Hello everyone, just a quick update on Junior Wilson and others at my facility on Rikers Island—since Tuesday’s Just Leadership virtual rally, Junior Wilson has become a de facto spokesman our most vulnerable people who are eligible for COVID-19 release, all while waiting for the Mayor’s Office and DOC to comply with the Board of Correction’s very specific memo calling for the release of all detainees from city jails fitting any of the following criteria:
· People who are over 50
· People who have underlying health conditions, including lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or a weakened immune system
· People detained for administrative reasons (including failure to appear and parole violations)
· People serving “City Sentences” (sentences of one year or less)
Junior fits as many of the criteria as humanly possible (the last two are mutually exclusive). Many of you know his case by now, but to summarize: He’s been detained for more than half a year on an administrative oversight, after being picked up on a false charge based on racial profiling, even after his family paid his bail. He has every reason to be bitter.
But he isn’t.
Instead, he and his wife have used all of their energy for the past two weeks in gathering the names and booking/case numbers of every person in his wing who qualifies for early release, doing a bit of the legwork for the Board of Corrections to get the most vulnerable people out of death’s way as this virus rips through the island.
And he still hasn’t been released. His wife let me know this morning that the DOC let three people from his wing out at 1am this morning, a cruel and insulting way of complying with this order. She hopes that the DOC simply hasn’t yet gotten to his name alphabetically.
One thing I tell my students in my Friday workshops at Rikers Island is that their stories always work on two levels: 1) The individual level, in which their stories are uniquely theirs, and 2) the level of the universal, in which their stories represent larger stories of the world, current, past, and future. Junior Wilson’s story is both individual and universal. He is one person currently experiencing danger and injustice, and he is many experiencing danger and injustice.
I encourage every one of you to tell Junior’s story to everyone you know, so that the Mantra “FREE JUNIOR WILSON” resounds the world over, advocating both for him and for every other person held at death’s door on a parole violation, every person of color who’s been a target of discrimination, every person pulled from their home and family by our addiction to incarceration.
Feel free to share this, put it in your own words, hashtag it, put it on social media, tell it to the people you’re currently sharing your social isolation with. You can also read more in the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and NY1, and listen to Junior speak here.
Junior Wilson at home in 2019.
This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here: