Kalief Browder was arrested by New York police in 2010 for allegedly stealing a backpack. His low-income family could not afford the 3,000-dollar bail. That was enough for a young man with neither a conviction nor a trial to end up locked up on Rikers Island, one of the most violent and controversial detention centers in the country.
What followed is hard to process: for nearly three years, the judicial system kept postponing his case without offering any resolution. And while the delays piled up, Browder spent nearly 700 days in solitary confinement, a practice that mental health experts describe as a form of psychological torture. No one convicted him. No one proved he was guilty. He simply remained locked up because the institutional machinery was in no hurry to deal with him.
In 2013, all charges were dropped and he was released. Years later, New York City agreed to pay 3.3 million dollars to his family to settle the civil lawsuit. The money is not enough to answer the question this case leaves open: how is it possible for a justice system to take away three years of a person’s life when it was never able to prove anything against them.
