David Remnick: Take a moment and think back to your high school years, where you lived, who your friends were, what you were into. Now imagine that your junior and senior years of high school never happened, and instead you had spent those years trapped in a jail cell without ever being convicted of a crime. This is not a story out of Kafka. It's what happened to Kalief Browder, a teenager from the Bronx. When Browder was just 16, he was held for robbery and assault charges after allegedly stealing a backpack. He spent three years on Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, waiting to go to trial.

New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder in 2014, and the case put a spotlight on all the failings of New York City's justice system. Delays in the courts, the overuse of solitary confinement, teenagers charged as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. Two years after Browder got out of jail, he took his own life. His suicide became national news and was mentioned by President Obama in an op ed condemning the overuse of solitary confinement.

Shortly after Browder's death, a court ruled that conditions at Rikers Island were so bad that the jail was put under federal oversight. Things did not improve. So far this year, seven people have died at the jail or shortly after being released. Last month, New York City lost control of the jail when a federal judge said she would appoint an outside official to run it. The 10th anniversary of Browder's death was on June 6th. Jennifer Gonnerman went back to the recordings from her hours of interviews with him, and you can hear her pen scratching in the background as she took notes.

Jennifer Gonnerman: I met Kalief about nine months after he got out of jail. This was early in 2014. Here, eat your food while it's hot. I just have a bunch of little questions that are mostly-- we get together near his lawyer's office. Usually, Kalief showed up wearing a hoodie with one earbud in his ear, the other dangling down. I have a whole list of stuff I typed up-- He came across shy and quiet, but when I would turn on a tape recorder, he would talk, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch. Not just about his time in jail, but about his life before, when he was still just a sophomore in high school.

Kalief Browder: I'm not going to talk to you and tell you I was a good kid and did all my work. I did do my work, but I did fool around with the girls and the kids playing in the hallways. I was a kid doing what kids did, playing around in the bathroom. Sometimes I'd get the hallway pass, play around in my friend's classroom, or whatever. The teacher be like, "Get out." I'm like, "All right, I'm chill, Miss. I'm going to go to my class." Stuff like that.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Flirt with girls in the hallway kind of thing?

Kalief Browder: Right.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Kalief's life as a high school student ended late one night in May of 2010.

Kalief Browder: To be honest, I thought it was just a routine stop and search or stop and frisk. When they came out the car, they told me and my friend to put our hands on the wall. I just thought it was a search. They're like, "Don't worry about it. You're just going to go to the precinct. We just want to figure out some things. Most likely, you're going to go home." I know I didn't do anything, so I said, "All right, I'll go to the precinct, but then I'm going to come home," but I never went home.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Kalief was taken over the bridge to Rikers Island, where he entered a whole different reality.

Kalief Browder: That whole Rikers Island thing is one big misunderstanding. The right and wrong is weird in there. What's right to them isn't right, and what's wrong isn't wrong. It took a whole lot of getting used to in there.

Jennifer Gonnerman: For most of Kalief's time on Rikers, he was in solitary confinement, usually a 12-by-7-foot cell, for at least 23 hours a day. He got sent to solitary for fighting with other inmates, but once you got there, it was very easy to rack up more and more days. The worst time of year was the summer.

Kalief Browder: They have a vent, and it blows heat for some reason. I don't know why.

Jennifer Gonnerman: In the summer?

Kalief Browder: You would think that it would blow out cold air, but it's heat. If you put your hand next to it, it's heat.

Jennifer Gonnerman: The vents did serve another purpose, though. All day long, inmates had conversations through them.

Kalief Browder: I'll fake-for-friend somebody.

Jennifer Gonnerman: What do you call it? Fake-for-friend?

Kalief Browder: Right, because I'm not really trying to become your friend, but I'm talking to you. Then they feel like they're your friend, and then they want to talk about all this other stuff. I don't want to talk about that stuff.

Jennifer Gonnerman: What do they want to talk about?

Kalief Browder: Gang stuff, or "I robbed this person," or "I shot this person." A bunch of dumb stuff. I don't want to hear that. There's times when they talk to themselves and yell at themselves and bang their heads on the wall all day, and they're very loud. You Know it's real because they'll be in this vent with you for about a month or two, and they do it all day, every day. You know it's not a game.

Jennifer Gonnerman: What if it's 11 o'clock at night? That could be going on at 11:00 clock at night?

Kalief Browder: No, it'd be 4:00 AM in the morning, and the dude would be kicking, yelling to the top of his lungs. Then you try to talk to them, but they don't understand what you're trying to say because they're mentally disturbed, so they get mad, and then they start doing it more. I had one dude, he was talking to himself all day, every day. He used to actually have like, how we're having a conversation, just like that, with himself all day.

That's the type of person where, once in a blue moon, I'd really listened to and just laugh to myself. There was a time when he was talking about a video game, Grand Theft Auto, and one of the Grand Theft Autos that he was talking about, I actually played it. When he was talking to himself about it and the stuff you do in the game, I was actually laughing because he was telling the truth, but when you're trying to go to sleep and he's yelling and that goes out the window, you're like, "It's not even funny no more. It's really annoying."

Jennifer Gonnerman: Kalief missed his junior and senior years of high school. Teenage inmates do attend classes on Rikers, but because Kalief was in solitary, all that he had was something called cell study. A correction officer would slip worksheets under his door and pick them up a few days later.

Kalief Browder: The way I see it was like, they put me in jail for something I didn't do, I might as well try to do something. I used to take the school thing serious. I used to really be looking forward to taking a test. The CO will come, and then she'll pick up people's schoolwork, and I'm on the top tier. I'll call her, "CO, Miss, come to such and such cell on the top. I got work for you." "Hey, I'm coming up there right now." Then they don't come. Then you call the captain, "Captain, my work. What's going on?" "I'm going to find out. Just give me an hour. I'm going to come back, I'm going to see what's going on." [crosstallk]

Before you know, the shift's changing. You're like that. You're trying to really progress. This is school, you're not talking about anything else. You're talking about school, and they still don't.

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All day, I'm thinking about that. I'm hungry. I'm hungry. I'm hungry. I used to actually beg the correction officers. They would finish serving the food, and there's always extras. It would be two, three slices of bread left over, but I'm hungry, so I would ask them, I would say, "Can I get that bread?" He would tell me, "No, you don't want that." "Why not?" "Because it's the end piece of the bread. You don't want--" "I don't care if that's the end piece of the bread. I'm hungry. I want that bread." "No, you don't want it," and they'll tell me no.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Kalief endured violence on Rikers Island at the hands of correction officers and other inmates, but when I asked him what was the worst part of being on Rikers, he didn't say the violence. It was the hunger. Sometimes, if you made a guard mad when he came around with the meal trays, he'd skip your cell.

Kalief Browder: You're just stuck in a cell, and you're getting starved and you're hungry, and then at nighttime, you can't even go to sleep because your ribs are touching, literally. How can you not get angry at that?

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Kalief Browder: Just being in a situation where you can't do nothing and you're helpless, that's very stressful. You're just powerless. When it's hot and the walls are sweating, the heat's coming out the vent, you didn't get in the shower past two days, your cell's dirty, and then you've read all your books already, and you're just sitting there, that's very stressful. It's crazy.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Did you feel yourself changing, like, I don't know, getting more angry or short-tempered?

Kalief Browder: The anger would come when I would be in my cell and I would get starved, and then when I try to talk to their superiors, when I try to talk to them, they just walk away from me. Then I'm in my cell, so it's not like I could tap his back and be like, "Hey, I'm talking to you."

Jennifer Gonnerman: There was one way to get the attention of a captain. When the officers delivered the food trays and picked them up, they had to unlock the slot in the cell door. If you were quick enough, you could shove your arm out through the slot and keep it there. The inmates called this holding your slot.

Kalief Browder: Because if you don't hold your slot. You're like an unheard voice. Correction officers will not put you in the shower, and they'll disrespect you or do all types of stuff to you, and you can't tell nobody. You'll try to talk to the captain, and they'll just keep walking on you. Nobody wants to hear you. You have no voice.

Jennifer Gonnerman: If you hold your slot, they give you more days on that.

Kalief Browder: It depends, because you got some captains that they talk to you, they work it out with you, like "What's going on, da, da, da?"

Jennifer Gonnerman: Like a regular person.

Kalief Browder: Right, but then you got some of them, "Oh, you're holding your slot? I don't care. Write him up." When you take matters into your hands and it's like a double-edged sword. It might work, and it might not work. I used to tell my mom the stuff the correction officers would do to me. I remember the days when I used to be able to come to my mom, and be like, "Mom, I need help. Da, da, da. Something happened to me in school." My mom would be there to get me out of trouble. Now I'm in jail, and these correction officers are violating my rights. My mom can't even help me. It's a weird situation.

My mom was always able to help, and now my mom was just crying on the phone. It was out of her hands. It's stressing. Especially during the times like Christmas and Thanksgiving when I'm in solitary confinement and I call my mom and then they're telling me, "We're eating this, we're doing this, we're doing that," and I'm just sitting in solitary confinement for something I didn't do.

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Jennifer Gonnerman: A few times, the stress seemed to overtake Kalief. One night, he tied his bed sheet into a noose and tried to hang himself from his light fixture. By then, he had been on Rikers for almost two years and was still waiting for his case to go to trial. Every six or eight weeks, he was brought to the Bronx to stand before a judge.

Kalief Browder: Every time with the court, it was always that side of me that was telling me, "You're going to go home," but then I tried not to hype myself up because it hurts when you think you're going home and then you don't go home. That's all that used to come to my mind, "I can't wait to go to trial so I can prove I didn't do it." That's all I used to tell myself, "I'm going to go to trial, I'm going to go to trial, I'm going to go to trial," and no trial, no trial. I used to tell myself, "Why aren't they ready for trial? I don't understand."

Jennifer Gonnerman: Finally, after Kalief had made 30 trips back and forth to court, a judge told him that he could go home today. All he had to do, she said, was to plead guilty.

Kalief Browder: The first thing that came to my head is for them to offer me something like that, they have to know they wrong. They know they wrong. There's no point in taking it. I told her, "I didn't do it. I'm not saying I did something I didn't do." She's like, "I'll let you go home today. You won't have no probation." She said a bunch of things that sounded good, and it really was tempting, too. It was a lot mentally, because half of you wants to get out of there, and the other half don't want to leave just off of the strength of a principal. All of that put together just made my head go crazy.

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Jennifer Gonnerman: It's astonishing, but Kalief turned down the offer, even though he knew that if he went to trial and lost, he could get up to 15 years in state prison.

Kalief Browder: After that court day, I cried and I said, "Yo, what if I made a mistake?" I always knew that there's always people that's innocent that go to trial and they blow. What if I go to trial and I do blow? Dudes that was fake-my-friends in there, they used to tell me, Kalief, just take it. Go home." I told them, "Bro, you don't understand how I feel right now. I didn't do this. I've been in here 30-something months. You think I'm going to just take that, it's all okay, and I'm going to just go home? No."

Jennifer Gonnerman: All the other guys on Rikers, they don't understand what you're talking about. They're like, "It doesn't make any sense to me."

Kalief Browder: Right. They call me all types of names. "You're dumb, you're stupid. If that was me, I would have said I did it, went home." I'm not going to lie, it did get to me when they used to talk like that, I used to go to my cell and lay down and think, "Maybe I am crazy or maybe I am going too far," but I just did what I felt was right.

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Jennifer Gonnerman: At his next court date, in the spring of 2013, the judge dismissed the charges against Kalief Browder altogether. He moved back home into his mother's house in the Bronx and enrolled in a GED class, but he could not stop thinking about that day in court, how nobody had apologized to him or even acknowledged the fact that he had just lost three years of his life.

Kalief Browder: You can't understand it if you've never been to Rikers Island. It's not like out here. Out here, you just live life and go about your business, and there, there's no living life. There's no life at all in there. It's just a hell. It's one big hell. There's no happiness to it at all.

Jennifer Gonnerman: If we weren't sitting down and I wasn't asking you about this, do you think you would be thinking about it otherwise?

Kalief Browder: I think about jail and the stuff that happened in there and the stuff that I've seen in there every day. I just feel as if there's no way that somebody could possibly tell me to just get over it and stop thinking about that stuff. There's no way.

Jennifer Gonnerman: Is that something that people say to you?

Kalief Browder: Some people feel as if I need to get over it, but it's not easy to get over it.

Jennifer Gonnerman: In the spring of 2014, Kalief found out that he had passed his GED exam on the first try, and he was ecstatic. He enrolled at Bronx Community College, eventually earning a GPA of 3.5, but his mental health problems continued. He had attempted suicide, and a few times he was confined in a hospital psychiatric ward. On a Saturday afternoon, I got a phone call. I saw that it was Kalief's attorney, and I knew that it was bad news. He wouldn't usually call on a Saturday. Kalief had killed himself.

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Jennifer Gonnerman: We went to his house that night. His parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles were there, and everyone seemed to be in shock. On the second floor, his father showed me where Kalief had pulled an air conditioner out of the wall, looped a cord around his neck, and pushed his body out through the opening. He was 22 years.

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Jennifer Gonnerman: Now, when I listen back to my interviews with Kalief, I wonder, why did he spend so many hours confiding in me, a stranger, about the worst experiences of his life? I know he wanted his suffering to count for something, so that other people wouldn't have to go through what he endured, but I also think about how, in the end, Kalief never got his day in court. I think he really just wanted the chance to finally tell his story.

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Kalief Browder: My friends that was in the school, they didn't know anything because I bumped into a few of them. They would ask me, "Where you been? I haven't seen you in a while." I told them, "I was arrested. I got locked up," and I had to tell them the sob story.

Jennifer Gonnerman: What do you tell them? How do you tell the short version of that story?

Kalief Browder: I would tell them how I got arrested for something I didn't do. Took me 37 months to prove that I didn't do it.

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David Remnick: Kalief Browder, who died 10 years ago this June, talking with the New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman.

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