Afrika Owes vowed never to return to Rikers Island as a detainee, even confidently wagering against her rearrest with a skeptical corrections officer while held as a teen in 2011. More than a decade later, the Harlemite remains good on her promise. She visited the jail complex last Friday, July 26, not to collect her winnings but to share her experiences to those at the Rose M. Singer Center (Rosie’s), the women’s facility on Rikers.
Owes went viral on TikTok this past April after she posted her reaction to passing the bar exam on her first try as a “formerly incarcerated single mom.” The clip currently sits at more than 800,000 likes, 3.4 million views and even earned a congrats from Google’s social media account.
“I’m not happy to be here, but I’m happy to be able to share my stories [and] to come back in this capacity,” Owes told the Amsterdam News. “It’s very full circle. I just spent a lot of emotions but I’m happy that I can talk to the girls. And I can’t believe they still have Corcraft toothpaste.”
Such toothpaste served as glue for a scrapbook she kept while on Rikers Island, which she brought to her visit. Owes recounted her six months in jail, detained on a high profile arrest at age 17 roughly half a decade before New York State passed Raise the Age laws.
Back then, Google wasn’t gassing her up on TikTok. Instead her case was blasted all over the internet thanks to the New York media machine’s infatuation over a star student’s fall from grace. Owes was a self-admitted “anomaly on Rikers,” arriving with a private school education and still studying for her SATs while behind bars.
Yet she says in reality, she was just like her adolescent peers on Rosie’s, shuttled back and forth between the courts and jails without agency. Local newspapers disparaged her as a preppy “gun moll,” slang for the female hanger-on of a male gangster. A teenage Owes spent a good deal of time arguing in the comments sections.
She ultimately won, not in a war of words but through further academic success. Wrapped in her plea deal were conditions to complete university, which Owes candidly shared in her speech. If she didn’t graduate high school and attend college, she would go back to jail. But her arrest led to repeated rejections during application season.
Finally, Hobart and William Smith Colleges admitted her and Owes kicked off her freshman year with a 4.0 GPA. She became a Fulbright scholar and ultimately graduated from Fordham Law. While Owes now pursues a dazzling career in corporate law and did not stay on Rikers long enough to become a “jailhouse lawyer,” she said navigating the carceral system informs her understanding of the legal world.
“It helped a lot with empathy [and] with working with clients, but also my knowledge,” she said. “I don’t think I was here long enough to be a jailhouse lawyer, but that’s only one half of [being] a lawyer—the technical, professional learning aspect. The other half is people, knowing the system and knowing that just because you found something on paper this is not what it’s like in [real life].”
Owes, like many women on Rosie’s, faced charges due to a man she dated in her youth. During her talk, she pointed out how when men are incarcerated, women visit them, send money and generally hold down the fort. But when women are incarcerated, rarely do men in their lives reciprocate. Samantha Jenkins, 18, says Owes’s visit particularly resonated with her as she dreams of one day becoming a writer.
“Her speech was very empowering to me, because I can relate to being in here because of a male as well,” Jenkins said. “And it shows me she got somewhere in life and it’s not over. My life isn’t over. I’m 18 years old, and my life isn’t over. And every day I feel like my life is over. I feel like this is it because I’m facing some serious charges. But she just proved to me that it’s not. And there’s still hope out there.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.