Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remdick. Take a moment and think back to your high school years, where you lived, who your friends were, what you were into. Now imagine that your junior and senior years of high school never happened.

And instead, you had spent those years trapped in a jail cell without ever being convicted of a crime. This is not a story out of Kafka. It's what happened to Khalif Browder, a teenager from the Bronx. When Browder was just sixteen, he was held for robbery and assault charges after allegedly stealing a back. Pack.

He spent three years on Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, waiting to go to trial. New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonerman wrote about Browder in 2014, and the case put a spotlight on all the failings of New York City's justice system, delays in the courts. the overuse of solitary confinement, teenagers charged as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. Two years after Browder got out of jail, he took his own life. His suicide became national news and was mentioned by President Obama

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