Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux
The recently announced federal-court takeover of Rikers Island was a long-overdue attempt to remove a stain on the soul of New York that shames all of us. The jail is being placed under the control of a “remediation manager,” with all major decision-making taken away from city officials who have squandered one opportunity after another to quell the out-of-control violence in our jails.
The vast majority of people detained at Rikers are waiting for their day in court and have not been convicted of any crime. But this year alone, five have died in custody, the same amount as in all of 2024, bringing the total number of such deaths to an estimated 38 since Eric Adams became mayor. One recent death, of a 20-year-old intellectually disabled man named Ariel Quidone, appears to have been clearly preventable: He reportedly begged jail officials for painkillers and medical attention for several days before collapsing in a hallway and ultimately dying of a ruptured appendix.
That contributed to Judge Laura Swain’s receivership ruling. Six correction commissioners, spanning the administrations of Mike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Adams, have all failed to quell levels of violence and medical neglect on Rikers that violate common decency and the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Cruel is exactly how detainees on Rikers were being treated in 2014, when Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, first filed Nunez v. City of New York, a class-action lawsuit citing conditions in city jails dating back to 2011 that included broken jaws, eye sockets, and noses, along with lacerations requiring stitches. “Staff frequently punch, strike, or kick Young Inmates in the head or facial area,” the Justice Department found. “Force is used as a means to punish Young Inmates, and staff unnecessarily continue to use force against inmates who already have been restrained. Force is used in response to inmate verbal taunts and insults.”
To make matters worse, said Bharara, the Department of Correction systematically failed to report the violence, conduct thorough investigations, or discipline staff for using excessive and unnecessary force. A troubling pattern of moving detainees to areas without camera surveillance was noted. An investigation by City & State suggests that deaths may have been undercounted by the department, which did not consistently record some inmates who died in court holding pens or in hospitals after being rushed there from Rikers.
For a decade, a court-appointed monitor has reported, with a rising tone of alarm, that the department was failing to live up to agreements to change training, staffing, reporting, and disciplinary procedures. The city was held in contempt for these violations of court orders, and Swain’s concluded that “the use of force state and other rates of violence, self-harm and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse” than when Nunez was first filed. Reflecting years of frustration, Swain revealed in dry legal language that she even pondered the idea of throwing city officials in prison. “Imposing a term of incarceration on Department or City leaders until compliance has been achieved would do little to advance reform or ameliorate the patterns of dysfunction that led to Defendants’ contempt,” she noted.
Adams responded to the receivership with his breezy “when does the hard part start?” attitude. “The federal judge made a determination that they want to do something else, and they don’t like what we’re doing. It’s a federal judge. We’re going to follow the rules,” he told reporters.
But make no mistake: The takeover of Rikers is exceptional, even unique. “Only ten times have jails been taken over, and prisons three times. So 13 times since 1979 have judges taken control of jails or prisons,” Hernandez Stroud, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “I think that receivers have done a lot of good. Receivers have introduced new policies; they have introduced accountability structures, like what is probably needed on Rikers. They have hired and fired staff to create culture change. They have replaced infrastructure, another thing that Rikers needs.”
The mismanagement of Rikers has come at a high fiscal cost. “We know that the administrative systems of the department are totally deficient right now,” Martha King, the former executive director of the New York City Board of Correction, told me back in 2023. “A great example of that is the city’s largest settlement related to the city’s jails most recently, which is a $300 million payout to up to 80,000 people who were kept in jail after they posted their bail. That is because their paper records and their management of the regular day-to-day function of the department was not working. A receiver needs to come in and deal with the administrative messes inside of the department.”
While it’s appropriate to lay blame for the Rikers mess on the last three mayors and their commissioners, the deeper truth is that we all have countenanced New York’s choice to shuffle thousands of people off to a remote, violent dungeon. “The mere structure of Rikers Island is out of sight, out mind. As a formerly incarcerated person, I remember that when you went over the bridge, it was the bridge of no return. It always was a place that was not in public view,” Stanley Richards, the remarkable CEO of the Fortune Society who briefly served as deputy commissioner of correction, once told me.
Richards points out the often-forgotten truth that violence at Rikers never stays there. “Over the decades, terrible things have happened to both people in custody and people who work there. And that trauma doesn’t end when your sentence ends or when you leave. That trauma is transferred into the community,” he said. “New York has been living with a system that has been horrible to people who are incarcerated there and the communities that they come from, because they end up coming back to the community worse off than they did before they left.”
Judge Swain will be a watchdog over the next mayor to ensure that the court receiver’s changes take hold. “The real question is, Are the reforms going to be sustainable by the government politically?” Stroud told me. “In other words: Once the government regains control, are these the sort of changes that the government will decide to upkeep?”
It will likely take years for a court receiver to upgrade administrative systems and change the culture of violence in our jails, including closing Rikers and replacing it with better facilities near the courts. But it will be up to all of us to demand that New Yorkers facing criminal charges get actual justice, including a constitutional right not to be beaten, killed, or left to die while in custody.
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