ASIN: B00F61XHNK
Publisher: Lume Books
Pages: 83
These days, Welfare Island is a verdant, residential retreat which was renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973. But in the earlier 20th century it was notorious as the “worst and most unmanageable prison in the world”. The grotesquely misnamed Welfare Island was known to most New Yorkers as the city’s most wretched hell hole, the setting for some of the darkest episodes in the city’s history since the mid nineteenth century.When the City officials MacCormick and Marcus organised a raid on the prison in 1934 they had no idea what they were about to stumble upon.Emaciated and scarred inmates, rife with self-mutilation, drug withdrawal and addiction, were crammed into stinking cells kept in appalling conditions. While shipping them off to hospitals and alternative prisons, the officers discovered a large-scale drugs trafficking operation run by notorious mobster inmates and facilitated by prison ...
