One December evening close to twenty years ago, Lenora and I were en route to the Harper’s Christmas party, at the Housing Works bookstore on Crosby Street, and Jennifer Gonnerman came with us.  One reason was that Jen, who was reporting on prisons for the Village Voice, had glimpsed an opportunity to write about Rikers Island, the offshore New York holding facility for accused men awaiting trial – a place proverbially off limits to journalists – and she hoped to turn the access into a prominent story, say, for Harper’s, about the abuses of human rights at the Rikers Island penal colony.

That story didn’t run in Harper’s (it ran in the Voice), and Gonnerman stayed with the story afterward.   Over the next twelve years, as she reported and wrote a series of stories about New York’s onerous sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders; and wrote Life on the Outside, a National Book Award-nominated book about Elaine Barrett, a woman so sentenced; and wrote a series of stylistically groundbreaking stories about “lives out the outside” of financial-boomtown New York – all through this, she kept her eye on the story of Rikers Island.  

She told a Rikers story last year in The New Yorker, where she is now a staff writer.   It was the story of Kalief Browder, a teenager accused of stealing a backpack and then forced to endure a frankly unendurable series of trial delays, physical abuses, and stints in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, all because he refused to plead guilty to a minor crime he maintained he didn’t do.  

The story came out, to extraordinary effect.   The abuses at Rikers Island, now in the bright light of The New Yorker, were condemned by New York’s mayor and other politicians.    

Then Browder – finally out of Rikers and at home in the Bronx  – committed suicide.  Even free and back with his family, he was damaged and haunted by the torture (there is no other word for it) of his periods of solitary confinement.

There is no happy ending to such a story.   There cannot be.   But out of such a story change can come; and change came this week when the Justice Department banned the practice of solitary confinement of juveniles in the federal prison system.   President Obama himself explained the ban in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, and he began by telling the story of Kalief Browder – which he doubtless read in The New Yorker.   

The president who likes to play the long game did so on solitary confinement, prompted by Jennifer Gonnerman, the journalist who plays the long game better than any other I know.   For her part, she wrote a piece attributing the power of the story to the training she got from James Ridgeway and others in an older generation of reporters on abuse in government.   

“What it’s all about,” a friend etched above the link to Obama’s opinion piece when he sent it along.  Truly, this is what long-form journalism of a certain kind ought to be all about: changing people’s lives and society for the better by telling stories of justice and its violation.      

It’s a challenge to the rest of us – I feel it as a challenge, at any rate – to do more, and do better, with our own writing.