The brother of a young man who killed himself after being locked in Rikers Island for years for a crime he didn’t commit is running for Mayor on the Green Party ticket.
Activist Akeem Browder — whose younger brother Kalief committed suicide at age 22 in 2015 – crashed a mayoral candidates forum in Harlem Thursday night to announce his candidacy and convinced organizers to let him participate. Browder was quietly tapped as the Green Party’s mayoral candidate last week.
Browder, who previously called de Blasio’s shutdown plan for Rikers Island a “publicity stunt” to get re-elected, told more than 500 people at the First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem that the city’s public schools are nothing more than a “pipeline” to its prison system.
“We build our schools to look like jails so we’re training and preparing [kids] for jail,” said Browder.
De Blasio did not attend the forum hosted by Faith in New York, a coalition of religious groups, saying he had a scheduling conflict.
Kalief’s time in prison for allegedly stealing a backpack was made into a 6-part documentary on Spike, “The Kalief Browder Story.”
He spent most of his time in solitary, before being released with his case dismissed in 2013. In January of 2015 he committed suicide. Since then, his case has become a cause celeb for those seeking criminal justice reform
