'I More so Consider Myself a Con Artist Than Anything'

What Danielle Miller learned at Horace Mann and Rikers.

- By Gabrielle Bluestone. Photographs by Ashley Pena

DANIELLE MILLER walked into Rikers Island at 3 a.m. in the dead of winter, shivering in a flimsy Missoni cover-up, Hervé Léger bathing suit, and Valentino Rockstud heels, carrying a Prada purse—the outfit she’d been wearing when she was arrested on a warrant related to a credit-card scam. She fell asleep under a pile of coats and woke up surrounded by a dozen other detainees in the same filthy holding cell, waiting for what would happen next. The daughter of wealthy Manhattan parents and a graduate of the prestigious Horace Mann School, she was ill prepared for a place like Rikers, but she did have one advantage: She knew how to make friends.

She picked up a few there who showed her the ropes. There was a small firecracker of a girl named Julie who was quick to start fights and a gorgeous woman with hair down to her butt named Krystal who took to Miller right away. “They were like, ‘Don’t worry. We got you,’” Miller says. While they waited for their dorm assignments, one of the women braided her hair into cornrows, because she felt like she needed to look “gangsta” to fit in, plus “your hair gets really fucked up in jail and they have terrible soap.”