End of the line: Despite it all, DOC can’t turn Rikers around

There’s a saying, when a circumstance practically hits rock bottom, that “it can only go up from here,” a marker of the optimism that has fueled humanity’s innovation and resilience for millennia. It turns out, though, that the truism doesn’t always hold true, particularly when it isn’t paired with action to actually make things look up.

Such is the case, sadly, on Rikers Island, that long collective humiliation to the people of this city. Throughout decades of dysfunction and violence, the New York City Department of Correction and its many commissioners under multiple mayors have often said the right things — that they will increase oversight, get a rein on brutality, hold staff accountable (even to the point of getting them to just show up consistently for work), contend with the deteriorating condition of the facilities themselves, be more transparent.

They’ve promised these things in press conferences, City Council hearings, to judges and their court-appointed federal monitors.

As described in the latest report by Federal Monitor Steve Martin — tasked since 2015 with observing, recording and issuing recommendations around the jail’s culture of violence and negligence — these promises even now ring empty.

Even as the system teeters on the edge of potential takeover, even as the monitor’s descriptions have only gotten more and more dire and the consensus builds that the DOC is unable to run itself, even as 28 detainees have died this year and last from what largely seem like preventable incidents, still the department remains unserious about its responsibilities and the need to turn things around.

One of those deaths, by the way, came the same day that Martin’s report was released last week. A correction officer told this newspaper that the Eric M. Taylor Center, where 27-year-old Manish Kunwar was found dead early in the day, that conditions in that facility are “those of a Third World country, beyond disgusting and inhumane for both officers and inmates.”

At 64 pages, this was not among Martin’s longer reports, but not because there wasn’t anything to criticize. The monitor pointed to previous reports issued in July and August and wrote that “the problems identified therein remain prevalent,” and it wasn’t worth simply restating them. In effect, the system has failed to make progress, and its failures are now well-documented.

That’s not to say that nothing’s changed; the report notes that conditions have worsened, in part as a result of “a growing level of abdication of control on the housing units” and continuing issues with record-keeping and transparency, including the DOC’s attempts to influence monitor reports and selectively withhold information. This prompted a terse order from the judge reminding leadership they are legally obligated to cooperate with the monitor.

What is there left to say? The DOC, even under the microscope and facing the threat of being sidelined by a federal judge, cannot seem to get its act together or seem particularly interested in trying. The department has been cajoled, shamed, coaxed and ordered again and again to turn itself around, and has failed to do so at each turn.

People keep being hurt and dying, and absolutely no one has been sentenced to that; most detainees there haven’t actually even been convicted at all. It cannot continue. The receiver can’t come soon enough.