This young man, indeed no one, should be treated this way!
Kalief Browder, the 22-year-old Bronx resident who was incarcerated as a teenager for years at Rikers without being convicted of a crime, was found dead by suicide in his mother's home this weekend.
Browder was the subject of a 2014 New Yorkerstory that chronicled the violence and mistreatment he endured at Rikers — including two years in solitary confinement — after being accused of stealing a backpack at age 16. Browder maintained that he never stole anything, but he was still held for three years without a trial and subjected to brutal beatings by both guards and other inmates, some of which were captured in surveillance footage later published by The New Yorker.
"I think what caused the suicide was his incarceration and those hundreds and hundreds of nights in solitary confinement, where there were mice crawling up his sheets in that little cell," Browder's lawyer, Paul V. Prestia, told the L.A. Times on Sunday. "Being starved, and not being taken to the shower for two weeks at a time ... those were direct contributing factors ... That was the pain and sadness that he had to deal with every day, and I think it was too much for him."
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