- Joined
- Jan 23, 2013
- Messages
- 30,608
Drugs, sex, and violence: My hell as a Rikers guard
By Gary Buiso
August 31, 2014
Robin Kay Miller spent 20 years working as a city correction officer, locked away in a seedy world of rampant sex, drug abuse and back-stabbing.
And that was just the guards.
Miller, 53, who retired in 2005, says she’s not surprised by the latest stories of criminality among correction officers — including three current and former Rikers officers charged after a city Department of Investigation probe into a guard network that smuggled drugs and violently attacked inmates.
A federal probe branded the 11,500-inmate jail a “broken institution” where guards routinely use excessive force and violate teen inmates’ rights. Less than a month after the
Aug. 4 report, Florence Finkle, the commissioner overseeing investigations at Rikers, resigned.
And following the 2¹/₂-year Department of Justice investigation, Mayor de Blasio last week signed into law a bill that requires correction administrators to track and publish data on the use of solitary confinement.
Now Miller says she’s ready to relate her own shocking experiences, which she says are symptomatic of a system infected for decades.
“This culture started long before the problems we’re seeing today,” she tells The Post. “It became a blueprint for what we see today.”
Miller doesn’t exactly look the part of a correction officer. She’s tall and slender and did some modeling when she was younger.
It’s only once she talks — well, shouts — that her inner CO comes out.
“You don’t talk soft after speaking to prisoners,” she says.
And she says she had another trait that was unique among her female counterparts — she wanted to work, refusing to trade sex with her superiors for cushier jobs.
“I see these female officers who came in with me. They’re in here giving [oral sex] and stuff so they don’t have to work with these prisoners and work those areas,” Miller says.
“This girl used to have a house in Queens where she would gather a bunch of [female] officers. The wardens would all go there and party.
“The officers wanted preferential treatment. They didn’t want to have to work with the inmates. A lot of them just didn’t want to work, so by doing [this] they could go to work or not go to work,” says Miller, who claimed her sister Theresa, also a correction officer at Rikers, “was part of it.”
Miller was assigned to C-76 on Rikers — the main building for male inmates, today called the Eric M. Taylor Center — where she would oversee up to 100 prisoners.
At the time, there was just a handful of female guards, and Miller’s class would be the first to include women assigned to “B-post” — locked behind a gate in the dorm area with the male prisoners — instead of inside “A-station,” an office with paperwork.
“Most females in my jail that were in office positions either had a family member with clout or was screwing a boss or someone with, as we would call it, ‘juice.’
“They would try to recruit you from the time you entered the jails. Personnel was the first stop. Any halfway decent-looking female was targeted and placed there to see who could get the panties first. I’ve heard throughout the years, it is alleged, they were recruiting them from the academy. Sending them to the Poconos for sex parties. But that type of move was for the higher-ups.”
Continued here http://nypost.com/2014/08/31/sex-drug-abuse-rampant-at-rikers-retired-officer/
By Gary Buiso
August 31, 2014
Robin Kay Miller spent 20 years working as a city correction officer, locked away in a seedy world of rampant sex, drug abuse and back-stabbing.
And that was just the guards.
Miller, 53, who retired in 2005, says she’s not surprised by the latest stories of criminality among correction officers — including three current and former Rikers officers charged after a city Department of Investigation probe into a guard network that smuggled drugs and violently attacked inmates.
A federal probe branded the 11,500-inmate jail a “broken institution” where guards routinely use excessive force and violate teen inmates’ rights. Less than a month after the
Aug. 4 report, Florence Finkle, the commissioner overseeing investigations at Rikers, resigned.
And following the 2¹/₂-year Department of Justice investigation, Mayor de Blasio last week signed into law a bill that requires correction administrators to track and publish data on the use of solitary confinement.
Now Miller says she’s ready to relate her own shocking experiences, which she says are symptomatic of a system infected for decades.
“This culture started long before the problems we’re seeing today,” she tells The Post. “It became a blueprint for what we see today.”
Miller doesn’t exactly look the part of a correction officer. She’s tall and slender and did some modeling when she was younger.
It’s only once she talks — well, shouts — that her inner CO comes out.
“You don’t talk soft after speaking to prisoners,” she says.
And she says she had another trait that was unique among her female counterparts — she wanted to work, refusing to trade sex with her superiors for cushier jobs.
“I see these female officers who came in with me. They’re in here giving [oral sex] and stuff so they don’t have to work with these prisoners and work those areas,” Miller says.
“This girl used to have a house in Queens where she would gather a bunch of [female] officers. The wardens would all go there and party.
“The officers wanted preferential treatment. They didn’t want to have to work with the inmates. A lot of them just didn’t want to work, so by doing [this] they could go to work or not go to work,” says Miller, who claimed her sister Theresa, also a correction officer at Rikers, “was part of it.”
Miller was assigned to C-76 on Rikers — the main building for male inmates, today called the Eric M. Taylor Center — where she would oversee up to 100 prisoners.
At the time, there was just a handful of female guards, and Miller’s class would be the first to include women assigned to “B-post” — locked behind a gate in the dorm area with the male prisoners — instead of inside “A-station,” an office with paperwork.
“Most females in my jail that were in office positions either had a family member with clout or was screwing a boss or someone with, as we would call it, ‘juice.’
“They would try to recruit you from the time you entered the jails. Personnel was the first stop. Any halfway decent-looking female was targeted and placed there to see who could get the panties first. I’ve heard throughout the years, it is alleged, they were recruiting them from the academy. Sending them to the Poconos for sex parties. But that type of move was for the higher-ups.”
Continued here http://nypost.com/2014/08/31/sex-drug-abuse-rampant-at-rikers-retired-officer/
