“When I was growing up, when a dude went to jail, it was the thing to do" Rivera tells me" You was a somebody. To be a man you had to go to prison." Christopher Robinson was like many of the teenagers who end up at One Main, a hard-luck kid from the roughest part of Brooklyn. He was not a high-risk inmate. He arrived in late August of 2008. He’d been sent because he’d violated his parole for, of all things, showing up at a new job as an overnight stock boy at Staples when he was supposed to be home. He’d been arrested a few months earlier for an alleged assault; before that, he’d served a stint at a juvenile facility upstate for stealing cell phones and a computer. Among the kids that Robinson hung around with in Brooklyn, Rikers is a kind of finishing school. A rough streetwise kid from the projects expects to be sent there, hears the stories, learns the jail’s rituals from older boys. And for Robinson, Rikers ran in the family. Israel Rivera, his father, spent time there on the way upstate for a murder he’d committed at age 15, two months after Christopher was born. “When I was growing up, when a dude went to jail, it was the thing to do,” Rivera tells me. “You was a somebody. To be a man, you had to go to prison.” ”
