Pilar de Jesus

Pilar de Jesus was born and raised in East Harlem. In the late 1990s, she visited her incarcerated boyfriend at Rikers. Twenty years later, in 2019, she was detained there for two days. She recalls the long intake process, during which the medical staff took five vials of her blood and incorrectly told her she was pregnant. She felt oppressed and disrespected by the COs, who flirted with her when she was a visitor and disrespected her when she was incarcerated there. She thinks Rikers should be remembered as a place where humans were tortured, where people's mental, physical, and emotional health was destroyed. (Summary written by: Annie Anderson)