Federal judge must put the Department of Correction in receivership

When it comes to Rikers Island, it often seems as if nothing can get worse — yet New York City’s government appears intent on proving that wrong time and again. On May 31, news outlet The City reported that the Department of Correction (DOC) will no longer divulge deaths in custody to the press or the public. The decision comes amid one of the deadliest periods in Rikers’ recent history and the jarring revelation that DOC failed to report recent violence and deaths to the federal monitor charged with overseeing the jail complex. These events have made clear that the city can no longer be trusted to run Rikers Island. It is time for new management.

For more than 60 years, the organization I lead, the Vera Institute of Justice, has worked with the city to reduce reliance on jail and protect the people who are confined. That work began in 1961, when Vera founder Herb Sturz launched the Manhattan Bail Project at the city’s request to deal with overcrowding in its jails, including Rikers. The project developed the foundational ideas of bail reform: that people with strong community ties will return to court with no need for jail. Years later, as deputy mayor for criminal justice under Ed Koch, Sturz nearly reached a deal to close Rikers, only to be stymied by Albany.

By the time I came to Vera in 1998, the city jail population was astronomical — nearly 20,000 people — as was the violence inside. Then-DOC Commissioner Michael Jacobson (later a president of Vera himself) worked with advocates, the legal community, and city government to reduce that violence as well as the number of people in jail, and despite tragedies and setbacks, we have seen marked success over the last 25 years.

In 2016, my colleagues and I on Judge Jonathan Lippman’s Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform even sought to imagine a future in which New York would forever shutter the jails on Rikers, which in our view would always be a gulag in the middle of the East River. At the time, a moonshot idea. These efforts culminated in 2019 with the state’s transformative bail reform law and the city’s commitment to close Rikers. When I served on Mayor Adams’ transition team, a group that supplied him with no shortage of ideas to continue this forward momentum, I did not believe this progress would stop, much less reverse.

Yet since Adams took office 17 months ago, the city has not only pursued policies that have increased the number of people held in our jails, contrary to the Close Rikers Plan, but has also seen at least 22 of those people die in custody — a tally that the federal monitor acknowledged Thursday may well be an undercount, considering the DOC’s sharp reversal on transparency. Last year, the rate of death reached a 20-year high, with total deaths the highest since 2013, when the jail population was roughly twice as large. 2022 also saw the end of a 27-year decline in the rate of stabbings and slashings, with a nearly 50% increase over their 1995 peak.

The mayor has frequently stated his intention to follow the law and close Rikers, emphasizing the importance of “accountability, transparency, and effective governance.” For his own part, DOC Commissioner Louis Molina has testified that he is “unequivocally committed to transparency and restoring public trust” in DOC. But these men’s actions speak louder than words, and the announcement that DOC will no longer be reporting deaths to the public must be a decisive call to action.

DOC is plainly in the business of self-preservation and obfuscation, not the safe and efficient operation of a jail complex that houses 6,000 people. Six thousand people who are neighbors — someone’s children — and who are entirely dependent on the city for their safety and well-being. The decision not to publicly report deaths is the latest in a recent string of moves aiming to hide the violence in New York City jails — and avoid accountability.

In January, the department barred the Board of Correction, DOC’s watchdog, from independent access to video from surveillance cameras and body-worn cameras inside the jails. The mayor’s appointed chair to the board has since sought to reduce the annual number of public meetings even as the commissioner repeatedly misled the City Council about staffing and other issues. Last month, the department announced that it will end contracts with outside service providers who, beyond providing much-needed assistance to people in jail, also bear witness inside and advocate for more humane conditions.

At the end of last month, the monitor published a damning special report concerning DOC’s refusal to disclose the existence of five recent and serious “life-altering” events on Rikers Island to the monitor, let alone the public. As the document emphasized, the monitor, who reports to federal court, actually had to read about some of these events in the press — a source of sunlight that DOC now wants to shut off.

At the time, just one of those five incidents was reported to have led to death, that of 52-year-old Rubu Zhao. Only days later, it was revealed that Joshua Valles, “Incident #4″ in the monitor’s report, had also passed away. DOC previously told the monitor that Valles died of a heart attack and so it did not pursue an investigation; an autopsy revealed the cause of his death was, in fact, a fractured skull. Valles was charged with nonviolent crimes in April, and he would not have been incarcerated at all but for last year’s unnecessary rollbacks to the state’s bail reform. His death will likely not even be counted in DOC’s official tally, as he was granted “compassionate release” by the DOC before being taken off life support — a blatant strategy of deception Molina has previously used to “do what we can” to keep deaths “off the department’s count.”

The commissioner pleaded for the monitor not to make information about these five incidents public because it would “fuel the flames of those who believe we cannot govern ourselves.” Those flames are raging. On Thursday, the monitor released another special report repeatedly questioning — and harshly criticizing — the department’s “deterioration in accuracy, transparency and collaboration.” It describes poor security practices and an exponential increase in violence, as well as unnecessary and excessive use of force, concluding that “the risk of harm in the jails remains grave and . . . the jails remain patently unsafe.”

What we know about Rikers is terrible; the extent of what we don’t know should terrify us all. The current administration has now proven that it is more committed to hiding DOC’s dysfunction than to addressing it. Rather than engage meaningfully with the monitor, DOC and city leadership have opted to criticize him — the mayor said that his “patience is running out” — and further obscure the daily, often deadly violence. Adams has now given Molina carte blanche: “Whatever he needs to do, not violating any laws, he can do.”

It is time to appoint a federal receiver with full authority over managing New York City jails. This administration has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to restore transparency or rectify the dangerous jail conditions, unrestrained staff absenteeism, and mismanagement costing ever more lives. Expecting compliance and cooperation is naïve and wishful, given the city’s clear intent to shirk oversight at every turn. While receivership has rightfully been seen as a last resort, the city has had ample time to address the emergency in our jails.

When Legal Aid sought the appointment of a receiver last year, it did so alone. Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams must acknowledge DOC’s ongoing failure and join the chorus — former DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice Liz Glazer, Comptroller Brad Lander, and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, to name a few — calling for receivership.

Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday and she must act. Receivership has brought success in similar situations when other approaches have failed. It helped improve the quality of medical care and lessen preventable deaths in the California prison system, allowed New York State to address rampant physical abuse and a lack of mental health counseling in the juvenile justice system, and helped the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago address chaos, mismanagement, and a lack of medical care that resulted in alarming rates of suicide.

In New York City, generations of citizens and organizations like Vera have tirelessly worked with mayor after mayor and their administrations to solve the problems in our jails. Despite earlier progress, we are now going backward, and the system is failing. The crisis we now face risks not only the lives of those incarcerated and those employed on Rikers, but also the safety of the communities to which these traumatized people will return. The time for federal receivership is now. Our city cannot afford to wait any longer.

Turner is the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice.