Gothamist
"Brandon's death is tragic but entirely unsurprising,” said Darren Mack, co-director of the jails reform group Freedom Agenda. “There have already been reports of entire housing units completely unstaffed for hours at a time. On Rikers, that means there is no way to get medical attention or anything else you may need.”City Limits
“To the degree that any access to voting is happening at all in the city jails, it’s because some volunteers or some individual took some initiative,” said Sarita Daftary, co-director of the Freedom Agenda, a project of the Urban Justice Center.The City
Sarita Daftary, co-director of Freedom Agenda, an Urban Justice Center project that advocates for decarceration, argued that the high AWOL rate makes it “harder for [the officers] who do show up for work — and of course, dangerous for the incarcerated people who aren’t getting to their court dates, to visits, to medical, to commissary, aren’t getting mail, and all other kinds of human rights abuses.”This tipsheet outlines ways to reframe conversations about aligning NYC's budget - and jobs connected to it - with our values, drawing on the work advocates and communities are doing to realize that shift.
This brief report outlines why the Mayor and City Council must act immediately to cut DOC's inflated budget, for the safety of people in their custody, and for the good of our communities.
NRDC
In 2016, Pastoressa joined a small but rapidly growing group of advocates, including formerly incarcerated people and their families, in calling for the complete closure of the Rikers Island jail complex. Soon after, she became a leader in the movement to close Rikers, and later one of the founding members of Freedom Agenda, a project of the Urban Justice Center helping to organize the fight to dismantle New York City’s unjust incarceration systemGothamist
“The 50-a data shows that the so-called reforms at DOC is just rhetoric,” said Darren Mack, a co-director of Freedom Agenda at Urban Justice Center. “And it's evidence of what advocates and survivors of Rikers already knew. That the brutality and violence will not be eliminated until there’s a total dismantling of DOC.”NY Daily News
As an advocate for closing Rikers Island, I encounter a common assumption: that correction officers are our main opposition. But when we look beyond the badges, we see that many officers are people of color from the same communities as those in the jails. Could we, together, envision good jobs that aren’t dependent on mass incarceration?Queens Daily Eagle
I’ve been incarcerated in the jails on Rikers, and in the Queens jail before it was closed. All of them are decrepit dungeons unfit for human beings. As a member of Freedom Agenda and leader in the movement to close Rikers, I have fought to reduce incarceration in every way possible.This set of Issue Briefs offers a deeper dive into the current state of New York City jails, and the plans to close them.
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