This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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 Khalif 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 Gonerman 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. And last month,

New York City lost control of the jail when a federal judge said she would appoint an outside

...