It was announced on what would have been his 24th birthday on Thursday [May 25], that the late Kalief Browder will soon have a Bronx street corner named after him.
A sign reading "Kalief Browder Way" will now grace E. 181st Street and Prospect Avenue. It is an honor bestowed upon a young man who Jay Z referred to as a "martyr" in the recent SpikeTV documentary series he helped produce on Browder's controversial prison term in New York City's notorious Rikers Island. An honor which he may have eventually been presented with were he still alive, the impact his story had on criminal justice reform was so significant.
Browder was arrested in May of 2010 when he was accused of robbing the bookbag of an immigrant worker, who identified him during a ride in the back of a police car weeks after the incident. Browder contended that he had nothing to do with the robbery since day 1, yet was given the impression that his arrest was simply a formality and that he'd eventually be released. However, due to what is in hindsight viewed as a highly dysfunctional system in the city's correctional facilities, particularly in respects to youth offenders, he got lost in the system and wound up spending nearly 3 years in prison without a trial.
After numerous attempts to get him to plead guilty for a reduced sentence, Kalief would eventually be set free when it was discovered that the robbery victim had for some time been living back in his native Mexico. In June of 2015, after putting some of the pieces of his life together, Browder hanged himself in the midst of an overwhelming bout of depression that many attribute him developing from spending an unprecedented 400 days in solitary confinement.
President Barack Obama would include Browder's name in a Washington Post Op-Ed he wrote, titled, "Why We Must Rethink Solitary Confinement," and he'd eventually be recognized as a catalyst for the federal banning of solitary for minors.
Source: nydailynews.com
