Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime,and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the novel Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, and excessive exercise of solitary confinement,teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. In 2015, or Browder committed suicide. On The novel Yorker Radio Hour,Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.
Source: wnyc.org