CBS News 12
“For them to sit here in the conditions that they are - any human being - it becomes an issue of human rights. It’s no longer a thing of right and wrong. The basic needs need to be met,” said Hope Sanders from Freedom Agenda.NYN Media
“I was a teenager when I spent 19 months on Rikers Island, when the population was over 21,000. It was a crisis back then. Decades of lack of transparency, decades of lack of accountability contributed to the crisis. And the pandemic exacerbated the crisis. Jail guards not going to work exacerbated the crisis” said Darren Mack, formerly incarcerated activist and organizer at the Freedom Agenda."Prism
“Darren Mack, who is the co-director of Freedom Agenda, the leader of the coalition that forms the Campaign to Close Rikers, spent 19 months at Rikers when he was just 17 years old in 1992... 'Rikers is managed through terror, through brutality,' Mack said. 'The same thing that was plaguing Rikers Island then is plaguing Rikers Island now.'”Newsweek
“Darren Mack, co-director of the Freedom Agenda, a part of the Urban Justice Center, told The City that he felt the numbers show that much of the drugs inside the city's jails were allegedly being funneled in from members of the staff.”The City
“This data confirms what we’ve known all along — it is corrupt DOC staff who keep drugs flowing into Rikers,” said Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, a jail reform organization. “But instead of swift action to root out this corruption, we’ve seen investigators fired, and discipline that is either absent or takes years to enact.”QNS
Marco Barrios, who was previously incarcerated on Rikers and now a member of Freedom Agenda, said that this land transfer brings the city one step closer to leaving the “horrific legacy of torture island behind.” “[We’re] moving towards repairing the communities that have been harmed by mass incarceration and environmental racism,” Barrios said.© 2023 Urban Justice Center | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
