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| Safeguarding Contraband, Outside Jails |
| By Robert Stolarik - The New York Times |
| Published: 03/23/2009 |
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Many visitors to Rikers Island entrust Robert Williams, above, with the phones, radios and other devices not allowed inside. After the Q101 bus crossed the narrow humpbacked bridge and arrived at its last stop — on Rikers Island — many of the passengers hurried to rows of steel coin-operated lockers. There, for 50 cents, they stored devices that are not allowed on visits to the jail complex, like mobile phones, beepers, radios and cameras. But others bypassed the lockers and approached a man in dreadlocks who was sipping coffee on a blue wooden bench. On one side of him was a surveillance camera, on the other, a loudspeaker urging visitors to enjoy their visits with the incarcerated. “Are you the one who holds the phones?” a woman called out. “What you got, babe?” he asked. She held up a pink Razr phone and the man, Robert Williams — known on Rikers Island as Bobby or sometimes simply the Phone Man — handed the woman a brown paper bag and a magic marker. She put her telephone inside the bag, wrote her name on it and handed it back to Mr. Williams, who tucked it inside his jacket along with a half dozen other bags. Mr. Williams is among several enterprising people — including a doughnut shop manager in Queens and the proprietor of a newsstand in Lower Manhattan — who have turned safeguarding the visitors’ valuables into a cottage industry. “I started doing it as favor for a few people,” Mr. Williams said of his start 10 years ago as a phone minder. “Then word spread and people decided they could trust me.” Although there are 542 outdoor lockers at Rikers for the storage of prohibited gadgets, it is often hard to find a free one, particularly on busy visiting days. At the Manhattan Detention Complex on White Street, lockers are available, but electronic devices may not be stored there. So visitors who show up with cellphones, music players or BlackBerrys must either find a safe place to put them on their own or cancel their visits. Mr. Williams, who has worked as a dispatcher for 19 years for a van service that takes visitors to and from Rikers, said that on a busy day, about 20 people ask him to hold their phones and pay him $3 each to do so. One of his customers, Sonia Cubero, 47, from Old Mill Basin in Brooklyn, called his service worthwhile. She said that traveling between the jail and her home without a telephone “was a nerve-racking experience.” Department of Correction officials acknowledged that the people who take care of the phones and other devices might be easing anxieties that otherwise would be directed at jail personnel. Stephen J. Morello, a deputy correction commissioner, said visitors who find their own ways to deal with the prohibitions “are making things simpler for them and for us.” Mr. Morello added that Rikers Island lockers are sometimes not available because many people who rent them fail to return the keys. That was why Destiny Collier of Brownsville, Brooklyn, walked into Donuts Unlimited on Queens Plaza South, near the stop where she catches the bus to Rikers.Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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