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Time: Kalief Browder's story By; Claudia Dass (APA Citations (Pitts, B…

- - - - The night before his suicide, Browder told his mother, "Ma, I can't take it anymore."
    - - His family tried everything to make him feel at home they would invite his friends over but all kalief would do is lock himself in his room not talking to anyone and shut all his blinds because he was paranoid someone was watching him. He was upset that he couldn't get a job and that people would judge him because he would talk to himself - a habit he formed in solitary confinement .
- - - - Rikers is named after Richard Riker- he was the chief in charge of the court system of New York city who was known for kidnapping escaped slaves even children and sold them into slavery. Few years later and its still happening, majority of rikers inmates are predominantly people of colour. if a white inmate came they wouldn't stay long.(anthropology)
        
        CO's let the inmates beat up kalief and didn't do anything to stop it and then put Kalief in solitary confinement for "his own protection"
        
        Correctional officers are very powerful and politically important. they are a union that has done everything to sabotage efforts to hold their member accountable when they abuse inmates.
        when Florence Finkle started to suspend officer on video clearly abusing inmates- Normine CBrooks opposed that. Finkle was then asked to resign and was replaced with a friend of CBrooks who he can easily manipulate into agreeing with his views
        
        "The strong survive and the weak don't- the weak get slaughtered you'll get jumped until you conform and say you're with the "program"" Kalief stood up for himself when he felt things weren't right he would speak up and at rikers thats exactly what he did. He would voice his opinions which got him in trouble in rikers with the CO's a lot this is a form of Cognitive dissonance this shows how Kaliefs actions aline with his beliefs.
        
        "In my mind I feel like I'm still in jail because I'm still feeling the side effects of what happen in there" - Kalief Browder
        
        During one specific suicide attempt outlined in the lawsuit, Browder was allegedly thrown onto his bed by the corrections officers, who then started punching him in the head and body.
        “If you don’t manage to kill yourself, they’re really going to harm you,” Browder said. “The first thing they did is they grabbed me and they cut me down. That’s when they slammed me on the bed and started jumping me.”
        
        He then ran into the hallway because he knew there was cameras and that it would capture the abuse but instead he got time in solitary confinement for "disobeying" CO's and resisting
        
        “Sometimes I went back to my cell and I cried myself to sleep because it’s like I want to go home and it’s like, they’re not letting me go home,”
        
        Initially a “quiet, respectful” young man, Kalief began losing weight rapidly due to the insufficient amount of food given to him while in isolation
- - - - Change in behaviour -While in the hospital for his psychotic break he was then prescribed " Risperidone" he was prescribed this drug while in solitary confinement as well. This medication is giving to those who experience schizophrenia or bipolar like symptoms, some effects of this drug includes anxiety, depression, suicide behaviour Kalief said it made him feel "spaced out" which affected his behaviour .
        
        But Browder committed suicide in June 2015, overtaken by the demons he developed while serving months continually in solitary confinement without a conviction or trial to justify his detainment
        
        -- He states "It was hell on earth, sometimes I feel like I'm never gonna be the same" this shows how the system has completely failed Kalief and how it changed him.
        
        Kalief Browder’s race and class status prevented him from obtaining justice and ultimately, cost him his life. Because Kalief’s of morality and beliefs this allowed him to believe in his constitutional rights as an American and he believed that the system took all those rights away from him, he was ostracized in and out of prison and made to endure fatal consequences for a crime he did not commit.
        
        Being poor and black in society- In Kaliefs case he was suspected of robbing an individual and was stopped and arrested based off of a description giving by the victim.Kalief was only guilty of being being black and poor which got him caught up in the situation. For example Dominique Stross a white male was charged with sexual assault he was worth $6 million dollars which allowed him to leave rikers because he had money.
      - “Prior to going to jail, I never had any mental illnesses,” Browder once told HLN. “I never tried to hurt myself, I never tried to kill myself, I never had any thoughts like that. I had stressful times prior to going to jail, but not like during jail. That was the worst experience that I ever went through in my whole life.”
- - - - Venida Browder, Kaliefs mother has always been by Kaliefs side during the whole case. She would go to every court hearing even if that meant missing work and taking the bus for hours just to see him. Kaliefs Pain was her pain, because of what was happening to her son she couldn't function properly as she had a bad heart condition so her health would just get worse and worse the longer Kalief was held awaiting trial in rikers
        
        --Every time Kalief was brought to Bronx State Supreme Court to appear before a judge, Venida was there. He had thirty-one court dates before a judge released him and dismissed the charges against him. “You don’t see a mother showing up that many times,” Kalief’s defense attorney stated
        
        Venida made the trip to Rikers Island every week to see her son Kalief. “There was a lot of hate and animosity I got from other inmates: ‘Oh, your mom always comes to see you,’ ” Kalief said in an interview “A lot of guys would call me 'mama’s boy.' They tried to tease me, make fun of me.”
        
        “Imagine being locked up 23 hours a day,” she said. “This is your life. Four walls; that’s it. He couldn’t take it. They told him, ‘We’re going to break you.’
        “That’s what they told my baby — that they’re going to break him. And, in reality, they did.”
        
        “Justice failed him, but he still believed in justice,” she said. “It’s a whole system that destroyed my son, and I want them all to pay.”
        
        “She was a woman of incredible grace and compassion who tirelessly fought for justice for her son Kalief and who championed the civil rights of others in our city,” Presita said. “But the stress from this crusade coupled with the strain of the pending lawsuits against the city and the pain from the death were too much for her to bear. 16 months after Kaliefs death his mother died from a heart attack at the age of 63
        
        Despite her immense pain, Venida Browder managed to turn her agony into activism
- - - - Browder’s attorney Paul Prestia said the case was repeatedly being pushed back because prosecutors knew they didn’t have sufficient evidence against Browder.The witness returned to Mexico for an indefinite amount of time so they didn't have a solid case
        
        scheduled for 28 court dates, for which he appeared in court 15 times just to be told every time that his trial would be delayed or continued to another day due to prosecutors unable to produce a formal case against him
        
        The court system does not want to take ownership of what they allowed to happen to Kalief. They wanted to use Kalief as a scapegoat to believe that he was wrong in order to believe that the system isn't corrupted
        
        Kalief, who grew up in a large family, was financially unable to post his $10,000 bail and had to rely on a public defender to help prove his innocence.After Browder was taken away to Rikers Island after declining a plea bargain and was placed in a housing unit called Robert N. Davoren Center, which held inmates, aged 16 to 18. This unit is well-known for having conditions that are ““deeply-seated culture of violence”, an environment not meant to rehabilitate and care for young adults
        
        Kalief Browder was persistent on not taking a plea because, as he stated in an interview, “this happens everyday” to people like him, and if he had taken the deal, he would “have been just another criminal” and statistic in this vicious cycle
        
        LawSuit - In November 2013, Browder filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department, the Bronx District Attorney, and the Department of Corrections. Prestia added that there had been a malicious prosecution and the court had been misled as to whether the prosecution would ever be ready for trial as "the people" were never ready. Prestia also put to the court that the prosecution knew they would have no witness when Bautista went to Mexico.
        
        The suit claims Browder spent more than 1,000 days in jail, including more than 400 days in solitary confinement. The charges against him, stemmed from a robbery he says he didn’t commit, were ultimately dropped in June. Browder attempted suicide at least six times behind bars, according to the suit, and instead of getting the mental health treatment he desperately wanted, he was allegedly beaten by the hands of corrections officers.
        
        Paul Prestia- a former Brooklyn prosecutor states that “Kalief was deprived his right to a fair and speedy trial, his education, and, would even argue, his entire adolescence”
        
        Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced “several bills to improve the treatment of incarcerated youth under the age of 21”, including Kalief’s law which “addresses the sort of mistreatment Browder suffered while at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City” Federal legislation has introduced a ban on solitary confinement for prisoners under the age of 21( youth and adolescence), due to the effects it can have on brain development and maturity.
- - - - Beliefs- “I always believed in standing up for what I felt was right and at that time I felt like that was the right thing to do, fight my case,”
        “The way I looked at it if I got to stay here just to prove that I am innocent, then so be it.”
        Kalief stated this and it shows how dedicated he was to fight his case because its all he had if he plead guilty no one would hearts story and no justice would be served
      - Kalief says how being in rikers effected him personally after he was released he stated " I'm 21 but on the inside I feel like I'm 40..there's no living life there's no life at all in there"