Kalief Browder

Based on Wikipedia: Kalief Browder

Kalief Browder was sixteen years old when he walked home from a party one spring night in the Bronx. He never made it. A police car stopped him, and a man in the backseat pointed through the glass and said Kalief had stolen his backpack. The police searched Kalief and found nothing. They arrested him anyway.

He would spend the next three years in jail waiting for a trial that never came.

The Accusation That Fell Apart

The date was May 15, 2010. Kalief and a friend were walking along Arthur Avenue near East 186th Street in the Belmont neighborhood when officers pulled up. Kalief assumed it was a routine stop-and-frisk—he'd been through them before, as had countless young Black men in New York City at the time. But this was different.

Roberto Bautista had called 911 to report a stolen backpack. From the back of a police cruiser, he identified Kalief and his friend as the thieves. There was a problem, though. Bautista couldn't keep his story straight. He gave conflicting dates for when the theft supposedly happened. Other details shifted in the telling. And the backpack? The officers searched Kalief thoroughly. They didn't find it.

None of this mattered to the system that swallowed him whole.

At the 48th Precinct station, Kalief was fingerprinted and processed. Seventeen hours later, a police officer and a prosecutor interrogated him. The next day, they charged him with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. At arraignment, bail was set at three thousand dollars. With a bail bondsman, his family would have needed nine hundred.

They couldn't raise even that. A neighbor offered to help, but it turned out not to matter. Kalief was already on probation from an earlier case—he'd pleaded guilty to joyriding in a stolen bakery truck, though he later insisted he was only a bystander who got caught up in someone else's crime. Because of this, his probation officer placed a violation hold on him. Even if his family had posted bail, he couldn't leave.

So they took him to Rikers Island.

The Island

Rikers Island is a four-hundred-acre jail complex sitting in the East River between the Bronx and Queens. It holds people awaiting trial—not convicted criminals serving sentences, but the accused, the presumed innocent, those who simply couldn't afford to leave. At its peak, Rikers held more than fifteen thousand people. The conditions there have been described by federal prosecutors as reflecting a "deep-seated culture of violence."

Kalief was sent to the Robert N. Davoren Center, a facility for adolescents. Preet Bharara, then the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, would later document what happened to inmates there: broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, lacerations requiring stitches. This was the world Kalief entered at age sixteen.

The small indignities accumulated alongside the large ones. Inmates washed their clothes using soap and metal buckets, leaving rust stains on everything. Kalief's mother, Venida, began visiting every week, bringing clean clothes and money for snacks. To avoid having his belongings stolen while he slept, Kalief slept on top of them—including his bucket.

He began doing pushups and pullups obsessively. "When I went in there," he later said, "that's when I decided I wanted to get big." It wasn't vanity. It was survival.

Violence Upon Violence

One day, correction officers lined up Kalief and other inmates against a wall. Someone had started a fight, and the guards wanted to find out who. Their investigative method was simple: they punched each inmate, one by one, until someone talked.

"Their noses were leaking, their faces were bloody, their eyes were swollen," Kalief recalled. The guards told them if they reported their injuries, they'd be thrown in solitary confinement.

On October 20, 2010, a gang member spat in Kalief's face. Later that day, Kalief punched the gang leader. Fifteen gang members attacked him in response. A video recorded on September 23, 2012, shows Kalief in handcuffs being assaulted by guards. After another fight—this one started when an inmate threw shoes at people and Kalief told him to stop—he was placed in solitary confinement.

He would spend nearly two of his three years in jail alone in a cell.

The Box

Solitary confinement, sometimes called "the box" or "the hole," means isolation in a small cell for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day. You eat alone. You exercise alone, if you're allowed to exercise at all. Human contact is limited to hands passing food trays through a slot in a door.

The psychological effects are devastating. Studies have shown that even a few days in solitary can trigger anxiety, panic attacks, hallucinations, and psychosis. Many experts consider prolonged solitary confinement to be torture. The United Nations has said that more than fifteen consecutive days constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Kalief Browder spent approximately seven hundred days in solitary. Nearly two years.

During this time, guards beat him while he showered, according to his later accounts. Verbal confrontations with officers would escalate into physical ones. He was allowed to read and studied for his General Educational Development exam, the high school equivalency test. But he was alone. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. Alone.

In 2010, while still in his first year at Rikers, Kalief made his first suicide attempt.

On February 8, 2012, he tried again, tying strips of sheet to a ceiling light and attempting to hang himself. He later said the correction officers goaded him to do it. After one court appearance, he sharpened the edge of his metal bucket into a blade and started cutting his wrists. An officer stopped him.

Thirty-One Court Appearances

While Kalief sat in jail and in the box, his case languished. The Bronx County District Attorney's office had a notorious backlog. Cases stacked up like unanswered mail. Defendants waited months, then years.

Brendan O'Meara was appointed as Kalief's public defender. Kalief insisted he was innocent. He wanted to go to trial. The prosecution offered him a deal: plead guilty and serve three and a half years. He refused. They came back with two and a half years. He refused again.

Why would he admit to something he hadn't done?

His first court appearance after arrest came seventy-four days later, in July 2010. A grand jury indicted him. In December, a potential trial date was finally set. But in January 2011—two hundred fifty-eight days after his arrest—the prosecution asked for a delay. They weren't ready.

This became the pattern. Throughout 2011 and 2012, prosecutors repeatedly told the court they weren't prepared to proceed. The case was adjourned again and again. Kalief appeared before eight different judges. "These guys are just playing with my case," he said.

On March 13, 2013, Judge Patricia DiMango made Kalief an offer. Plead guilty to two misdemeanors, she said, and you can go home today. Time served. Just admit you did it.

He refused.

Back to Rikers.

Two and a half months later, on May 29, 2013, the prosecutors finally admitted what had happened. Roberto Bautista, the man who had accused Kalief from the back of that police car, had returned to Mexico. They couldn't find him. They couldn't reach his brother. There would be no witness.

There could be no trial.

Judge DiMango ordered Kalief's release. He walked out of Rikers on May 30, 2013. A week later, the charges were formally dismissed. He had been in jail for three years for a crime that would never be proven, for which there would never be a trial, based on the accusation of a man who had left the country.

What Freedom Looked Like

Kalief came home to the two-story brick house on Prospect Avenue near the Bronx Zoo where he'd grown up. His mother Venida had raised thirty-four children over the years through fostering and adoption. Kalief was one of seven biological siblings; five had been placed for adoption when their mother's drug addiction made her unable to care for them. Venida had taken him in.

He tried to rebuild. He passed the GED exam—studying he had done in solitary. He enrolled at Bronx Community College through a City University of New York program called Future Now, designed to give college educations to previously incarcerated young people. In his first semester, he completed eleven credits with a 3.56 grade point average.

He worked as a math tutor, helping others prepare for the same GED test he had passed. He took a job as a security guard but was fired when his history of mental illness came to light. He handed out flyers near Wall Street. He watched the businesspeople in their suits walking to their offices.

"I want to be successful, like them," he said.

In May 2015, he submitted a paper for his college writing class titled "A Closer Look at Solitary Confinement in the United States." He received an A. In the paper, he wrote that perhaps different forms of punishment should be used for inmates who break minor rules, as opposed to those who cause severe harm, "because the mental health risk it poses is too great."

He was writing from experience.

The Mind Doesn't Forget

The depression didn't lift. The paranoia didn't fade. Three years in jail, two of them in isolation, had changed something fundamental in Kalief's brain. He knew this about himself.

"People tell me that because I have this case against the city I'm all right. But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. There are certain things that changed about me, and they might not change back. Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness."

In November 2013, a few months after his release, Kalief made another suicide attempt. He was admitted to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital. It was the first of three admissions.

He and his family had filed a lawsuit in November 2013 against the New York City Police Department, the Bronx District Attorney, and the Department of Corrections. Their attorney, Paul V. Prestia, argued that the prosecution had been malicious, that the court had been misled about how ready the prosecution actually was for trial, and that the prosecutors had known all along they would have no witness once Bautista left the country. The city denied everything.

The lawsuit was still pending.

June 6, 2015

At 12:15 in the afternoon on June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder hanged himself from an air conditioning unit outside his bedroom window at his mother's home.

He was twenty-two years old.

Venida found his body.

Aftermath

Five days later, mourners gathered near the Manhattan Detention Center for a three-hour vigil. They chanted "Justice for Kalief." A concurrent vigil was held on Rikers Island. People carried signs reading "Black Lives Matter."

Kalief was buried following a service at Unity Funeral Chapels on June 16, 2015. His grave is in an unidentified Bronx cemetery.

On June 27, protesters organized through Facebook marched on Rikers Island under the banner "March to shut down Rikers—Justice for Kalief Browder!" The hashtags #resistRikers and #ShutdownRikers spread. On August 10, the anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Kalief's brother Akeem led fifty protesters to the Bronx Supreme Court.

And then, in October 2016, Venida Browder died.

She had spent years fighting for her son while he was locked up, then fighting alongside him after his release, then fighting in his memory after his death. The strain—the crusade, as attorney Prestia called it—had been too much. Officially, she died of complications from a heart attack.

"In my opinion," Prestia said, "she literally died of a broken heart."

What Changed, and What Didn't

Kalief's story gained national attention. Jennifer Gonnerman's profile of him in The New Yorker, published in October 2014, was read widely. After his death, the coverage intensified.

In 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited Kalief's case in a written opinion. The case was Davis v. Ayala, and Kennedy was discussing the problems of solitary confinement. He wrote about the "new and growing awareness in the broader public" of these issues, pointing to Gonnerman's article and news coverage of Kalief's suicide. "Consideration of these issues is needed," Kennedy wrote.

That same summer, Representatives John Conyers Jr. and Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a package of bills aimed at reforming youth incarceration. One was called Kalief's Law—the Effective and Humane Treatment of Youth Act of 2015. It would have banned solitary confinement for juvenile inmates, prohibited shackling young people for court appearances without justification, and required states to provide speedy trials.

The bill never became law.

On January 25, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order banning the solitary confinement of juveniles in federal prisons. It was a significant step, though limited—federal prisons hold only a fraction of America's incarcerated population. Most prisoners, and most juveniles, are in state and local facilities.

In 2017, Jay-Z produced a documentary miniseries called Time: The Kalief Browder Story. It aired on Spike TV and brought Kalief's experience to a wider audience.

In January 2019, New York City finally settled the lawsuit with the Browder family for 3.3 million dollars. Nobody from the Bronx District Attorney's office was held personally accountable for keeping Kalief incarcerated for three years without a trial or a conviction.

What We Know Now

Kalief Browder's story is extreme but not unique. Across America, people sit in jails for months or years awaiting trial because they cannot afford bail. The Bronx court backlog that trapped Kalief persists in various forms in jurisdictions nationwide. Cash bail systems mean that identical defendants—charged with identical crimes, with identical evidence against them—experience radically different outcomes depending on whether they can pay.

The one who pays goes home, keeps working, keeps their apartment, keeps custody of their children, and can prepare their defense from freedom. The one who can't pay sits in jail, loses their job, loses their housing, may lose their children, and faces enormous pressure to plead guilty just to get out—even if they're innocent.

Solitary confinement remains widespread. Though reforms have been enacted in some jurisdictions and the practice has drawn increased scrutiny, tens of thousands of people remain in isolation in American prisons and jails at any given time.

Kalief understood all of this. He wrote about it for his college class, drawing on both research and his own scarring experience. He wanted people to see what he had seen. He wanted things to change.

He was robbed of his happiness, he said. Three years for a backpack that was never found, for a trial that never happened, for a crime that was never proven. Then two more years of struggling with what those first three had done to his mind.

He was twenty-two when he died.

His mother was sixty-three when she followed him.

The backpack was never found.