Writer William Mersey was sent to prison for tax fraud, and spent time at New York City's Rikers Island a few months ago. In this Daily Beast article, he describes what life at Rikers will be like for rapist Harvey Weinstein.
I suspect the shock of being found guilty of rape in the third degree and sexual assault in the first degree Monday and immediately cuffed and taken into custody by court officers is what led to the heart palpitations that caused the ambulance transporting him to Rikers to be diverted to the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital. Weinstein, who’d avoided any time behind bars until now, should steel himself; there are more shocks to come once he recovers from his post-conviction fit of the vapors.
When I left the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) for Rikers, I was handcuffed, shackled at the ankles, and placed in a tiny, claustrophobic plastic cubicle in the back of a Ford van to bump and bruise my way to the inmate island. He should hope he’s tied to his seat and not given a rough ride like I was.
Photo of Rikers Island by U.S. Geological Survey, conversion to PNG by uploader (Herr Satz). – The National Map Seamless Server, layer New York City (Mar 2006), latitude 40.79930093 to 40.78455349, longitude -73.89361276 to -73.86990631.Converted from GeoTIFF to PNG using GIMP., Public Domain, Link | Photo of Harvey Weinstein by Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63418391
