Federal receivership won’t come yet, city given time to measure Rikers fixes
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A federal judge gave the city two weeks to submit metrics they plan to use to measure the success or failure of their action plan to fix Rikers Island on Tuesday, May 24, 2022. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
A federal judge gave the city more time Tuesday to stave off the potential federal receivership of Rikers Island, the city’s troubled jail facility that has seen violence and death increase over the past several years.
Laura Swain, the chief U.S. District judge for the Southern District of New York, told Department of Correction and city officials, as well as representatives for the federal monitor appointed to oversee the DOC, that they’ll have three weeks to share the ways in which they plan to track the progress made to the action plan to fix Rikers Island they submitted last week.
DOC Commissioner Louis Molina, the federal monitor team led by monitor Steve Martin, attorneys from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York’s office and lawyers from the Legal Aid Society appeared before Swain, in what was the latest conference in the Nunez Monitoring case that began over half a decade ago.
Swain gave the DOC two weeks to craft a number of metrics they’ll use to assess the success or failure of its action plan, which was created in partnership with the federal monitor team and includes over two dozen changes the monitoring team recommended the agency make to its management of the jail facility.
The DOC has until June 10, the date of the next hearing on the case, to present the metrics.
Should the metrics not meet Swain’s standard, the jail could be put into the hands of a federal receiver. Additionally, Swain gave the plaintiffs and Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the option to submit a motion for a federal receivership by the June 10 hearing.
The Legal Aid Society, the plaintiffs in the case, declined to comment when asked by the Eagle if it would be submitting a motion to request a federal receivership.
The question of whether or not Rikers and the DOC should be subject to a federal receiver was first floated by Williams last month, when he condemned the lack of progress made in making the jail safer over the past several years.
Sixteen people died in DOC custody last year, an eight year high. Five detainees have died this year – Mary Yehudah, a 31-year-old woman, died on Wednesday, May 18, a day after the DOC presented its action plan to Swain.
Though there was a slight reduction in use of force incidents in 2020, the rate of correctional officer to detainee violence has increased year after year dating back to 2016. Additionally, the number of slashings and stabbings greatly increased last year – there were over 350 slashings or stabbings in 2021 and 121 the year prior, according to the federal monitor.
Earlier this month, the city’s Board of Corrections said that in four of the five deaths to have occurred in the jail this year, a lack of available correctional officers was to blame.
In January, around 30 percent of the department’s uniformed staff was unavailable to work because they were either out sick, being medically monitored and unable to work with the incarcerated population or AWOL, according to the monitor.
The monitor has repeatedly called on the DOC to change its staff management practices, which it says has led to ineffectual deployment of staff and a lack of accountability when officers allegedly misuse force.
The monitor has also called on the city to bring in more jail management experts from outside its current ranks, something the DOC is unable to do as a result of New York City law.
Skirting that law is something a federal receivership would allow the DOC to do.
What exactly a federal receivership would look like at Rikers Island, isn’t exactly clear – that’s because federal receivership can vary from case to case.
It could mean having a federal authority work side by side with the DOC, or it could mean a complete replacement of current DOC leadership with federal officials.
“Judges have incredible leeway here, they're kind of making this up and they have the opportunity to try to fashion the receivership to meet the needs of the particular situation,” Sara Norman, the managing attorney of the Prison Law Office in San Quentin, California, said at a recent federal receivership panel hosted by Columbia University.
Both Molina and Mayor Eric Adams have pushed back against the idea of a receiver and have asked the administration, which is a little less than five months into its term, be given more time to turn the violent situation around. Adams has explicitly said that he sees a receivership as a politically perilous solution.
“It says we can’t do our job,” Adams said Thursday at an unrelated press conference. “What’s next, do we take over our school system? Do we take over the Department of Sanitation?”
“We are responsible to take tax payers dollars and provide goods and services to the people of this city,” he added. “And when you start stating that your city can’t do its job, that’s an indictment of the over 300,000 city employees and all those who are employed on Rikers, and I’m not surrendering this city to anyone who believes we can’t do our jobs.”
Prior to Tuesday’s conference, a number of criminal justice reform groups called on Swain to institute a federal receiver.
“Today's hearing may not result in a federal receivership of the Rikers jails, but the City still must conceive of an actionable plan to promptly and effectively reduce both the number of New Yorkers incarcerated there, and the number of officers on payroll,” said Tracie Gardner, the vice president of the Legal Action Center. “Right now, the math isn't mathing - asks to hire more staff while the staff already hired won't even show up, and more and more New Yorkers being imprisoned there in dangerous and deadly conditions while the City claims to be moving towards its closure? We need radical change now to truly end the ongoing horror at Rikers.”
City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, whose Queens district includes Rikers Island, appeared on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” Tuesday morning and said that while she feels something needs to change on Rikers Island, she isn’t sure that change should include a federal receivership.
“It’s complicated,” Cabán said. “I don’t think that a federal receivership solves our problems but something has to give.”
“We have to hold that [a federal receivership] is not the only answer,” she added. “Rikers Island is not just a physical place, it's a culture. It’s a way and strategy of doing things, to presumably achieve some level of safety and health, and it has failed abysmally.”
