Hustlers, Boosters, Zombies And the Wages of Petty Theft
The fast-talking street hustler is a ubiquitous presence in city time; we both encountered many inmates disparaging C-76 [a Rikers Island building where the authors were incarcerated, housing inmates serving “city time” sentences of a year or less] as a “shelter,” due to its high rate of homeless men convicted of low-level property crimes.
These men demonstrated high rates of drug addiction, particularly to heroin, coupled with severe and apparently untreated mental illnesses like schizophrenia. We met very few street hustlers whose lives were not defined in large part by one of these factors, and many who seemed wracked by their disastrous combination. While most of the street hustlers we met relied heavily on the city’s shelter system, they did not receive city time for simply being homeless. And while petty drug possession and sale lands some street hustlers in city time, far and away the most common charge is misdemeanor theft, stemming from shoplifting, or as its practitioners call it, “boosting.” In our experience, these self-identified “boosters” account for the vast majority of street hustlers serving city time.
For a short time, Jarrod bunked next to one full-time booster, a middle-aged Black man who identified himself as homeless. He had been at Rikers two weeks prior, and was already back. He told Jarrod he liked one particular “white boy judge” who always gave him 15 days instead of the 60 that the district attorney requested.
Shortly before his arrest, he had been boosting air freshener liquid at Duane Reade. As he loaded boxes into a duffel bag, a yuppie confronted him. “Is that what you all do,” the man said, “steal from the store like that?” Continuing to load boxes into his duffel bag, the booster replied, “Yeah, man. You look like you got a good job. I don’t. And I been looking.” The yuppie replied, “Don’t you see these cameras?” The booster said, “Man, I got out of jail last week. Difference between me and you is, you’re scared to go there and I’m not.”
Dormitory life sometimes felt like a citywide boosters convention; large groups of them, prominent in the daily call for methadone, recounted their exploits with pride and enthusiasm: outsmarting sales clerks, securing lucrative fencing deals, and outmaneuvering the police. They often sounded like middle-aged men recounting their high-school-football glory days at the local bar – and true to form, the average booster was approaching this age. These rap sessions involved elaborate exchanges of information around the security protocols at various businesses; whether employees are permitted to interfere, whether they have facial-recognition software, whether they call the cops, and so forth.
The most vocal boosters were self-identified professionals … who treated their occupation with seriousness and derived pride and identity from their work. With keen precision they spoke of calculating the smallest items with the highest value, balanced with their ability to easily find a fence to pawn it off. For example, Jarrod met one man who stole nail polish from CVS in large quantities. He had a deal with a Chinatown nail salon, which bought his inventory and even requested particular colors and brands for the future. David met one booster who proudly claimed that his trade had gotten him banned from every Duane Reade above 59th Street.
Boosters work hard for their money. Jarrod bunked next to another middle-aged man who recounted his lucrative racket filling a sack with Häagen-Dazs in Midtown Manhattan and quickly hopping on an uptown bus.... Once in Harlem, he and his partner would sell containers that retailed for $5 for only $2 to bodega owners, selling out before they even melted. Stealing an average of 100 containers per run, he and his partner would split $200. He estimated that he had stolen $7,000 worth of ice cream from Duane Reade. Unfortunately, their corporate office also made estimates: they compiled surveillance footage of him stealing over $1,000 worth of ice cream, sufficient for the state to charge him with grand theft. He was sentenced to a “bullet” (a “city year,” or eight months after time reduced for good behavior) but was perfectly comfortable at Rikers; he ordinarily lived in a homeless shelter, and did not find Rikers much different.
Many boosters treat short-term incarceration as an occupational hazard. They are distinguished from other professional thieves, however, by the pettiness of their trade; instead of occasional big jobs that carry potentially long prison sentences, boosters are always at work, in low-yield, low-risk undertakings. If thieving is a profession, they are what we might call its precariat.
In addition to the professional boosters, who were more likely to be gregarious and boastful, we also encountered many street hustlers whose lawbreaking was rash, uncalculating, often pathetically inept, and doomed to failure. David met one man who robbed a bank with a note demanding $800, which he received, only to be captured waiting for the bus outside.
Some of these men were withdrawn almost altogether from the life of the dormitory, wandering in a state of confusion that earned some of them the derisive distinction of “zombie.” A subset of “zombies” only seemed to get out of bed for their daily dose of methadone. These particularly abject inmates seemed to be on the outside what the charming and gregarious street hustlers are on the inside: tragic men caught in an unending cycle of poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, and bad decisions, whose only agenda seemed to be escaping reality by getting high, and supporting this habit by any means necessary.
David Campell is a writer and translator and Jarrod Shanahan is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University. On different occasions, each served sentences at Rikers Island arising from arrests at political protests. This excerpt from their book, City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island, appears here with their permission and that of their publisher, New York University Press.
Photo by: WNYC
