The Court-Ordered Takeover of Rikers Shows the Crisis in American Prisons and Jails
A federal judge on Monday stripped control of the Rikers Island jail complex from New York City and ordered the appointment of an independent manager to fix rampant violence and persistent constitutional violations at the infamous lockup.
Citing nearly a decade of cyclical reform and backsliding at Rikers, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Laura Taylor Swain rejected a proposal from New York City to appoint the current correction commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, as a “compliance director,” and instead will put control in the hands of an independent official “empowered to take all actions necessary” to end the chaos at the jail.
The ruling is no surprise. Swain warned city officials last year that she was inclined to impose a receivership after finding that the city was in contempt of 18 provisions of an agreement it entered in 2015 to settle a lawsuit over brutality at Rikers. In fact, violence, death, use-of-force, self-harm, and most other metrics of human misery got demonstrably worse at Rikers in the ensuing decade, despite repeated orders from Swain and recommendations from a court-appointed monitoring team to improve conditions.
“There is no doubt that these less extreme measures have proven futile,” Swain wrote in Monday’s order.
The monitoring team repeatedly documented widespread security lapses and failures to help inmates who were trying to commit suicide in plain view of officers.
In 2021, a New York state judge ordered a pretrial inmate released from Rikers after he presented credible video evidence that he’d been forced to perform in a “fight night” organized by gang leaders while guards watched on. A New York state senator said lawmakers touring Rikers that same year saw a man trying to kill himself. A public defender who toured the jail told The Intercept that inmates in one segregated intake unit were locked in small showers and given plastic bags to defecate into.
The loss of direct control of Rikers is not only a huge embarrassment for New York City; it’s one of the loudest warning sirens so far that something has gone profoundly wrong in American prisons and jails. Swain’s order is an acknowledgment that there’s an impossible contradiction between what our country’s founding documen
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