, and then a mainstream political position.
In April 2017, Mayor de Blasio reluctantly announced that Rikers would close. We celebrated that moment as a major step forward, but not as a win, given the scant details in the mayor’s plan. Though I am no longer with the campaign, I have watched for the past two years to see if the mayor’s plan could be improved to match the values of today’s criminal justice reform movement. Despite fierce pushing by advocates, as of Tuesday's City Planning Commission vote, this administration does not have the right plan to close Rikers.
First, the mayor’s plan projects the need for too many jail beds.
The historic and comprehensive pretrial justice legislation that advocates got passed in Albany six months ago, and that takes effect in January, may halve the number of New Yorkers in jail.
Second, the mayor’s plan doesn’t significantly change the culture of Rikers -- retaining the use of solitary confinement, and not holding the Department of Correction accountable for continued violence at jails across the city.
Third, the mayor is simply not engaged. It’s easy to mock Mayor de Blasio for his lonely trips through Iowa and New Hampshire, but it has now been months since the mayor addressed criminal justice reform, and he has apparently neglected to even assign a deputy mayor to the mammoth project of closing Rikers.
There was a time when Mayor de Blasio’s borough-based plan, for all its flaws, seemed like the best and only chance at closing Rikers. But the politics of Rikers and the politics of New York have changed. Every known 2021 mayoral candidate is for closing the Rikers jails. With a stable Democratic State Senate, we can keep improving the broken laws that led to our current system. And across the city, voters are demanding reform from their district attorneys. As circumstances shift, our policy on what is best for New Yorkers must evolve.
As a city, we can settle for Mayor de Blasio’s eight-year, $10 billion plan, or we can push him to generate a better plan that invests billions into helping communities directly, doesn’t have towering jails, and reforms the Department of Correction. It’s not too late, we still have a choice.
Here’s a different path forward, some of which can be demanded by the City Council through the land use review process (ULURP) that is only part-way through and now in the Council’s court:
First, dramatically reduce the number of projected jail beds, including exploring options that would require no new jails to be built and improve conditions at existing non-Rikers facilities.
Second, make a serious financial investment in community-based mental health centers where people can get treatment outside the jail setting, and allocate more funding to transitional housing.
Third, divert people otherwise sentenced to misdemeanor jail terms to programs that can help them get their lives on track.
Fourth, properly implement bail, discovery, and speedy trial reform in 2020, which will dramatically lower the number of New Yorkers in our jails.
Fifth, pass parole reform next legislative session in Albany, which will dramatically reduce the number of New Yorkers in city jails for technical parole violations.
Sixth, work with community groups to expand restorative justice models that empower survivors and hold defendants accountable without using incarceration.
Seventh, demand that our elected district attorneys treat jail as a last resort.
These solutions will be better for our community and improve public safety in the long run, without building huge new jails.
Finally, I commend the Herculean work of advocates, directly impacted people, City Council members, and even certain de Blasio administration members for working to close Rikers, including those who have sought to improve the borough-based jails plan. We are in this together as a city.
We only get one chance to close the Rikers Island jails, and we can do better. Mayor de Blasio and the City Council should act boldly to reimagine criminal justice in New York City.
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Janos Marton is campaign manager for the ACLU Smart Justice Campaign and a 2021 candidate for Manhattan District Attorney. He managed the #CLOSErikers campaign 2016-2017. On Twitter @janosmarton.
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