“I remembered a Thanksgiving on Rikers, when the students in the cooking class were furloughed–yes, freed–for the day to deliver 100 turkey dinners they’d made to soup kitchens, a battered women’s shelter, and a hospice for people with AIDS. For several years now, Fresh Start has worked this bit of magic. Barbara Margolis persuaded the correction officials to let us use the jail kitchen overnight to cook the turkeys and stuffing. To this day, New York City restauranteur Michael Weinstein donates 100 twenty-pound turkeys for the project. The department provides canned goods and bread for the stuffing. The male teens in ‘junior’ Fresh Start bake and decorate 500 cookies.

“For two nights we’d be up, defrosting, basting and cooking the turkeys, letting them cool on the massive steel tables. It was eerie driving onto Rikers at one o’clock in the morning–the entire island still and enshrouded in mist, the busy roads suddenly desolate, a guard dozing off in his booth. In the jail, the corridors were empty save for an inmate porter buffing the floor.

“In the kitchen, however, the Fresh Start cooks worked furiously, sweating from the heat of so many ovens, taping and stacking a hundred cardboard boxes for delivery. I remember trying to stir the stuffing in a steel vat that was deep enough for me to stand in, and how Frank laughed at the look on my face when he handed me the ‘oar’ to mix it with. The next morning, exhausted and pie-eyed, we rode into Manhattan in a bus with NYC DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION pained on the side. I remember noticing Frank, lost in thought, as he stared out the window at the line of people by the church awaiting their turkeys from Rikers. One of the men recognized a friend; I wondered if Frank had stood in that line himself.”

–Jennifer Wynn, Inside Rikers: Stories from the World’s Largest Penal Colony