Hundreds of protesters have staged a rally in New York, calling for a notorious prison there to be shut down over the inhumane treatment of its inmates.
The protesters marched through Queens streets on Saturday, denouncing the deteriorating conditions at the scandal-plagued Rikers Island prison facility.
They said that solitary confinement and sexual assaults were rampant at the prison, adding that the conditions of mentally-ill inmates were appalling there.
“It’s a six-by-nine-foot cell,” former inmate Johnny Perez, 37, said of the facility’s solitary confinement. “People have died from heat exhaustion. It gets so cold that it’s hard for you to sleep because you have limited blankets and clothes.”
“For decades, the notorious Rikers Island Jail Complex has been marked by violence and corruption and impervious to substantive reform,” read a Facebook event for the march.
On September 16, six former correctional officers at the facility…