An inmate at Rikers Island

There were no suicides in my cellblock during my time at Rikers, but an inmate in one of the adjoining blocks had hanged himself in the shower room soon after I arrived. I remember being disgusted when I heard one of the COs [correctional officers] referring to the victim as 'another mope on a rope'. But that was early on in my sentence, before my ongoing Rikers 'education' taught me to take the callousness of the average guard for granted. The few guards who treated the inmates decently turned out to be the crooked ones who smuggled drugs into the cellblocks. Their profit motive gave them reason to consider us as potential customers, rather than just bags of meat that had to be inventoried three times a day, so in the upside-down world of prison life these black-market capitalists were actually the only guards to exhibit any human compassion. I considered it a lucky break to have been assigned to a cell block where one of these bent guards held the keys.

With our in-house smuggler on duty, the overnight hours in the dorm were a lot more mellow than they would have been if the hard-ass CO who worked the day shift had been in charge. At least at night we didn't have to worry that the smell of marijuana smoke would be reported to the shift commander and bring the flying squad rushing in to search our bunks and lockers for contraband. This was a real bonus. Our cell block was crammed with eighty inmates in a space built to house fifty, so the air in the dorm was always foul - even when the barred windows set high in the cell walls were cracked for ventilation. But the scent of burning marijuana after lights-out brought a welcome change that I came to appreciate as one of those minor blessings that made prison life slightly more tolerable. That's one lesson you can count on a place like Rikers to teach you - how to savour the little things. It was also the one lesson I promised myself I'd keep in mind once I hit the streets again.

- Peter Kaldheim, Idiot Wind: a Memoir, Edinburgh, 2019, p.282-3.