When I entered Rikers Island at the age of 20, I thought I was the only woman who had endured relentless violence in her lifetime. Years of sexual assault that began when I was 9 years old in a closet in my childhood home left me torn and defeated. During those assaults, I would focus on the little piece of light shining under the door, willing it to at least take my mind away. I desperately needed care and help processing what I survived.
Instead, when I cratered at Rikers while trying to reckon with the anguish I had experienced and the harm I had in turn abetted, I was thrown into solitary confinement for six straight months—alone in a cell for at least 23 hours a day. With only an aluminum toilet, sink, and bed, and a thin mattress. The one tiny window I had access to was blocked up so I couldn’t see the faintest sliver of light.
Or so it seemed. Because inside Rikers, I met women of all ages like me; women who had also been beaten and neglected, forced to make tough, painful choices to survive. Women who had turned to substances to escape their pain. All of which contributed to the crimes we committed (though many were innocent as well). For the first time, I realized my experience was not unique.
We needed someone to care enough to ask what was wrong, to help us open up, and provide us support to blossom into the people that we were meant to be. What we got instead was more abuse and trauma.
Rikers remains virtually unchanged since I was there. Inhumane physical conditions, uses of force, violence, and misery still plague the island. Sexual assault rates at the women’s jail on Rikers are twice that of jails around the country.
We cannot continue to leave incarcerated people in these brutal conditions. They are human beings and deserve to be treated with decency. Furthermore, 95% of all people who are incarcerated will return to our communities. When they come home, what kind of people do we want them to be?
As the City Council votes this week on a plan to close the Rikers jails forever and replace them with a smaller system in the boroughs, we must ensure that any facilities that are built to replace Rikers embody a vision of healing and new beginnings. If people have done wrong, we need to find out the root causes and address them. Punishment and isolation can never achieve those aims. The facility for women must provide trauma-informed wrap-around re-entry services, starting from day one, and connect women with services when they leave. It must stand completely separate from any men’s facility and have as non-carceral an environment as possible.
That means it cannot be operated by the current Department of Corrections, which has proven itself incapable of keeping women in their custody safe.
Before I met women who created safe spaces for me to reckon with my trauma, I had few social skills and a distorted view of the world shaped by years of abuse. Without the assistance I needed, I played a role in the death of a man named Thomas Vigliarolo. I served 27 years in prison for my actions, and pray that I can somehow atone for my sins through my work to change the way we approach people like me.
Since my release in 2012, I have toured the country telling my story and written a book about my life, so girls and women out there know they are not alone. I advocate improving conditions for people who are incarcerated. I am a proud mother, sister, friend.
I joined the #CLOSErikers campaign at its start in 2016, calling with other directly impacted people for an end to a system bereft of humanity. Because Rikers can never provide what is needed. It must close forever.
Now we stand on the brink of achieving that goal. What follows must be smarter and more caring. Together, let us ensure that women who have experienced harm like I did have the support and skills to bring light into the world.
Donna Hylton is a women’s rights activist and criminal justice reform advocate. Hylton is the author of “A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life Unbound.”