Stanley Morris

Stanley Morris grew up in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He served his first term on Rikers Island in 1986 when he was 20 years old. Over the following decades, he served several more stints on Rikers, where he worked as a barber and in food service. He was incarcerated there in early 2020, when COVID-19 first swept through the facility. During the pandemic, he received inadequate medical care at the jail, where he waited more than three weeks to see a doctor, who dismissed him without an examination. Without proper personal protective equipment, he and other incarcerated people had to make homemade masks from bed sheets. He describes Rikers during the pandemic as "chaos on steroids," as the jail's normally tumultuous and violent energy ramped up. He prayed every night that he would make it out alive so he could see his family again. In his 25 years of going back and forth to Rikers, this was his worst experience there. (Summary written by: Annie Anderson)