“Incarceration harms health,” Homer Venters declares at the outset of Life and Death in Rikers Island. Venters worked for almost a decade administering health care in the New York City jail system — the bulk of which is clustered on Rikers Island — including as chief medical officer and assistant commissioner of Correctional Health Services for the New York City Department of Health (DOH). In Life and Death, Venters draws from his experience in the highest echelons of the DOH, numerous clinical studies on Rikers Island, and a background in public health that includes examining asylum seekers for evidence of torture. His conclusion: incarceration itself must be treated as a cause of harm to incarcerated people.

Life and Death is at once measured and scathing, a fitting combination for a staid medical professional navigating a brutally authoritarian environment. Venters casts himself as neither a whistle-blower nor a score-settler, focusing instead on interpreting the information available in the public domain through the lens of his professional experience and ethical perspective.

Much of the book will be nothing new to those who follow highly publicized Rikers scandals like the deaths of Christopher Robinson, Bradley Ballard, and Kalief Browder; the growing chorus of state-sponsored and private investigations into abuses on the island; and employee memoirs like former Rikers social worker Mary Buser’s Lockdown on Rikers. The novelty of Venters’s account is not so much the stories he tells as the framework he brings to understanding them. The result is a damning indictment of the Rikers Island penal colony — and the conditions of jails across the country.