A man in Rikers Island died Tuesday morning, becoming the eighth New Yorker to die in city jail custody this year, advocates said.
Donny Ubiera, 33, died inside the jail’s George R. Vierno Center, according to a statement from The Legal Aid Society.
Advocates insisted that Ubiera’s family deserves immediate answers from Department of Correction officials and jail medical staff on what led to his death, writing that “all too often, our client’s loved ones are deprived of even the most basic information following the passing of a relative.”
We are a sour, cruel people who are quick to condemn and slow to emphasize.
The most important single metric with which to judge a society is how it treats its prisoners.
Our world’s largest per capita, punitive, non-rehabilitative, for-private profit off human misery prison INDUSTRY should be a source of national shame.
Instead, many Americans still insist it isn’t cruel and punitive enough, preferring schadenfreude, blame, and insistence that the cruelty we inflict is necessary and somehow deserved, to owning up to the understandably disillusioned citizens in our prisons and homeless tent cities that WE as a society have utterly and completely failed.
Sadly, our nation has grown to be immune to the concept of shame.