A female inmate falls for a handsome guard. He’s really a former con man in witness protection. Their forbidden flirtations smolder toward a climax: Murder!
It happened not on Rikers Island, but in “Rikers Island.”
The book, a 406-page romantic drama that sells for $18.99 on Amazon, is part of a expansive genre inspired by New York’s troubled jail complex. The authors are detainees and correction officers who have written scores of Rikers books, many self-published, that are available online, at neighborhood stores or from the trunks of authors’ cars across New York City.
This particular entry in the canon was self-published in December by Michele Evans, who began writing it while serving 18 months at Rikers. She had an eye for detail, a pencil cadged from a counselor and material all around.
“I knew I had gold as far as content was concerned,” said Ms. Evans, whose real-life crush on a jail officer inspired the plotline.
Riddled with dysfunction, violence and lawlessness, Rikers has produced a constant loop of lurid headlines, as well as a decade-long movement to close it. But it has also spawned an awful lot of literature.
The books include harrowing memoirs by guards, inspirational accounts by educators and thinly veiled fictional hellscape narratives by detainees. There are romances, fights and jailbreaks. Often, what the stories lack in polish they make up for in details observed firsthand.
The books often include the jail’s name: “Rikers Island Revolution,” “Rikers Island Memory,” “The Seagulls of Riker’s Island,” and of course the French language “Dans l’Enfer de Rikers Island.”
Despite the complex’s horrific conditions, or maybe because of them, it is a literary incubator, a grim counterpart to bucolic writers’ retreats like Yaddo where creativity is pampered, said David Campbell, who is working on a memoir of his yearlong stretch on assault charges. An agent has already agreed to shop it to publishers.
“You have a lot of time to reflect on things, and your basic needs are met with three meals a day,” Mr. Campbell, a writer and translator, said. “When I was a starving artist in New York, I spent most of my time trying to make ends meet.”
There is a long history of literature written by authors who have served time, from Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jean Genet to Oscar Wilde and E.E. Cummings. To those names, add Deborah “Sexy” Cardona.
Ms. Cardona began writing in 2001 when she was locked up for a year on drug charges. She churned out two manuscripts at Rikers, then 11 more during six years in state prison. She self-published all 13 after being released and, she said, “sold 100,000 books in six months.”
“You have a lot of talented people who started writing in there and became urban fiction authors,” she said.
The 413-acre Rikers complex, with its squat jail buildings behind fencing and razor wire, lends itself to that genre. With about 6,200 detainees, it is one of the largest lockups in the United States and one of the city’s most damning problems. Last year, nine people died in the jail system.
Mayor Eric Adams says conditions at Rikers have improved drastically on his watch, and he is battling a federal effort to take over the complex. The court fight has produced thousands of pages of evidence about the horrors there. Inmate authors have added thousands more.
Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale University who specializes in prison writing and culture, said that inmates were often motivated to write about being rehabilitated, or to expose horrid conditions or just to put out something racy and entertaining.
“In all the cases, there’s a sense that no one has listened to my story, not at the trial or the investigation, so now I am taking the opportunity to tell it myself,” Professor Smith said.
“The New York City audience has a huge appetite for Rikers stories, and there are so many people passing in and out of the jail, so it makes sense that a lot of detainees take the chance to get their stories into the public’s hands,” he said.
In 2021, Steven Dominguez published “Across The Bridge: a Rikers Island Story,” a drama infused with the corruption, violence, drugs and sex he said he witnessed while working at Rikers as a correction officer until his arrest in 2014 for smuggling drugs and other contraband into the complex.
Mr. Dominguez, who is trying to get his book produced as a television series, said he had started writing while serving six years in prison because “I knew the jargon and the protocol on both sides of the bars.”
Because Rikers is “the most infamous jail in the U.S., on top of it being culturally identified in hip-hop and rap music,” the name alone is likely to sell books, he said.
Ms. Evans said her fiction described the Rikers experience in a way that journalists cannot.
“A lot of people read the articles, but they don’t understand what’s going on in there,” said Ms. Evans, whose book mentions the jail’s “big, rust-rimmed garbage cans” and correction officers clad in riot gear who “resemble a battalion of armored turtles.”
She describes the regular strip searches of female inmates in rooms where the air becomes “thick with a sense of degradation and helplessness.”
One of her book’s subplots involves Fonna, a detainee who dies in solitary confinement, a practice the New York City Council voted in December to ban. Ms. Evans said the story line had been inspired by the real-life experience of Layleen Polanco, who died after having an epileptic seizure while she was in solitary in 2019.
The book describes Fonna’s mental breakdown in a “cold stark box” with a barred window. Ms. Evans, who was at Rikers on charges of assaulting a husband she described as abusive, said the details came from her own stint in solitary around Christmas in 2022. She said she had been left for hours in her own vomit and the spillage from an overflowing toilet.
For jailhouse authors, obstacles abound, even in obtaining writing materials.
Cindy Eckard Wakefield, who self-published the memoir “Roses and Rikers” last summer after serving time at the complex in 2011 following a drunken driving crash, said the safety pens provided to detainees were hopelessly flimsy, so she would wrap shampoo labels around them to make them usable.
Mr. Campbell, who was in jail after pleading guilty to assault related to a 2018 protest at a far-right event, said he had tried to use a typewriter at a Rikers law library but found that half of its keys were missing.
When other inmates learned he had writing skills, they bartered to have him write grievances or Valentine’s Day poems to their girlfriends, paying him in commissary items like packets of fish. He traded packets of coffee for good pens pilfered from jail jobs, safeguarding the prized items by sticking them with toothpaste in hiding spots like the inside of a mop handle or under his bunk.
Without a publisher’s clout behind them, Rikers authors get resourceful in promoting their books.
A former correction officer, Gary Heyward, promoted “Corruption Officer” while wearing a blue-and-orange jumpsuit: part guard, part inmate. The book, which chronicles Mr. Heyward’s 2006 arrest for smuggling drugs into the complex, did so well that it was picked up in 2015 by Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. Mr. Heyward is now working on “Copstitute,” a book about a guard who runs a prostitution ring at Rikers.
A former detainee, Shayvonne Jenkins, said she had sold hundreds of books by promoting them on social media and in person at churches and readings.
“People want to read about that inside life,” said Ms. Jenkins, who began writing two books while at Rikers for seven months on drunken-driving charges and a parole violation.
Her 2017 collection, “Poetic Memoirs of an Incarcerated Black Princess,” includes “Amongst the Isolation,” a poem that describes the loneliness of solitary confinement and her glimpses from a small cell window of planes taking off from nearby La Guardia Airport. She is finishing her fourth self-published book, “Shebillionaire of Wall Street.”
Thomas LoFrese, a private investigator from Long Island, recently self-published the novel “Escape from Rikers Island” and has sold roughly 300 copies in several weeks, 50 at a Knights of Columbus meeting.
Mr. LoFrese was never detained at Rikers but was familiar with the complex after interviewing inmates there for defense lawyers.
His book features an unlikely jailbreak to free Joey “Chop Shop” Terelli, a mobster on trial for murder. In choosing the plotline and the title, Mr. Lofrese said, it helped that Rikers was constantly in the headlines as a matter of civic debate.
“That was a major consideration,” he said, “what’s going on lately with Rikers.”
But much of the Rikers-related literature is written with a heightened consciousness of small things.
In “Gone ’Til November: A Journal of Rikers Island,” the diary that the rapper Lil Wayne published in 2016 about serving time on a gun-possession charge, the reader gets an inventory of the humble items the author was issued when he arrived: a towel, two sheets, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a green cup.
In Ms. Eckard Wakefield’s memoir, she writes about a garden where some detainees work horticultural jobs. Stanzas from a poem “by Inmate #210-11-00753” are an ode to a single rose: “I see what it’s made you/this jail full of hate/chained to this island/no choice but to wait.”
Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.
