-Hello.

I'm Bill Moyers.

The United States is facing a crisis of mass incarceration.

Our prisons and jails are packed with people.

To understand the human toll of this crisis, Riker's Island is a good place to start.

Rikers is New York's infamous jail and was ranked in one survey among the ten worst jails in America.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated across the country face similar violence, cruelty, and abuse that have become all too common at Rikers.

Most of us are blind to what goes on inside the walls.

Places like Rikers are out of sight and out of mind, foreign countries we never visit.

Yet what happens to the people inside is done in our name with our tax dollars and reputedly for our safety.

Here are some stories from inside Rikers told solely by the men and women who lived them.

Be fore-warned -- some of the scenes are shocking, some of the language is raw, but these are the faces of mass incarceration in America today.

[ Bird caws ] -Before you hit the bridge, it says, "Welcome to Rikers Island."

And then you go on the bridge, and it's just like -- It was the daytime, but it felt dark.

-When they start to drive across the bridge, I realized how long it was, and I could see Rikers Island as we came over the hill.

-I was going across the bridge and I just -- I'm just looking at it, I'm just, like, the whole time, shaking my head in disbelief.

-On that bus, there's so much stuff going through my mind.

But the main thing is just that hoping that I do make it out.

-It -- It looked grim.

Like, it looked like a monster, like we were about to go into the belly of, you know, a beast.

-New York City is, to me, the greatest city on earth.

But when you look across that bay onto Rikers Island, that's not living.

That's just existing.

I feel like I wasn't...

I felt like I'm here, and nobody cares.

-My name is Ismael Nazario, from Brooklyn, New York.

September 28, 2006, I was arrested for a robbery.

I was actually on my way to school.

I was, like, you know, "When I get to Atlantic Avenue, I'm going to walk by the park to see who's in the park."

Big mistake.

The first two cops that got out of the car, they drew their guns on me.

They said, "Well, this kid got -- Well, the robbery just happened.

This kid got hurt pretty badly.

And you fit the description."

I was standing there with all these police surrounding me, but I'm standing there confident, though, because I know that I didn't do it.

I wasn't even over there.

So, the cop peeks his head into the driver's side window.

He peeks his head back out.

He says, "Yeah, that's him.

Lock him up."

[ Indistinct conversations ] -When I first got there, it was almost like flying over the Bermuda Triangle.

Like, once you're there, it's easy to get there, but it's hard as hell to get out.

-Once you get there, you find out that it's actually just as bad as people say that it was.

-There's this distinct smell of Rikers Island.

It's, like, a mix of bleach, dirt, and grime.

The bars -- they look dirty and dusty, and the cells look nasty.

-The officers just said, "For all of youse who've been here, you already know what to expect.

For those of you who have not been here before, this is your first time, tighten your pants."

-They got us inside the door, closed the gate behind us, unshackled, took the cuffs off, sent us in a room.

They came in, strip-searched us, which was just, like, crazy to me.

-Oh, man, the worst part is just the strip frisk, having another man tell you to lift your nuts up, spread your ass, and all that.

Getting butt-ass naked with your arms up.

[ Chuckles ] When you think about that... man, oh, my God!

I never want to go back to that... -Coming off the streets, never been in an environment like that.

Just thrown in, basically, to the wolves.

I was scared.

-You walk in.

You're in between these two doors.

You see, like, this gate, and then, on the other side of that is the dayroom, and then there's other adolescents on the other side.

You know, they're looking through the gate.

In their mind, you know, it was like, "Oh, we got a victim or, you know, fresh meat."

-I went to Rikers Island with a friend of mine, and he had already been back and forth to Rikers Island, and this was my first experience.

And when I got into the dayroom of the house where we was at, my friend was with me, luckily.

And we were sitting there talking, and all of a sudden, I seen him stand up and walk to the corner of the dayroom.

And I couldn't understand what was happening.

And when I turned around, there were two guys coming to take my sneakers.

I assumed that my friend and I, we were going to fight together, but it was just me fighting at the time.

They wound up getting one of my sneakers, and I had a black eye and busted lip and everything.

And after it was over, I went to him and I said, "What happened?"

And later on that night, he brought me back my other sneaker and he said to me, he said, "I had to know that you could stand up for yourself before I stand up for you."

And so that was my induction into the way things ran on Rikers Island.

-My name is Damian James Stapleton.

I'm 29 years old.

I grew up in the Bronx, and I moved immediately to Harlem to live with my grandmother.

My moms was addicted to crack cocaine, and she would always be gone.

I was abused as a kid, in pretty much any way you can think of, you know?

My grandmother would beat me.

I have scars to this day on my head from my grandmother, like, abusing us, you know, physically, just from being under the influence of alcohol.

I remember my mother coming, you know, just popping up, taking us out.

She had money.

She went to buy us some clothes one time.

And we went to the store and she bought us some clothes and she was, like, you know, "Take those clothes off."

And I must have been about 4 or 5.

And we took the clothes off to put the new clothes on, and she seen the whelps on us that my grandmother had put on us and the marks from beating us so much.

And she wanted to do the right thing.

She took us to the hospital.

but I guess when she got there, it was so overwhelming for her, she left.

And she never came back.

My mental-disorder diagnosis is unspecified personality disorder, mind and mood disorder, and anxiety disorder.

I knew something was wrong with me because I could never sleep at night.

One night, I couldn't sleep, and there was this guy just talking.

He just came in.

So I asked this guy to be quiet numerous times, and we got into a disagreement about the noise, so I felt like I wanted to get him in the morning.

And when the morning came, being that he was up talking all night, he was sleeping when they opened up the cells.

I went to his head with the sock and the batteries.

-I didn't want to take psych medication because I felt like that was tantamount to using drugs, street drugs, so I refused all medications.

I wouldn't take any.

I don't think people should be drugged up or beat or deprived of food because that's what they used to do.

I think that sometimes you just need a shoulder to lean on or someone to talk to or someone to cry to because it's like you're letting out a whole load.

There was no one to talk to.

-The treatment that I saw... [ Chuckles ] ...for people with mental-health issues came from both sides of the wall, meaning the employees and the correction officers, as well as the inmates.

They were abused and treated so disgustingly that my stomach would turn.

I watched this one guy piss on a mental-health dude laying in his bed.

When you see people like this, you would say to yourself, "Damn, leave that guy alone."

-People who are incarcerated don't talk, they scream.

Everybody screams at each other.

There's no normal talking.

I was just -- I was literally cowering in the corner.

This one woman was laying on the floor, and she had her hair piled up on top of her head.

I guess she rolled over or whatever it was, and all of a sudden these things rolled on the floor, kind of like white -- I want to say, sugar cubes, little white rocks.

And all the girls just jumped on it.

It was like -- And I'm sitting there and I'm like, "You know, what's going on?"

And they're all scrambling, but they're trying to be quiet, 'cause they didn't want the officers to know.

It turned out the woman had hidden crack in her hair, and when she laid down to sleep, the crack had fallen out.

That was the first time I ever saw crack.

-When you in jail, complete upside-down kingdom.

Everything that means something to us here doesn't mean...in there.

And everything in there that's negative and what you shouldn't be doing, it means everything.

My name is Marcell Neal, 34 years old.

And when I first went to Rikers, I was 14 years old.

And, at that point, it was like you go back to being a child now, from a 14-year-old in the streets, and you think you tough to being a child.

You want to call your mother.

You want to call everybody you can possibly call to get you out of there.

-So, they had this setup, call it, like, "the program."

2, 3, or 4 inmates ran the house.

-The program is, "You're gonna do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it or we're going to beat your ass, and you're out of here."

-So there's, like, a chain of command.

So, there's the people that run the housing unit.

Those are the two top or one top person that is, like, in control of everything.

Then there's the team, which is the enforcers.

Then, after the team, there's either a designated person that's "in control" of the dayroom, where you play your cards, your chess, watch TV.

Then there's people that have "rockin' spots."

The people that have the rockin' spots are people that don't want to necessarily have the house, be on the team, or have the dayroom, but they fought and earned their respect to just "rock in the house," where they can just pretty much do what they want to do.

And then the bottom of the totem pole is what they call "dayroom dummies."

So, the dayroom dummies was the guys that give up their phone calls, give up their commissary, have to ask permission to leave the dayroom either to go to their bed or to use the bathroom.

-When I went in the bathroom in the morning to brush my teeth, I saw the other kids that were washing people's underwear, and I didn't want to be one of those kids.

They got treated badly.

As soon as I walked into the house, one of the guys who was running the house slid a plastic bucket down the aisle in front of me and said, "That's your new job, washing people's underwear."

So I picked the bucket up and smashed him across the face.

-In order for you to kind of be successful in that type of environment, you have to manifest a certain form of wickedness.

I'm thankful that, for the most part, I didn't succumb to, you know, certain emotions, as far as becoming what I didn't want to become.

And the end result was I got cut because I didn't acquiesce to the demands of, you know, the brothers running the house.

-I had brand-new Reebok Classics.

And this was like the third night I was there.

And three dudes came up to where my bunk was at and asked me for my sneakers.

And I just gave them my sneakers.

And that was a big mistake.

Next thing you know, I went to commissary, they stole my commissary, stole all my belongings.

Fortunate for me, there was this older dude.

He schooled me.

He told me, "Listen, you got to -- You can't do that.

You show weakness here and you're dead.

You know, you're not gonna make it."

I grew up into Roman-Greco wrestling.

I'm a black belt in a couple of the arts.

So, my father always taught me, you know, "I got you in this for discipline.

I don't want you to hurt somebody unless somebody tries to hurt you."

So that was a big debate for me because I didn't want to hurt nobody.

I could, but I didn't want to hurt nobody.

But I had no choice.

The first thing I did was get my sneakers back.

I went and got all my commissary back.

I went and got all my jeans, all my shirts, all my T-shirts, all my underwear, all my socks.

I went and got everything that they took from me back.

And I had to bust a couple of heads to get them back.

It was either gonna be me or them.

And I had to do this in order to gain my respect.

-You know, I heard all types of stories about, you know, people switch up on you when -- You know, they're one way in society, and then in jail, they're another way.

They could be your friend out there and be your enemy in here or be your friend in here and be your enemy out there.

-I learned to befriend people and get close to them in order to find out their weaknesses.

-Somebody who you think is gonna be a friend -- they manipulate you.

They would say, you know, "Buy this for me at commissary, buy this for me," you know.

And when you came back from commissary, they were waiting for you.

My name is Kathy Morse.

I am originally from Livingston, New Jersey, which is a middle-class suburb.

I graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in criminal law and justice.

I always wanted to work with returning citizens.

That's what we call them.

We don't call them "ex-offenders."

They're "returning citizens."

I was hired to work for a very large law firm in Manhattan.

And they trained me, and that's how I got my start.

And I continued to work as a trust-and-estates paralegal until my incarceration.

Shortly after returning to work after I had my third child, we were facing eviction from our house.

There was one trust that I was handling.

It was a very large trust, and they had pre-signed wire instructions.

So I took the pre-signed wire instructions, and I whited out the account number and put my own personal bank-account number there and faxed it over.

And they just wired the funds into my account.

$283,000.

I missed a court date.

And I thought that my court date was postponed, and, evidently, it wasn't.

And I was just running errands around town, and the police pulled me over.

And they said that they had a warrant out of New York for my arrest.

My daughter was in her car seat, and she became hysterical, just screaming.

And they took my daughter and I to the police station.

They let me hold her with one arm, and my other arm was shackled to a bench.

I was remanded to Rikers Island.

Um... -Immediately, within like 15, 20 minutes of being inside the holding cell for that building, a red light starts spinning.

Guys that already been here are like, "That's a red dot."

Red dot meaning either something popped off, meaning somebody got cut, somebody got stabbed, somebody got hurt, somebody committed suicide, or a guard got hurt.

Seen a kid come out, bloody, ambulance, in a stretcher.

Immediately, I start to think -- I'm not thinking about where I'm going anymore or getting any sleep.

I'm thinking about, "How am I gonna get my first weapon?"

So I asked somebody, "Yo, what's the easiest way to get a weapon?"

You know what he tells me?

"Off the fan."

I look over in the corner, there's a fan right over there.

Next thing I see next to the fan is a box of tissues.

I'm thinking, "Man, how am I gonna get to that fan?

Because I need to make an ice pick off of that, you know, with that thing."

And when they finally called my name, as soon as I came out, I was like, you know, "Officer, can I grab some tissue?"

And when I went over to the fan, I don't know how I did it, but I snatched it right on off.

-It's gladiator school for real.

If you get there and you don't have a weapon to defend yourself, you have an issue.

-Violence rules.

Predator, prey.

That...never changes.

-I'm in a situation where I can't run from.

But my whole time in the streets, that's all I've ever been doing is fighting.

So I'm looking like I'm in a place where I always trained for, but just didn't know it.

-The sad part is, the alternative to violence is more violence.

And when somebody realized that you're willing to be more violent than they are, they are less prone to be violent.

-They taught me how to use a level of violence that I never -- I could never imagine I was capable of doing.

-Sucka...say some slick...

I turned around -- 'cause at that time it's, like, the old-school phone where you can plug it in and unplug the joint.

I unplugged it and made him eat the phone.

And I punched him all through his mouth.

-It was total chaos.

It was violence.

It was everything I desired, everything that I look forward to in my life, coming from foster home to boys home, and jail.

And so I fit right in.

My name is Barry Campbell.

I'm 49 years old.

I was born in England.

I came to America in 1972.

But when I came to America, I started getting into trouble.

I was fighting a lot.

And one day, the teacher came to address me because I was fighting with another student, and I spun and hit her in the head with a chair.

I was addicted to drugs at a very early age, at the age of 8.

I started doing burglaries at the age of maybe 12, 13.

We were terrorizing downtown Brooklyn at the time.

My mother went into court and said that she couldn't control me anymore.

So from that point on, I became what I call a "systems baby."

I went from foster home, boys home, jail, to prison.

When I first got to the foster home, I was physically, sexually, mentally abused.

The boys home was even worse.

So that chaos that I ran into on Rikers Island was just going back home to the boys home for me.

-In the dorm, the beds are all lined up, but they're also screwed into the floor.

So they don't move.

They're metal.

There were two girls who were having a disagreement over something.

And the one girl literally jumped on the girl, got her on the floor, had her under the bed, and was holding her hair and banging her head up and down, hitting the one side on the concrete and the other side on the frame of the bed.

And we were all standing there screaming, saying, "Stop!

Don't do this!"

If we interfered with the fight, we would get a ticket.

So we really couldn't do anything.

And, in the meantime, there's blood, and you can -- you can smell it and you can just -- you hear the flesh.

[ Sniffles ] And that smell of blood -- I just know -- I can't -- Sometimes, it gets into me, and I just can't get rid of that smell.

I can't get rid of it.

And the officers just stood there and watched this go on.

And I have never felt so helpless.

-So, there was this time when we were in the dorm, and these two guys got into it.

And one of them were, like -- he wasn't a tough guy, but he had food, and they were pretty much trying to, like, take his food.

And I seen him go to the C.O.

and tell the C.O.

like, "Yo, you know, I can't live here."

So the C.O.

is like, "Well, you know, pack your stuff and put it on the gate."

So he went back and he sat on his bed.

He packed all his stuff.

The guys were forming around him.

You know, they're moving in suspicious ways.

Not making a circle around him, but they're moving in suspicious ways, and there's pretty much one who just keep, like, going and mess with him.

He could fight and he could beat this kid, but he didn't want to.

You know, he didn't want to fight.

He just wanted to be left alone.

He wanted to go to court.

He wanted to make it home.

And he grabbed his bag, and he was making his way to the door.

And the kid went and grabbed a cup -- a green steak cup -- and filled it up with hot water and threw it all in his face and burned him.

And burned him.

And when he did that, the kid reached in his face and he pulled the rest of his face off.

-My name is Raymond Yu.

I'm 34 years old, born in Lower East Side Manhattan.

I got into trouble as a child.

I was in and out of the system, like Spofford, group homes, detention centers.

So before I went to Rikers Island, I was already, like, seasoned.

I was on the phone.

And I was relatively new to the house.

I had court the next day, so I called my mother.

And somebody taps me from behind and was like, "Yo, you can't use that phone."

I was just like, "Yo, get the...away from me, yo."

And then I'm talking to my mother and... And then I felt somebody, like, come behind me, and, like, he grabbed me from the back first.

And then, like, I felt like this, but then I kind of rolled with it.

I was like this, and my mother was on the phone.

I could hear her like, "What's going on?

What's going on?

What's going on?"

I knocked the razor out of his hand.

We're fighting.

And then the officers come out, seeing, clearly, I was cut.

And she said, "Well, do you need medical attention?"

I'm cut!

I said, "No, I don't need medical attention," because, like, you know, that's protocol in there.

We handle it ourselves.

-I was assaulted in the shower... by four inmates, and they were determined to teach me a lesson.

They heard that I was a snitch.

I was sexually assaulted.

I wanted to die.

[ Sniffles ] No, I did not report it.

You can't report.

You can't report it.

I just -- I would lay in my bed at night.

[ Sniffles ] And my dad was deceased, and I would lay in bed at night and I would have conversations with him, about how I wanted to come up with him... how I wanted to be safe.

[ Sniffles ] -I've seen men rape other men.

I've seen men who were deprived of sexual relationships with their significant others prey on other individuals.

-It took a lot of strength... to...not, uh... just to not do certain things to people in there.

Although, it was the norm in that environment...

I had...

I had a lot of spiritual protection.

You know, there were people that were there that, you know... really...really helped me out in certain ways that I've never forgotten.

I actually became a gang member because I thought it was something that kind of countered the oppression that, you know, society put me under.

I really believed that.

I didn't find out until later, you know, after joining, you know, this "organization" that, you know, we kind of did the dirty work for these, you know, demonic spirits.

-My name is Reverend Hector Bienvenido Custodio.

Everybody calls me Benny for short.

Born on July 12, 1970, in East New York, Brooklyn.

I'm actually one of the original founding members of one of the most feared gangs here in New York City, the Latin Kings.

I was the second in command throughout the State of New York at the mere age of 17 years old.

The Latin Kings became a presence on Rikers Island around like '91, '92.

We were few, but we were bad.

I fought with everyone.

Anyone who I thought that was a threat, I immediately jumped on them.

And I thought that by fighting all the time and controlling, releasing my stress, I thought I was somebody, because inside Rikers Island, you become a ghetto superstar.

That's Benny Blanco from Brooklyn.

That's, you know, that's that Latin King cat.

-Blacks started filling into the prison more, and they created this system called "Brotherly Love Overrides Oppressive Destruction," which stood for BLOOD.

And it became a union so that if you got in trouble in the streets, then you had a family inside the prison system, too.

-When I became a BLOOD, now it was more so I had an authority, now I am the authority.

And that culture is just very much different because it's like the worse you do, the bigger you are.

So now when I say, "jump," now it's for real.

Now it's you gonna jump, and if you don't do it, I got 35 other people in here that's gonna make you do it.

-When the BLOODs were created, they was putting fear in a lot of people.

-And it became this whole type of system where they had control and the officers gave them power, gave them drugs, gave them influence, right?

And the C.O.s always was the oppositional gang.

Whether they was a secret member of this gang, they was an entire gang themselves, and that's the way they portrayed themselves.

-There's a saying that it doesn't matter if you have a uniform on -- right?

-- that says, "correction officer" or one that says "inmate."

You're still doing time.

-Well, being an inmate and being a C.O.

is, like, a very thin line.

Time stops for them, too, when they come to Rikers Island.

There's only one bridge in and one bridge out.

There's some C.O.s that are real cool.

You know, there are some C.O.s that really understand the system, and they try to prevent these young people from coming back by talking to them.

-The majority of the officers on Rikers Island are minorities.

They come from where we come from.

They grew up where we grew up at.

Somehow, they just never made it to prison.

-My aunts and my sister are captains on Rikers Island.

And my dad and my mom are federal court officers.

Because I couldn't tell anybody that I was related to this person, I would just see, you know, family in the corridor when I'm going to eat and just give them the wink.

-You know, I've done bought drugs from correction officers who told me they were going to send me to the box if I don't pay them, you know, things like that.

And all of that made me say, "Well, you know you're just like me, you know?

We're all criminals in here."

-I remember when the security officers -- the head of security -- left me a Allen key to open my window frame so I could hide my pouches in the frame of the window.

-And they'll bet on the fights.

The officer will be like, "Yo, 5-Cell versus 10-Cell."

The officers will let them out, and then they'll fight.

-The C.O.s is the gang.

They were the ones that, "If you don't listen to what we say, we beating you up.

We're gonna come in here with shields on.

So what you're 17 years old?

We're gonna bust you upside your head."

-One time, they had came inside of the cell, maybe six officers.

They threw me to the back of the cell, pushed my panties to the side, pushed their fingers in my anus, and just drag me all up and down the cell.

I was screaming, "Help me, help me!

They're raping me!

They're raping me!"

And one of the inmates was saying, "Get the...off of her.

Get the...off of her.

I'm gonna tell my lawyer.

I'm gonna tell my lawyer!"

And when she said that, that's what made them run out the cell.

-As I'm walking towards the cage, I noticed there's a Plexiglas divider in the center of the cell.

And I asked him, "What's that?"

He says, "That's something new that we're trying out, and you're gonna be the guinea pig."

So, I laughed with him.

We laughed.

The Plexiglas divider was about nose high, I'd say, after you sit down.

Me and my visitor couldn't hear each other.

So we leaned forward.

He tells me to sit back.

I comply.

I leaned forward again about three or four minutes later because we couldn't hear each other.

What he did was -- he turned to his partner.

He said, "That's it."

Next thing I know, I'm off my feet.

He had me by the neck, off my feet, against the gate.

I broke his hold.

I land on my feet.

His partner swiped my feet from under me.

I land on my head and on my neck.

I lost consciousness.

-I was literally hogtied up, like, the two long sticks, like, handcuffed, like, carried like that.

Literally carried like that, through the mag, banging my face on the mag.

-I'm like a roasted pig.

And I'm just, like, in the air, like that.

-Officers almost killed me.

They carried me in that cell and they beat me up.

Everybody was punching me.

I went to sleep.

And the next thing you know, I woke up, pants almost off my ass... on myself.

Like, fighting for my life, feeling like I'm fighting to breathe.

-They're just kicking me and they're spitting on me.

They're hitting me with their walkie-talkies.

And they're just hitting me with it, boom!

I couldn't block it, so I'm just like this.

The only way I could block it is like this.

But they're hitting me all over here.

Boom, boom, boom!

That's how I lost my tooth.

My face was like this.

-I came back to and I was struggling with a concussion.

I was struggling with trying to walk.

I couldn't walk.

I didn't feel my legs.

I had multiple contusions to my chest, my back, my neck.

I get migraine headaches for days.

I got sciatic-nerve issues.

One day is good, one day is not.

Today, I could walk.

Tomorrow, I can't.

-I would say I was being beat up for maybe four minutes, five minutes straight.

They broke a bone on my back.

They broke my nose.

You probably have seen a picture of me.

Probably didn't look nothing like me.

You know, kind of handsome right now, right?

But I was in a wheelchair for a month and a half, two months.

That one experience taught me that, you know, you can never be sound asleep in prison.

You know, you always have to be a light sleeper.

You always have to be on point, even in your sleep.

Even when you think you're secure, you're really not secure.

-The only way I could get back at them was by either filing a grievance, which is a joke, or by filing a lawsuit.

So I filed a lawsuit.

The officers really did a number on me that time.

They brought me down to solitary.

Solitary confinement is rough, man.

You can really go crazy.

-On Rikers Island, they sent you to solitary confinement, really, for anything.

-If you ain't never been around death, or, like, somebody else dying, like, then it's hard to hear somebody like two cell doors down from you hung up.

He's shred up.

He couldn't do it.

He didn't even have that much time.

Brother was just doing seven months.

But 90 days in the box will kill you.

Two days in the box will kill you.

-I was sentenced to 1,580 days in solitary confinement.

Almost 4 years.

-I'm in solitary.

I can't call my family.

I'm not getting any visits.

So, you know, questions run through my mind like, "Why me?

What am I into?

How did I get myself into this?

How do I get myself out of this?

What is this?"

I just got very depressed.

-My longest stretch as an adolescent was 120 days.

When you first enter the box, it's, like, a very dark and gloomy place.

I mean, it kind of replicates a jail cell.

It's just a little bit smaller.

Floors is gray.

Walls is, like, a dark, dingy color.

It's all gloomy.

It's meant and designed to keep you down.

You hear people out the window screaming all day.

You hear people in your tier screaming all day.

I walk into the box, and there's, like, people.

It's noisy.

It's, like, everybody's screaming.

And it just sounds like a madhouse.

It's just, "Aaaah!"

I went into the cell, and the cell closes.

And then just that sound that the cell -- Like, that sound that the cell makes when it closes, it's, like...

It's -- It's a crazy sound.

-It sounds like a dog kennel.

Like, imagine like 20 different breeds of dogs on the same so-called tier in cages and hearing just so many different, you know, sounds of barking.

That's what it begins to sound like, you know.

It's -- It's madness.

You sleep until you can't sleep no more, and then you're awake until you can't take it anymore.

And you just wound up, just -- You know, you either count the cockroaches that come under your door or you start counting the cracks in the wall, anything to keep your mind occupied.

-I used to look at, you know, like, paint chips on the wall, and they would become figurines.

And you look long enough and, you know, hard enough, you know, they start moving around.

You know, so now, all of a sudden, you got your own private movie theater.

-I was laying down and I saw a piece of yellow rice moving.

So I'm like, "Why is that yellow rice moving on the floor?

Why is that yellow rice moving on the floor?"

I said, "Oh, now I'm hallucinating.

Wait a minute.

We haven't had yellow rice in weeks.

Wait a minute.

I don't even drop food on the floor.

I eat over the tray.

That's not rice."

Then I'm talking to myself.

"Candie, it is rice.

No, it's not rice.

Yes, it is rice."

So I'm like, "That is rice."

So, I don't know if you ever saw "Sesame Street," the little worm that used to jump up and down.

The rice was jumping up and down like that little worm.

So, I'm like, "Rice doesn't move."

Now, any logical person knows rice doesn't move.

So I'm like, "That rice is moving."

So I get up and I bang on the window door and I told one of the officers.

I said, "Look, I need to see a therapist."

And she says, "Why?"

I said, "I'm hallucinating," I said, "I think I saw a piece of rice moving."

She said, "Oh, no, girl.

That's a maggot."

-Then you just go through all these different mixed emotions and feelings -- frustrated, angry, pissed, sad, depressed.

Did I say anxious?

Your conversation even starts to change.

When I would go on visits and I'm sitting with my family members, when they would come see me, it's like, "Yeah, you heard?

You heard?

You hear me?

You hear me?"

Repeating a lot of the stuff that I was saying twice.

And they're looking at me like I'm crazy, but to me, this was normal, because this was the conversation in the box.

-When you're in there for that amount of time, you tend to lose who you are.

You tend to lose your identity.

You start regressing and you start doing things that are not normal of a human being.

You start playing with feces.

You start counting the different holes in the wall.

You start befriending the roaches and the rats that come through.

You start feeding them and, you know, you begin to embrace this type of lifestyle.

-I remember one time, they gave me a milk carton.

And the C.O.

-- he didn't want to give me my food because we had an argument the day before.

So he said, "All you're getting is milk."

"Okay, cool.

Well, give me the milk."

He gave me two milk cartons, and I drank both of them.

And I gave him one back.

He didn't even realize that I kept one.

So, what I did was -- over the next four, five days, I would urinate and defecate inside this milk carton and save it and let it pile up and build up.

And I took the milk carton.

I seen him when he walked past my cell.

And I shook it up.

And I called his name.

And when he came back, I'm like, "Yo, open the slot.

I had left something in here."

So when he opened it, he stuck his face in, and I shot him in the face with it.

I just squeezed it.

And when it hit his face, oh, man, I seen a look in his eyes of disgust, because when I squeezed it, he had his head turned to the side, so it got in his eyes, his nose, his mouth.

It was dripping in his hair.

As bad as he wanted to open that cell door and beat me, he couldn't 'cause the cameras was in the hallway.

-I really did feel that my mind was breaking down because my body was also breaking down, as well, because the portions that they feed you in the box is smaller than what they feed you in general population.

So you have to make sacrifices when it's chow time.

Like, you get two pieces of bread.

But you're starving at that moment and you want to eat everything and you know this isn't going to fill you up, but you have to eat a small portion and you have to put the bread off to the side for later.

I'm not necessarily going to say I felt I lost my sanity completely, but I know it was being chipped away little by little.

-This is so loud, and it's 1,000 cells, 100 people per floor, literally just floor after floor, people yelling, trying to yell over each other.

The door, the wind under the door, the toilet dripping, the sink that doesn't flush, the banging on the vent from the guy upstairs, the kid with the battery downstairs that's on the door like... [ Imitates tapping ] Like, he's losing his mind, so he's just doing beats to keep... All of that is one pressurized environment that you can't escape, and you end up just trying to hide under the covers, trying to hide yourself from the light, trying to hide yourself from the -- the bombardment that you can't stop.

-It was crazy.

Just dudes screaming all night, kicking on the cell doors, rappers and jailhouse rappers, and talking all night long.

All night.

Like, you just couldn't get sleep.

You can't sleep at night in the box.

You have to sleep in the daytime.

I remember getting up and walking, pacing back and forth, and just ranting, and to the point where I just got so...furious, I started kicking on my cell door.

Kicking on the door.

The C.O.s came by and they -- You know, they're trying to tell me, "Calm down!"

I'm telling them, "Nah...that."

They're like, "We're going to have to come in there, you know, and we're going to have to calm you down."

And I'm just going off.

I'm going off.

And they got this shield, and he's like, "We're going to come in."

And they came in.

He opened it, hit me.

And I remember they knocked me out.

I was out for a while.

I got up.

My head was hurting.

And I was just kept saying to myself, like, "Yo, I got to get out of there," because now I'm starting to be like those guys.

-I have very vivid nightmares that I'm either swallowing my tongue or my head's being decapitated.

So, I started cutting myself.

The I.D.

cards they give you are kind of like a credit card.

If you sit there long enough rubbing back and forth, you will rip your skin.

You get this ache in your chest.

It's hard to explain, but it's like this ache, and it's not a physical thing.

And it doesn't go away no matter what you do.

It just doesn't go away.

And by cutting, it relieves the pain.

It relieves the pain.

-Sometimes, you figure, "I may be better off if I'm not living" than feeling like you're dehumanizing because you have to put your milk carton inside of the toilet to keep it cold.

I'm thinking about doing something negative.

You understand what I'm saying?

Not doing something positive, because how could you think about doing something positive when you have nothing positive, being locked into a box?

-I heard somebody die.

He was Dominican.

He didn't speak English, and the person told him -- The officer told him to do something.

He gave him an order, but he just stood there and didn't move.

But I don't think it was because he was trying to be, you know, rebellious.

It's just that I don't think he understood what was said.

And they went in his cell and they was beating him with the sticks, right?

It was like three of them.

And the sticks would miss him, hit the wall, and it would reverberate through my cell.

It was just like... And you hear -- I heard his, like, cries.

And it was crazy because people just came out of their cells and went on with their day.

People are like, "Yo, who got Kool-Aid?"

"Somebody got cigarettes?"

Like, nobody missed a step.

It was just business as usual after that.

-You want to hold on to that understanding that this is insane, because if you lose it, then you kind of become conformed to it.

And once that happens, there's no, you know, redemption or rehabilitation, you know, as they like to say it.

-I started to feel like an animal.

If you leave an animal in a cage long enough, when you open the cage door, they won't even come out.

If they do come out, they tiptoe around and they go right back.

And I felt like that, and I wanted to break that cycle.

I wanted to break out of that.

It was like bondage to me.

It was like slavery.

-I remember there was a time where...I actually contemplated suicide.

And I remember my mom coming to see me.

And she grabbed me by my shoulders and she told me, man -- She said, "If you don't give up on yourself, I'm never going to give up on you."

She said, "Do what you have to do to survive, but make it home in one piece."

And that voice right there -- She says, "Please."

She begged me.

She says, "Come home because I'm not going to be able to take it if they take you away from me and you take your own life."

And I kept hearing that small, still voice in... in my mind while I was in the bing.

And little did I know that, you know, it was God that kept talking to her and talking to me not to give up.

-What I used to see was from Rikers Island and most of the buildings I've been to, I could definitely see the airport, and I hated seeing the planes take off and land.

I hated that 'cause I always wanted to know, "Where they going?

Where they coming from?

They coming from vacation, a nice tropical island?"

And I can always see the Empire State Building.

They light it up different colors.

And I used to just stare at the city and wonder, "How is life for somebody right now, and what are they doing versus what I am I doing right now?

Looking out this window from jail into that free world."

-The system, jail and prison, is designed to keep us going in and out.

That's why they have revolving doors when you go to court.

So, it'd be a young person that I was with, right?

He would be here for about, say, a month, a month and a half, two months.

He would go home for two weeks.

Right back.

When he comes back, "Yeah, I'm back in the building."

Like, so pretty much what you're telling me is, you went on a two-week vacation home, and now you're back at your real home.

♪ -You have all the plans in the world, but the main plan is to stay free out of prison.

And being released out here where there's no one at -- There's nobody that's going to help you if you need some help because no one knows you, and you're so nervous being back out in society after being in jail, even if it's just for one night.

It's overwhelming.

-I remember being on that bus, not wanting to look back, you know, but being able to see so much because, you know, the sights, the sounds, the smell, everything is assaulting me at one time.

You know, and it was, like, paralyzing, because it's like my head is snapping everywhere.

And then I'm on this bus just doing this.

-You know, when you're coming from jail, you're not used to being around nobody but so many people, so I guess that's, like, an adjustment that you will go through the first month.

That's like the adjustment of learning how to stop taking showers with your slippers on.

You know, first having your underwears on when you take it.

You know, I've had made the mistake of throwing my spoon in the garbage and little things like that.

-I came home June 21, 2010.

I came home dressed in all white, you know, the rebirth.

When I had finally got back home and stuff and I got around a couple of the people that actually knew me and knew the scenario, they was like, "Damn, you did all that time for something that you ain't even do."

I was like, "It is what it is."

Just got to -- Like, just got to move forward from this point.

Can't cry over spilt milk.

Just got to get some napkins and wipe it up, right?

-Coming home, it was hard for me to readjust.

I didn't like being around people.

I didn't want to share anything with anybody, like my thoughts.

I didn't want to be around my own family.

Like, it was just really, really hard for me to talk to people.

I wanted to use violence for everything that was wrong.

-My brother and my sister will have nothing to do with me.

My husband's family will have nothing to do with us, my husband and my daughter included.

It's very difficult.

My husband and I are currently separated.

-I was a stranger in a strange land.

I didn't understand the language.

I didn't understand -- It was difficult.

To this day, I still sometimes have difficulty.

Last night, I went with my wife.

I took her to -- We were on a date.

We were just walking in Rockefeller Center.

And it was too much people, and I became tense.

And I was, like -- She had to hold my hand.

She says, "Hey, it's easy, baby.

It's easy.

Just let's go."

-And then, I remember one day, you know, I said, "Let me go outside."

So I go outside by myself.

And I got halfway, not even halfway on the block, and I couldn't walk any further.

And there was nothing stopping me, you know, but it was like a barrier that prevented me from going any further.

And I wanted to move further, but I couldn't.

I was kind of frustrated.

And I said, "What is wrong?"

So I went back upstairs, and I just started crying.

-Unless you've experienced coming home from jail or prison, you'll never know what it's like.

You don't know what it's like to go looking for a job, and everywhere you turn, every door you open, they look at you differently and say no to you.

They don't know what it's like to be hungry and have no food on the table for your family, but you out there struggling, looking for a job.

I've always said, you know, it's great, everybody's talking about these inmates that are being released.

But what are you putting in place for them to come home to?

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -I said to myself, "I ain't going back to jail, you know, especially after what I just experienced."

You know, so I'd rather die in these streets before I go back into them jails.

♪ [ Cell door closes ]