Intake in the New York City Jails (Rikers Island)

Ariel’s ethnographic dissertation research in the New York City jails (Rikers Island) focused on the processes, logics, technologies, and experiences of mass incarceration across the health and corrections intake processes. She chose to study intake not only because it is the most dangerous part of a person’s incarceration (e.g., due to withdrawal from prescribed or other drugs, interpersonal violence), but also because it was the site from which the logics and essentializations of corrections and health care are most apparent. I found that 1) embodied realities (ontologies) were multiple, 2) there was a gulf between the essentializations required by electronic record systems and the phenomenological experience of intake. The implication is that if reality is multiple, then it can also be intervened in and changed, particularly when experientialities are incorporated.