Rikers, reviewed (Getty/Yelp)

Hey, if fictional restaurants from Bret Easton Ellis novels can get rated on Yelp, why not some of Manhattan's penitentiaries? That was the question when The New York Post picked up the story two years ago, Rikers Island averaged four and a half stars, which is half a star higher than Balthazar. Central Booking, according to the Post, only managed to earn itself two.

But that was apparently during the salad days of New York's penal system: Today, Rikers has slipped an entire star to three and a half, while the Tombs lost half a star. (Maybe it's time for the prisons to change their chefs.)
Below, some of our favorite reviews of the correctional facilities in New York. At least we know they aren't paying for fake reviews.

On Rikers

Louis P:

Rikers is a popular and intimidating prison, when you go on that highway/bridge to get to the facility you feel like you are on your way to Shutter Island!

I went on a class "field trip" here many years ago and they must have asked the prisoners to scare us because they were doing anything they could to drill into our heads that prison is hell.

One kid in the class had an earring on and was harassed so bad he never wore it again.

If you are going to prison this is the place to be, because you will learn quickly that you messed up and hopefully you will get your act together.

They don't serve good food though, so be prepared!

Jean-Luc Q:

As a life-long Trekker, I was so excited to find out that Jonathan Frakes had FINALLY opened his private island to Star Trek fans. However, after going I have to say that anyone considering going to this joke of a Star Trek con is wasting your time. NO ONE cos-played, there was no schedule AT ALL, and Jonathan didn't even hold a Q&A OR sign autographs! In fact, the whole time I was there I didn't even see him once! For an ENTIRE ISLAND named after the one and only William T. Riker, to not even have the actor who played him show up for even a small appearance was terribly disappointing.

If you are trying to decide whether or not to go, set a course for as far away from RI as you can and warp 9.9 out of there! I would have liked to have said to my fellow fans, "Engage!" for a trip to Riker's Island, but in the end it was a total disappointment.

Pinky and the B:

My big brother was a resident here off and on for years. He had free health care, free schooling, a water view and a gym membership with his residential plan.
I went to see him here many times while Mayor Dinkins was in office. It was a "lively" community with it's own shuttle bus to the island. Going to visit him there was a growing experience.
His friends there seemed very nice and liked to share Reese's Peanut Butter Cups a lot for some reason. Too bad they had to share one phone. But my brother said living in a gated community is not all that great but at least they had metal detectors to protect the residents. He said he felt like a prisoner!

On Central Booking

David C.:

If you're here, you're probably not gonna like it.

Paul K.:

I didn't try the food, but the single serving cereal boxes make for an acceptable pillow. Third star is for not strip searching me.

Martin O.:

Their menu needs work.The Kool-Aid helps the nasty water taste a little bit better, but their sandwiches are awful. The bread is reminiscent of styrofoam and the bologna is rough around the edges. Also they need ventilation... the stale air makes your hair greasy. And the staff is so disgruntled.

Keith G.:

I realize one star is the lowest rating you can give, but I'd still like to say that the star is for my cell-mates, most of whom were good-humored and polite and in for petty drug violations. And, to be honest, the guards could have been worse.

But the Tombs only gets one star because it is filthy. Really filthy, as in unhygienic. It's a human rights violation to force people to stay here against their will (and of course most of the people in here are in here against their will). The bathroom is not only out in the open, it's covered in shit, and you have to ask for toilet paper. There's no soap.

The food was ok, but since I ended up paying a $120 fine, it was a little overpriced, for some pb&j and corn flakes.

The board of directors of the City's Economic Development Corporation meet at 110 William Street.

Gary Ackerman hosts a town hall meeting for small business owners at the public library in Corona, Queens.

Prisoner and AIDS advocates protest the closure of the HIV testing program at Rikers Island on the steps of City Hall.

A Veterans Day ceremony will be held at the Brooklyn VA hospital.

Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro announces funding for the Staten Island Recreation Association's therapeutic horseback riding program.

James Gennaro and John Liu host a Kristallnacht commemoration at the Free Synagogue of Flushing.

People for the American Way host a discussion of the election results and debate on same-sex marriage at their Northeast Regional Office.

The International Rescue Committee honors Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirlief at their Freedom Award dinner at the Waldorf, which John Edwards is also scheduled to attend.

Susan Sarandon is honored at the Habitat for Humanity gala at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Bob Schieffer moderates a panel discussion on national security reporting with journalists Dana Priest, James Risen, Pierre Thomas and David Remnick at the Sheraton.

—Nicole Brydson

This wasn't the sort of sign you can fold up and put in your pocket, mind you: It was a big-a really big-electronic orange sign ("Don't call it saffron," cautioned one art wag) that belonged to the New York City Department of Transportation. In fact, the sign was so big that it had a V.I.N., or vehicle identification number, just like a Hummer or a truck. It was also worth $17,000.

After a D.O.T. employee discovered, sometime around 3 p.m., that the sign had vanished, he canvassed the area in case someone had moved it-Jenny Holzer, perhaps, for one of her cryptic text installations-but still it was nowhere to be found. He then called his office, but none of his co-workers had taken the sign for a walk; neither had they given anyone else permission to do so.

Even amid the pleasant commotion caused by The Gates, one would think there might be witnesses to the theft of a Day-Glo sign the size of a billboard-especially since it had been chained to the spot with a quarter-inch steel cable.

Calls were made to the Department of Transportation's director of equipment to see if he knew anything about the fugitive message board. One theory had it that it might have been moved to Astoria. "It went missing the same day as the water-main break," said a police official. "It might have been taken to help out. I'm still convinced it was moved as opposed to stolen."

But they couldn't find the sign in Astoria, either. A police official also nixed the theory that the sign might have been taken by a frustrated foreign tourist who wanted a better souvenir of The Gates than the schlocky Gates-related T-shirts, caps and key chains that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are hawking to help defray the project's costs.

However, the cop couldn't help observing that more literal-minded art lovers might actually have preferred the D.O.T. sign to The Gates. "It was a Gates with a message," he said.

Caged Car Rage

If you've ever wondered why the back seats of police cars look like prison cells, complete with steel-mesh barriers separating the front and back seats, it's for perps like the one caught by cops on Feb. 21.

At around 6:30 p.m., a suspect who fit the description of a male who'd just stolen jeans from a nearby store was detained by officers from "Operation Impact" (an NYPD program that assigns rookie cops en masse to particular precincts). The Impact rookies spotted the man at the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station and escorted him up to street level. The reaction of the prisoner after a "show-up" was conducted and a witness to the shoplifting positively identified him certainly was impactful. He started to resist after he was handcuffed, requiring the concerted effort of several cops to subdue him. And after he was successfully placed in the back of the patrol car-usually down time given over to quiet reflection-the handcuffed man kicked out the rear passenger window. This turned out to be not the shrewdest thing to do; he was charged with resisting arrest and criminal mischief in addition to petty larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. Nor did it earn him his freedom.

"If you've seen the back of the car, it's like a cage," said Inspector James Rogers, the commanding officer of the 19th Precinct. "He's not going anywhere."

The suspect's antisocial behavior, it turns out, may have had less to do with trying to escape than giving some expression to his frustration-not only at the cage in which he found himself confined, but at the prospect of the slightly larger one that awaited him on Rikers Island. The police said the crook had a rather extensive rap sheet, as well as an outstanding warrant, the details of which they were trying to ascertain at the time a crime report addressing the incident was submitted.

Ralph Gardner can be reached at RGard135@aol.com.

Let's face it: One of the most perilous uniformed jobs in New York isn't that of a cop or even a correction officer on Rikers Island, but rather that of a traffic agent for the city's Department of Transportation. At least that's what two recent incidents on the mean streets of Manhattan would seem to suggest.

On July 9, a D.O.T. agent was issuing a ticket to an unoccupied vehicle that was illegally double-parked on the corner of 76th Street and Second Avenue. Before she'd finished writing the ticket, the vehicle's driver returned. "I'm leaving, I'm leaving," he told the agent.

However, he neglected to inform her that, before doing so, he intended to punish her by running her over. The man started up his 1992 white Ford minivan and drove it into the agent, knocking her to the ground. He then put the car in reverse and fled southbound on Second Avenue.

But there was something he hadn't considered-the fact that the agent had already written down the vehicle registration number on the ticket. The car was traced to a Bronx address, and the case remains under investigation by the 19th Precinct detective squad. The D.O.T. agent, complaining of abdominal pain and difficulty breathing, was removed to New York Presbyterian Hospital by the E.M.S.

In another parking-related incident that occurred at 11 a.m. on July 2 in front of 320 East 79th Street, a traffic agent told a double-parker who was sitting in his car to move it. The motorist took the agent's order literally: He moved the vehicle a mere three car lengths from where it had previously been stationed, and continued to double-park.

At that point, the agent stopped playing Ms. Nice Guy and proceeded to issue the driver a ticket for double-parking. The driver didn't display his unhappiness over the summons by butting the officer with his vehicle, as did the fellow in the abovementioned incident. Instead, he calmly (well, perhaps not calmly, but purposefully) disembarked and knocked the summons out of the agent's hand. He wasn't through, though. Next he produced a handy baseball bat from the back seat of his car and started to advance on the traffic agent who, spotting the weapon (and apparently not unfamiliar with being put on the defensive by motorists), tried to call for assistance over her radio.

Rather than flee the scene at this point (as prudence would seem to dictate), the perp-civility taking over, if only momentarily-apparently abandoned his bat and went at the government employee barehanded, knocking the radio out of her hand. Just then, a gallant eyewitness got between the agent and motorist and broke up the fight. The suspect returned to his vehicle and fled eastbound on 79th Street. The police canvassed the area, with negative results. The agent suffered no injuries.

Don't Mess With the Press

Frankly, there aren't that many perks available to members of the Fourth Estate. This may explain why they guard the few they do have so jealously. One fringe benefit is the opportunity to apply for "NYP" press plates, which entitle the holder to park in designated areas that are off-limits to the general public. And-parking being what it is in the city-a journalist can get ugly quickly when he finds himself forced to feed quarters into a meter because some uncredentialed schmuck took the last spot in the press parking zone.

This phenomenon apparently explains the scratches one motorist, a 74-year-old East 80th Street resident, discovered on his BMW on July 3 after he'd parked the vehicle in a New York press–designated area at 60th Street and Park Avenue. He told the police that his vehicle (for which he has some sort of special parking permit, though not one that entitles him to "NYP" license plates) was vandalized on both July 2 and July 3.

In the first incident, his left door was scratched; in the second, his rear door and left rear fender were scratched. And since journalists feel most comfortable expressing themselves in print, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the victim reported finding notes on his car telling him not to park there because-duh!-it was reserved for the press. Apparently, the notes were not on letterhead.

Brotherly Love

If you're going to get into a fight that draws blood-especially with a sibling-it helps to know what you're fighting about. Unfortunately, an East 50th Street resident who was taken to Bellevue Hospital at around 6 a.m. on June 30 (after greeting the new day in an Upper East Side bar) was unable to recall what exactly had been the cause of the altercation he'd gotten himself into.

He confided to the police that his faulty memory had something to do with the fact that both he and his brother were intoxicated. Nonetheless, it was clear that the match had been spirited: It had started as a verbal dispute and then escalated into a physical battle, in which his brother punched him in the face and head, giving him a bloody nose and causing bruises on the face.

However, in the spirit of familial reconciliation, the victim stated "numerous times" to the cops that he had no desire to press charges. By the time the police arrived, the brother had left the scene.

One would not be incorrect in thinking that doing P.R. for the city's prisons is somewhat akin to pushing a large boulder up a steep hill. The job was mostly about damage control. If an inmate hanged himself in his cell or there was a prison disturbance, I'd go on WINS and deliver the news as casually as possible.

It was hard to be proactive. I once organized a show of art made by both inmates and Soho artists at our Centre Street headquarters. I can't remember what the point of the exhibition was, but William Ciuros, the Commissioner of Correction at the time, was something of a security freak and wouldn't let the public attend.

The high point of my career with the department-after which I took a leave of absence that continues to this day-came when we lent vehicles to the Board of Ed during a school-bus strike, and I managed to get a photo on the front page of the Daily News ' "night owl" edition of a correction officer gingerly helping a kindergartner onto a prison van.

The occasion for my return to Rikers arose when I was invited to attend an inmate creative-writing program sponsored by Fresh Start, an organization founded by Barbara Margolis in 1989 and now run by the Osborne Association. Fresh Start teaches prisoners social and vocational skills so that, upon their release, they'll hopefully be able to get jobs as something besides drug dealers. (I don't think I'm being politically incorrect in saying this, since the majority of writing samples the students produced during my visit did indeed involve the risks and rewards of selling drugs.)

I waited on the Queens side of the Rikers Island bridge as John Mohan, my latter-day equivalent at the D.O.C., checked me in at the security trailer. I didn't envy John. I learned during my tenure at the department that it's a lot easier to ask questions as a reporter than to find answers for them as a flack. Also, flacks are held responsible by their superiors for anything prisoners say that finds its way into print and reflects negatively on the department. And prisoners, as a group, have a talent for speaking in sound bites.

Memories of my time with the department came flooding back as I smelled the sea air, watched the planes taking off from La Guardia next-door and waited for John. I used to visit Rikers at least a couple of times a month when I worked for the prisons, either escorting dignitaries around or overseeing the publication of The Pen , the department's official newspaper.

Today, the department's inmate population is at least double what it was when I worked there. I wouldn't exactly call Rikers Island a country club back then, but there are far more fences topped with razor wire now than I remember, and where there were once lawns with grazing geese and pheasants, jails now stand. The island isn't one large prison, but actually a bunch of separate facilities. The Adolescent Reception and Detention Center, which was relatively new back then, is showing its age, and rivulets of rust from where the razor ribbon hits the building are running down its façade.

The writing class was held at the Eric M. Taylor Center, the facility for those who have been sentenced to prison terms of a year or less. Accompanied by Fresh Start's Marianna Shturman and Susan Blum from the Osborne Association, we stopped to pay homage, as decorum dictates, to the prison's warden, David Goodman.

Warden Goodman, a modern-day disciplinarian who wears designer Philip Johnson–style spectacles, started as a correction officer in 1981 at the jail he now runs. Contrary to the island's overburdened appearance, Warden Goodman says that things at his jail are better than they used to be. "We're much more professional, much more accountable," he told me. "We have a gang-intelligence unit. We do a lot of searches during the midnight tour. Violence is tremendously down-down 95 percent since '95."

Alan Feuer, a New York Times reporter, was leading the class. Whatever rehabilitative effect it may have on the inmates, the program has certainly proved helpful to the careers of the instructors. Jennifer Wynn, who runs the program and teaches a journalism workshop, recently published Inside Rikers , a behind-the-scenes look at the prison. And Raul Correa, who runs the creative-writing workshop with Mr. Feuer, is off at Yaddo and recently published his first novel, I Don't Know But I've Been Told .

I suppose I should include myself in this group. My first assignments as a freelance writer came from editors who figured I was an expert on crime, which wasn't necessarily true. Actually, my first published piece was about the island's Christmas pageant, which featured prisoners in drag and quite displeased the clergy.

The assignment the day I visited was to write about "a crisis, the moment of no return." It wasn't an especially difficult assignment, since the lives of the prisoners, by definition, are in a constant state of crisis. Many of their stories were about the temptations of drugs, sex and stolen cars, and sometimes a combination of all three.

By itself, it would be hard to see how useful the creative-writing class could be. But it's part of a comprehensive, four-month program that includes counseling and job training and continues after a prisoner's release. According to Fresh Start, of the inmates who complete the program, 85 percent avoid reincarceration.

The 10-minute time limit prevented the completion of anything especially polished. But there were some nice turns of phrase, such as "Sweat becomes my flesh." It was a reference to the sensation one storyteller experienced standing before a judge who was about to decide whether to remand him to prison or dismiss the charges. "That's a little line of poetry," Alan said encouragingly.

Another inmate wrote of the headaches of managing a "members only" strip club in Harlem and of "a well-known Black Tail magazine centerfold model" there named Champagne. It was hard to detect the moment of crisis in the piece, unless it was when Champagne showed up for work an hour and a half late. However, when she finally arrived, she gave her customers more than their money's worth.

A prisoner named Anthony wrote of his bad judgment in deciding to hang out with his crew one fateful afternoon instead of going home to his girlfriend. "I was busy getting what some would call 'my high' on," he wrote. "After that, we were all on our way to rob the major department store."

As I watched Mr. Mohan scramble to get the prisoners who spoke to me to sign release forms, I couldn't say I missed my old job. The prisoners aren't the only ones society forgets. Correction officers and jailhouse P.R. men also tend to be underappreciated. Two years was just about the right amount of time to spend there-I suspect I learned more than if I'd attended journalism school.

After class, Anthony told me he was serving time for violating his probation. Probation for what? I asked. "Robbery 1, 2 and 3," he said. "I was there. But I didn't rob nobody."

In all the time I worked for the Department of Correction, I never once met an inmate who admitted he'd been justifiably arrested. At least some things never change.

Perhaps an even more reliable aphrodisiac was the beeper I wore while working for the Department of Correction's public-information office. But that's a whole other story.

In any case, I recently returned to Centre Street for a spectacle as riveting as anything I'd witnessed, and certainly more inspiring: Michael Corriero's courtroom.

Mr. Corriero is Manhattan's Youth Part judge, and every Friday morning dozens of 14-to-18-year-olds accused of violent crimes–kidnapping, rape, assault, armed robbery–get shipped to him from Rikers Island and other facilities run by the Department of Juvenile Justice. He has the power to get them out of jail and into a program where they're expected to go to school, observe strict curfews, and report to his courtroom once a month so he can monitor their progress. If they complete the treatment successfully, their crimes are purged from the record.

Or he can send them back to prison.

"I'm not so interested in exactly what they say, but their demeanor reacting to me," he said in his chambers on a recent Friday.

But the teenagers are only part of the drama. Were Daumier to paint the scene in the courtroom (though perhaps Goya would be a better choice), or were Dickens to commit it to literature, they would undoubtedly be as drawn to the dispirited families of the accused as to the defendants themselves. Enveloped in an almost palpable mist of despair, the families sit in two cramped rows in the back.

Sitting slightly above the fray, Judge Corriero seems less a jurist than a minor deity. He asks a girl arrested for armed robbery how her baby in foster care is doing. He orders a defense lawyer whose client expresses an interest in math to buy him a ticket to see A Beautiful Mind . And he chastises the parents of an incarcerated teenager for bringing his two younger brothers to court with them.

"Isn't today a school day?" he demands. "I'd rather you be in school."

I know I run the risk of seeming insensitive by comparing what is very serious business–lives literally hang in the balance here–to theater. But Judge Corriero's courtroom achieves what only the best drama does–especially for those of us fortunate enough to have escaped poverty and addiction. It takes us out of our comfortable, confident little lives and teaches us something about the condition of others.

The questionable triumph of this city is that we've performed a vanishing act on the poor. You can go about your life never having to sidestep anything more distasteful than the dog droppings on your Park Avenue sidewalk.

"You rarely see a lone child robber or a lone child burglar," the judge said, explaining why society should resist the temptation to throw away the key on all these kids. "For example, three kids involved in a knifepoint robbery–one holds the knife, another is the lookout, another is the recipient of the property from the victim. You have to look at the individuality of the child, the extent of his involvement, and make decisions on that basis."

On this Friday, three high-school football players were brought before Judge Corriero. They'd been arrested for robbing a Chinese-restaurant delivery man at gunpoint on East 158th Street using a BB gun.

The judge saved his harshest words for the team's quarterback. "You're on Rikers Island now," he said. "You like the people you meet there? You like the feel of the bars? The fact that you have to go to the bathroom in front of everybody? You like the smell? You think of that the next time you're walking down the street thinking of doing something stupid."

If a kid is willing to plead guilty, the judge can enroll him in a youth-offender program on the spot, as he did these three. The process, including the judge's harangue, takes no more than five minutes. On this day, he heard 31 cases before lunch.

As impressive as Judge Corriero seems throwing lighting bolts down from the bench, one is allowed to wonder how successful these programs are in the long run. While he said that no empirical studies have been done of the recidivism rate among adolescents sentenced to the treatment programs, rough estimates are that only about 20 percent of them return to jail. Those who don't go through the programs go back to prison between 60 and 80 percent of the time, he said.

One of his cases on this morning involved an adult who first appeared in the judge's court room five and a half years ago as an adolescent. "When you add up all the times he's had to appear in front of me over six years, you do develop a relationship," said the judge.

Cops pulled over a car he was driving and found drugs in the back seat. A smooth talker, he said the drugs were found on a friend and that he didn't know anything about them.

"The question," the judge said, "is why are you driving around with people who carry?"

"I'm not trying to make an excuse," the man said. "But my mom just came out of surgery." He claimed that he was on his way to the hospital.

"Why do you make it so difficult for yourself?" he asked.

"Judge, you're 100 percent right."

Judge Corriero released him on his own recognizance. "His violations of probation have been minor," he said.

At 59, the judge's athletic looks make him seem a couple of decades younger. And he isn't unfamiliar with overcoming tough odds. He grew up in Little Italy, the first member of his family to go to college. But the judge had advantages these kids don't, including the nuns at the Maryknoll Missionaries in Chinatown, who educated him and considered discipline a short cut to divinity.

By 1 p.m., the courtroom is nearly empty as most of the family members have departed–some in tears. One of the last cases of the morning was a robbery involving a teenager who seemed especially young.

"Am I going home for my birthday?" the kid asked.

"No," Judge Corriero replied. In fact, he'd scheduled the teenager's next court appearance for his birthday. "You'll be with us," he said gently. "Do you want to change the date so it's not on your birthday?"

The kid nodded shyly. "Every Friday," said the judge, "is like an emotional roller coaster for us."

Albert Einstein thought the "prettiest way" to get to the heart of certain concepts in physics was to think up good thought experiments. This seems as apt a method as any for illuminating the deep fissures of class and race at the heart of Jennifer Wynn's wrenching little book about the lives of Rikers Island inmates.

Imagine this scenario: The young Al Gore–who, we know from his own mouth, possessed and used illegal drugs on "rare and infrequent" occasions during the 70's–is living in the South Bronx in the 1990's. Strip him of his family and money and paint him another color; let him then be captured in a drug sweep by the police and accused of selling an ounce of marijuana–a prison offense. Alternative Al has the typical characteristics of a Rikers Island newbie: 92 percent of the Rikers population is black or Hispanic; one quarter can't afford, or can't find somebody else to put up, bail of $500 or less. The predominance of blacks and Hispanics in the system doesn't mean that whites never encounter the criminal-justice system–on the contrary. The large majority (71 percent) of under-18's arrested by the police are white, but even in that age group, the selection bias is tilted against minorities: apply the alchemy of the justice system, and two-thirds of the under-18's who actually end up in jail turn out to be black or Hispanic.

After Al exchanges the clothes he was arrested in for the Rikers greens worn by his 20,000 or so fellow inmates, he'll discover that he has an official commissary account with a $150 charge against it. He has to come up with that sum before he can purchase such luxuries as deodorant or cigarettes. If he leaves the island without paying it back, he can be arrested for it. However, he can discharge the debt with 10 weeks of menial labor. Mind you, at this point he hasn't been convicted of a crime–he's merely being detained for trial, like three-fourths of the Rikers population.

If, like the real Al Gore, our Albert has a problem disguising his own sense of superiority, he is going to have trouble with the guards. Enough of that and you are put in the torture chambers–or, to use the American euphemism, "solitary." In 1988, Rikers opened the Central Punitive Segregation Unit–the "Bing"–for storing the insolent, the ultra-violent and the psychos. These are the hard-core inmates who assault other inmates, "gas" the correctional officers (i.e., throw urine and feces on them) and, if the conditions are right and a sharpened chicken bone, shank or pen is handy, stab the C.O.'s, too. In the early 90's, the C.O.'s responded with overwhelming force. Ms. Wynn records conversations with one of the C.O.'s, "The Captain," who transferred out of the Bing before it was reorganized in 1995. Here's what happened to an inmate who stabbed an officer in the cheek with a pen: "The officers took the inmate into the receiving room and beat him with batons for fifteen minutes," The Captain told Ms. Wynn. "They were playing baseball with his face. Every bone in his face was broken. They did everything but make his brains come out of his ears." When they were done, "Everyone was covered with blood. Eight batons were broken. It made Rodney King look like kindergarten."

Rikers is much less violent now. In 1996, Commissioner Michael Jacobson decommissioned the old Bing. Inmate stabbings and slashings have dropped 90 percent from 1995 levels.

We imagine Al would be too smart to tangle with the Bing, anyway. If he keeps to a low frequency, does his stint right, he'll eventually be taken on a transport and dumped off in front of Twin Donuts on Queens Plaza at 4 a.m. This happens to 350 inmates a day. He'll have a $4.50 MetroCard in his hand, and he'll be wearing the clothes he was arrested in. If Al was nervous when he was arrested–and if he's like the real Al Gore, no doubt he'd have been upset at the police meanly misconstruing his sharing a baggie with a pal as some kind of sale of a controlled substance–and say he threw up, he'd be wearing clothes that reek of mildew and vomit. The Corrections Department certainly hasn't washed them in the interim.

This is from a "recidivism quiz" published in the inmate-written Rikers Review : "When you get off the bus on Queens Plaza, which of the following are you most likely to do? (A) Approach the nearest drug dealer; (B) Call home for a ride; (C) Grab a forty (a 40-ounce can of beer made with malt liquor) and drink it with your buddies; or (D) See if there's some female action in Twin Donuts."

If we look a little harder at the two universes revealed by our thought experiment, we find a deep moral paradox which complicates the choice Alternative Al has to make in Queens that morning. Remember that the real Al Gore, who openly confessed to violating the law, became our Vice President and then a professor at Columbia University–all without having to think too hard about his pot-smoking days. But what are the chances for Alternative Al? Even if, say, he could get accepted to Columbia as a student, it's unlikely he'd be able to attend, thanks to a change in the federal funding law made under the real Al Gore's watch. Alt Al's record of being caught and prosecuted for possession or sale of a controlled substance would make him ineligible for a year for "any grant, loan, or work assistance" under the Higher Education Act. Given his meager resources, the cost of living in New York and the amount of living you can do on a minimum-wage salary, that year-long wait could easily doom him. If you're caught once, you're caught again for being caught: Stigma piles on stigma. In the real Al's world, something like the opposite happens: Success breeds success.

Ms. Wynn has worked since the early 90's with Fresh Start, a rehabilitative program that sponsors classes in Rikers and develops jobs for inmates outside of Rikers. She has been on both ends of the Fresh Start program and has toured other New York prisons under the aegis of the Correctional Association. Her book branches into impressionistic accounts of what's happened to some of her clients over the last decade. There is a certain Newgate Calendar colorfulness to this crew: Frank, the crazy-looking recidivist who is arrested for a robbery he commits out of habit after he's landed a salaried position; Anthony, a Columbia student and heroin addict who got caught up in Rikers' methadone program; and 20 others. But the overall impression is, depressingly, much like what George Orwell once described as the image of totalitarianism at the end of 1984 : "imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever."

Ms. Wynn is not an elegant or comprehensive writer, and she ignores large chunks of the Rikers Island experience–most notably sex. Although she strives to be nonpartisan, her style betrays her as the classical liberal. It's just not in her to condemn absolutely. This is the kind of thing that has driven the right-wing mind crazy since Eleanor Roosevelt was a pup: To conservatives, restraining one's moral judgment implies not having any. But this reviewer is satisfied that we have more than enough agencies, politicians and pundits out there willing to thunder condemnation. In the meantime, what happens? Three hundred and fifty new Angels, Dwaynes, Franks, Napoleons, Lynwoods, etc., have to hook up each day. Far better if they hook up with a Jennifer Wynn than with the blunt or the 40.

Roger Gathman has written for The American Scholar and In These Times.

her eyes to know how rankly foul our school systems, public and private,

must be. Seldom has there been a more discouraging parade of illiterate,

unlearned, ill-prepared, poorly spoken ignoramuses than the men and women

members of the Congress depositing their soot on our television screens

during the impeachment debate. So many hours of coarse, repetitive,

inarticulate grunts, gargles and gwaks.

The American Congress has never had a reputation as the home of the

learned or the wise, but in the past there have been a few eloquent

speakers betraying a broader knowledge than can be found in a law library.

The current membership of the House of Representatives, however, is as

unimpressive a collection of human beings as can be found assembled

anywhere outside of Rikers Island. Few of them, to use one of their

favorite expressions, rise above the level of street thugs in their

discourse. With a congressional staff approaching 40,000 people, you would

think that at least one member of the Senate or the House would have found

somebody to write a decent speech.

Nevertheless, their trash-mouth repetitions and cliché-mongering

are worth dwelling on for a moment. "This is a government of

laws," they proclaim with the maddening regularity of cuckoo clocks,

but anyone from the outside listening to them is driven to conclude that it

isn't a government of laws, it is a government of lawyers. The laws

are an incomprehensible hash.

After 4,000 references to the Founders, Framers and Fathers, and

adjurations that any deviation from their perfect wisdom will send the

society crashing God knows where, it occurs to an intelligent outsider that

it might be better to think about the Constitution than worship it.

Treating it as the Shroud of Turin only traps us into mindless debate as to

what does or does not "rise to the level of blah, blah, blah."

This Constitution before which there is so much kneeling and joss-stick

lighting is anything but the supreme political design of the ages. We act

as if the Constitution was not made to serve us but as though we were made

to serve the Constitution. In truth it is a sucky document in need of

overhaul before it does us in, and perpetual peddling of it to the populace

as the perfect political plan only makes it that much harder to change.

As has been said elsewhere, it is all but impossible to change because

the Founders, Framers and Fathers wrote it that way, not for any exalted

motive like protecting liberty, but to protect human slavery. Every day in

the House and Senate, you will hear the familiar cant about not changing

the Constitution but the insuperable barriers to amendment were in place

before the first 10 amendments were passed, and it is worth bearing in mind

that for decades thereafter the Bill of Rights was a dead letter,

unenforceable anywhere in the United States. It was window dressing and

would have remained window dressing without the passage of the 14th

Amendment.

To get the 14th Amendment passed, 600,000 men died in the Civil War.

Nothing short of this sacrifice was demanded by that crinkly piece of

parchment to purge it of slavery and begin to make the Bill of Rights

something like a real protection of personal liberty. This argument has to

be made repeatedly as a corrective against those who insist the only way to

run the country is Constitutional divinations conducted by legal pedants and judicial scholiasts scouring

200-year-old manuscripts written by men who, in their craziest dreams,

could not have imagined a nation such as ours. We are related to the

reality of the Founders, Framers and Fathers in the same degree and kind

that we are related biologically to Australopithecus, the little apes at

Olduvai Gorge from whom we are said to descend.

No amount of exegesis on what the Founders, Framers and Fathers may have

intended when they wrote phrases like "high crimes" is going to

accomplish anything but to further mislead ourselves. Hence, beware of

members of Congress quoting and requoting Barbara Jordan's now

somewhat tired statement that, "My faith in the Constitution is whole,

it is complete, it is total …" Such fervent credos are

meaningless invitations to stop thinking and stop questioning imbecilic

recitations of legal and political dogmas.

Why should it be a mortal sin to contemplate changing a sclerotic

governmental system that barely works at any level? Exhibit No. 1 for this

assertion is the impossibility of campaign finance reform. Setting aside

whether or not it is desirable, look at the predicament we're in.

Nine judges who serve for life and whose findings cannot be reviewed by

any other power on earth but themselves have decreed the Constitution is

violated if limits are put on campaign spending. At the same time, any

legislation that might be cleverly enough drawn up to snake its way around

this decree cannot pass the Senate, a legislative chamber where Montana,

with 870,000 people, gets two Senators, as does California, with 31

million. At this late date in the 20th century, the one-man, one-vote rule

obtains to only one house of the American Congress. I suppose that we

should be grateful for this much since the Constitution, as originally

written by the infallible Founders, Framers and Fathers, did not have the

direct election of Senators by the people. To get that one small change,

direct election, required more than a century of bitching, moaning and

struggle. We are living under a cryogenically rigid system without ice

breakers.

It is also, unhappily, a system whose defects are often celebrated as

its greatest virtues, to wit, the separation of powers. Under this scheme,

everybody in government can blame everybody else and all of them can be

played off against each other by the 20,000-plus lobbyists plying their

trade like so many Eighth Avenue hookers in what is called Gucci Gulch, the

hallways outside the hundreds of committee rooms where Congress stumbles

through the bewildering business of writing laws whose impact and import it

can scarcely guess–in no small measure because, under the separation

of powers, it has no connection, and certainly no responsibility, for

executing the laws it passes.

Ever since Hector was a pup, suggestions have been made for ameliorating

this deficiency by such devices as making the Secretaries of the executive

branch departments nonvoting members of Congress. Like all ideas for

revamping dinosaur government, these also were asphyxiated generations ago

by the dead hand of this Constitution.

The one argument for removing the President from office has nothing to

do with perjury. If Congress were to kick out a President on the trivial

grounds it is toying with, it might trigger a series of events through

which Congress took over much of the executive branch power and began

administering the goofy laws it passes. In the nonvirtual world, of course,

removal of President Clinton would lead to nothing of the sort. It would

lead to one more mess, and we have enough of these as it is.

Starting in the 1950's, the Supreme Court made a run at filling in

for the ever-paralyzed Congress. It didn't work. The strict

constructionists, those Talmudic fanatics of 18th-century

constitutionalism, emitted ear-splitting bellows of protest, and it turned

out that judges under our system make even worse legislators than do

legislators. After two or three decades of trying to run vast public enterprises from the

bench and making a disgusting muck of it, the judges are in retreat.

So problems pile up and the gigantic animal in Washington rollicks in

the mud or lifts its long neck so that its dumb head can rip off more green

leaves from the shrubbery surrounding its swimming hole. Nor is the remedy

for our woes a higher class of person in Congress. What we need is a better

Constitution.

Under city law, female prisoners about to give birth are supposed to be taken to a medical facility outside the jail. But at the clinic, administered by St. Barnabas Hospital, a physician assistant–less highly trained than an M.D.–decided Ms. Green could wait for hospitalization and sent her back to her cell. Yet common obstetrical logic is that a woman who'd had 10 children, as Ms. Green had had, would be a likely candidate for rapid labor. Sure enough, she was. With the help of other inmates, she quickly gave birth, in her cell, to a baby in distress who was then rushed to Elmhurst Hospital Center.

The irony of this story is rich: A woman incarcerated by the city for having allegedly killed a child gives birth in a city prison cell, in conditions that endanger the child.

While Rikers staff members have told The Observer that what happened to Ms. Green is an indication of problems at the jail, any claim by her would probably be far down on the list of troubles for St. Barnabas. On Aug. 24, almost eight months after the hospital assumed control of health care for Rikers, the city convened an extraordinary quality-assurance meeting. Packing a conference room at the headquarters of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, the city agency that was placed in charge of prison care in 1996, were high-level city doctors and administrators, and representatives from St. Barnabas, including its president, Dr. Ronald Gade. The medical charts of a handful of inmates were examined during the meeting. Ongoing assessment of medical care at Rikers, through which 133,000 inmates pass a year, is common. But this meeting was unusual because of the seniority of the administrators in attendance and what prompted it: steady complaints from doctors that medical standards at the jail have plummeted dangerously under St. Barnabas' watch.

In August, the Manhattan District Attorney began a preliminary investigation into whether medical supplies are being diverted from the detention center, The Observer has learned. According to a senior law-enforcement source, investigators from the racketeering division have contacted at least one person at H.H.C., seeking information about supply orders and inventories.

Physicians have claimed, and internal memos seem to support, severe shortages of basic but necessary medical staples–gauze, paper towels, latex gloves, Foley catheters, specimen bags. Yet St. Barnabas has ordered roughly the same levels of supplies as its predecessor. If the District Attorney determines that the shortages do indeed exist, the question then would be, where are the supplies going? Sources have alleged to investigators that they are being diverted from Rikers to other St. Barnabas-run facilities.

Officials at St. Barnabas declined to be interviewed for this article, but did respond in a letter to written questions. "We are aware of no investigation by the office of the Manhattan District Attorney," the response read. "No one at the hospital has been contacted by anyone in law enforcement … and we state categorically for the record that there is no basis whatsoever for any such investigation."

H.H.C. released a two-paragraph statement which read, in part: "[H.H.C.'s] Office of Correctional Health Services and its affiliate, St. Barnabas Hospital, are committed to providing high-quality care to inmates at Rikers Island. This includes a quality assessment/improvement program with continuous monitoring of the care that we deliver. Furthermore, ample pharmaceuticals and medical/surgical supplies are provided for the clinics we operate and the patients we serve."

All together, eight Federal, state and city agencies and watchdog groups are looking at St. Barnabas' medical practices and management, some at Rikers Island and others at another facility it administers, Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the South Bronx. On July 21, the Federal Health Care Financing Administration issued a 12-page report on deficiencies at Lincoln hospital that it found were "of such serious nature" that they limited the hospital's ability to provide adequate care and meet the conditions for receiving Medicaid and Medicare revenue. The agency cited, among other things, inadequate triaging of emergency-room patients and waits for critically injured patients of up to six hours for consultations with specialists like neurosurgeons.

Yet H.H.C., in its statement, said that Lincoln has always met Health Care Financing Administration standards, continues to do so, and has not been excluded from the two Federal programs, which in 1997 reimbursed the hospital $271 million. St. Barnabas responded that the hospital, along with H.H.C., had disagreed with various of the Federal agency's findings. "In the time since that report, a secondary survey has found that every standard of care is being met–or exceeded–at Lincoln."

However, a Health Care Financing Administration spokesman said that the hospital was still being monitored by the state because of deficiencies. "These statements appear to be dismissive and cause me to be concerned about whether the facility takes these findings seriously," she said.

St. Barnabas' Rocky Road

Even as St. Barnabas faces these charges and findings, Dr. Gade appears to be contemplating expanding his reach. The Observer has learned that on Aug. 6 and 7, St. Barnabas representatives attended a mandatory preproposal conference in Philadelphia for any potential bidders interested in providing health care for inmates in that city's correctional system. On Sept. 4, bids are due for that contract, which may be worth more than $17 million per year. St. Barnabas declined to comment on those plans.

New York's award to St. Barnabas of the Rikers contract–the most lucrative prison-care deal in the country–has been fraught with controversy from the beginning. On Sept. 5, 1997, six medical groups submitted bids to H.H.C. The lowest bidder, St. Barnabas, won the contract with a managed-care-style plan to computerize patient records, improve care and cover inmates' hospital costs. The Bronx hospital estimated that it could do this for a base amount of roughly $301 million over three years; the highest bid, in comparison, came in at $373 million. (Last December, Saint Vincents Hospital and Medical Center–which previously had shared the prison contract with Montefiore Medical Center–filed a lawsuit against St. Barnabas and H.H.C., alleging that there were irregularities in the bidding process. The suit is still pending.)

Six months prior to the awarding of the Rikers contract, Dr. Gade had emerged from another competitive city bid with a three-year, $94 million deal to provide health care at Lincoln. Again, St. Barnabas, the lowest of five bidders, had proposed to cut costs through a vigorous triage of 40 percent of hospital staff and a streamlining of residency training programs. With the 1998 prison contract, the city used H.M.O. logic. It gave St. Barnabas a lump sum to pay for hospital visits. If there is money left at year's end, St. Barnabas gets to keep it. The city, under its previous Rikers Island medical contract, picked up the costs of inmates' hospitalization. A March 1998 New York Times story reported that in February, hospital visits by inmates were roughly half what they were in February 1997 when Montefiore administered the contract. St. Barnabas wrote The Observer that its "model of care has produced a record of innovation, cost-effectiveness and markedly improved public safety by reducing the number of off-site trips by prisoners." Donna Bell, a senior obstetrician at the clinic Ms. Green visited, said, "Under Montefiore, there were a lot of unnecessary procedures" being performed on inmates. "Under St. Barnabas, I have not had any problems with patient care." When asked about the case of Ms. Green, she replied, "No comment."

Yet the spate of inquiries raise several questions. Does the contract, under a managed-care model approved by the city, provide a dangerous incentive to withhold care? And can the complicated lives behind bars at Rikers–often tainted by H.I.V., drug habits, sexual abuse and multiple diseases–bend to a pared-down, managed-care model?

Staffing and Supplies

A review by The Observer of 20 patient records, more than 100 internal memos, and interviews with five inmates, seven current and nine former staff members, reveals chronic supply shortages, severe understaffing and significant delays in treatment.

Shortly after St. Barnabas took over the contract on Jan. 1, 1998, Rikers staff members said, they began to experience a lack of basic supplies. "You're examining an AIDS patient and you don't have gloves," said a physician who recently left the correctional facility. "If you don't have paper towels and you're seeing 15 to 20 patients, what do you do? Many times, I brought my own."

In February, alarm bells over missing supplies began to ring at H.H.C.'s Correctional Health Services division, which oversees the contract. Then executive director of the division, Greg Kaladjian, investigated allegations that supplies were being diverted. Mr. Kaladjian, now a private consultant, met secretly with a senior Rikers administrator at a Holiday Inn near La Guardia Airport, where the possibility of diversion of supplies to other St. Barnabas facilities was first discussed. "There was no documented evidence," said Mr. Kaladjian, "just rumors and innuendo. I would send out my people on unannounced visits and the [warehouses] and closets were filled to the gills. We looked at the ordering patterns, too, and we could never establish why [the shortages] were happening."

The supply shortages are well documented in interoffice memos obtained by The Observer . On March 12, Rikers medical program director Richard Daines wrote to senior managers about supplies, "New purchases (wheelchairs, shower chairs, nebulizers, exam tables, sphygs, opthalmoscopes)–managers feel like they are not getting definitive answers and are not updated on the status of their requests."

The day before, a group of clinic managers at the prison had typed up a more candid account. Their note begins: "This page was not sent to [H.H.C. central office], just some specifics we discussed.… Supplies: Paper towels! Basics like these are not being provided. There are no medication forms! Items such as shower chairs, wheelchair tires, batteries have been ordered but we are getting no response or feedback–consider offering us a time frame during which time we will receive items." At the end of a list of problems, from a backlog of dental consults to a shortage of lab coats, the note says, "Concern with the quality and compromise of patient care."

Rikers clinicians, who declined to be identified, said that severe supply shortages forced them to improvise. A source at the Anna M. Kross Center, where inmates are first evaluated, said that on one occasion, "We didn't have specimen bags, so we were putting specimens in test tubes into trash bags. Sometimes … we have to use unsterile gauze for dressing changes."

For a three-week period earlier this summer at North Infirmary Command, Rikers' medical clinic, inmates were apparently forced to reuse disposable Foley catheters to drain urine from their bladders when the stock of new ones ran out, according to a nurse, several inmates and an inmate's attorney. St. Barnabas said that it had never heard of such a claim. In one documented case, a family purchased a box of catheters for an incarcerated relative.

"There is no factual basis for any statement that 'there have been extreme shortages' of supplies on Rikers Island," St. Barnabas' letter read. "Since taking over the contract, St. Barnabas has enhanced and improved the flow of supplies to the correctional facilities." St. Barnabas further stated that as required by the city, the hospital maintains a "perpetual inventory, and is in full compliance with the contract."

A System Under Stress

Hillel Bodek, a veteran social worker in the city's court and prison systems who on July 5 was profiled in The New York Times as an expediter in a sluggish bureaucracy, said, "There hasn't been a crisis of this proportion in providing health care to the city's prisoners in all the 20 years that I've been doing this. I very often get calls by judges when lawyers finally complain to them about [inmates'] health care. I've had more calls in the last six months than in the two years before."

It would appear that supply shortages and understaffing may be affecting patient care. Joseph Kennedy, 21, a paraplegic inmate, was treated at Rikers for bed sores above his buttocks which turned into decubitus ulcers. His wounds became so infected that in January, at Bellevue Hospital Center, his leg was amputated and its skin used to cover his wounds.

Mr. Kennedy was returned to Rikers, where his wounds reopened. The next four months were a battle for needed supplies and treatment in the face of escalating infection, according to his medical records.

The largest ulcer was documented as four inches long, two inches wide and an inch-and-a-half deep. On March 12, a clinician wrote of the wound, "extremely foul odor noted (like a dead animal) … additional symptoms (tendons) now are exposed."

It was also noted that the patient's catheter was leaking urine because the only available connector for the tubing was too large. Mr. Kennedy was using tape around the connector in an effort to stem the leak.

In April, notations show that a plastic surgery consultation at Bellevue was needed, but not scheduled, despite calls up the bureaucratic chain. A dry flotation cushion to ease pressure on his wounds was ordered, but did not arrive. Mr. Kennedy's infection progressed. A June 20 notation reads: "[Patient] very anxious to go to hospital for flap and very concerned about his condition." Two days later, it was noted that a hospital appointment was still unscheduled.

By June 24, Mr. Kennedy began to vomit up a "yellowish material" and had a 103-degree fever. Sepsis had set in, and he was transferred to Bellevue, where he underwent emergency treatment of the wounds. Mr. Kennedy is now back at Rikers.

In some patient cases, doctors seemed to chart the inmate's deterioration defensively, noting their recommendations for emergency care in bold lettering and with exclamation points. On Jan. 22, a clinician wrote in capital letters in the chart of one inmate, "Needs urgent evaluation at Bellevue or Elmhurst hand clinic for reevaluation of gangrene of remaining fingers."

The patient's chart reveals that over the course of seven weeks, he requested painkillers of increasing strength as dry gangrene crept up his right hand. Necrotic tissue was noted on Jan. 8. On Jan. 27, he refused treatment at the Elmhurst Hospital clinic.

On Feb. 27, his condition deemed urgent by Rikers doctors, the inmate was sent to Bellevue, where he underwent a bypass graft for a clotted artery in his right arm and had several fingers amputated. On March 11, his chart notes that he told a Rikers clinician, "'You are not doing anything for me–why should I come to [the prison clinic]?' [Patient] wheeled himself back to bed."

Staff members said that cases like those are born of a system that is stretched to the breaking point. They claim there are too few staff members, many of them inexperienced, and that patients are leaving clinics without treatment because of excessive waiting times. According to staffing plans obtained by The Observer , under St. Barnabas, four-fifths of the medical staff are physician assistants.

St. Barnabas said of its staffing that it had essentially continued Montefiore's patterns and was meeting its obligations under the contract. It added, "[T]o the extent that any changes in that pattern have occurred, they have resulted–in the findings of our H.H.C. monitors under these contracts–in improvements in care."

An administrative assistant in charge of scheduling who recently resigned from Rikers described a depleted staff pool. Montefiore, she said, maintained a per diem staff pool of approximately 200 it could draw on to fill shifts; she said that St. Barnabas' per diem pool is one-quarter that size, and that on any given shift, there was at least one unfilled position in each clinic. "The staff is just overwhelmed and stressed," she said. "There are no buffers."