Mayor names new jails boss
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Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, an eight-year veteran of the Department of Correction, was named the agency’s commissioner by Mayor Eric Adams on Friday, Dec. 8, 2023. Photo via NYC mayor’s office
By Jacob Kaye
The city’s troubled Department of Correction finally has a new commissioner.
Nearly a month after City Hall said a new agency head would be named to replace Louis Molina, whose long-awaited “promotion” to serve as assistant deputy mayor of public safety was also made official Friday, Mayor Eric Adams tapped Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, an eight-year veteran of the DOC, to serve as Molina’s successor.
The leadership shakeup comes over a month after Adams first announced that Molina, who served as DOC boss for just under two years, would be moved into the new role in City Hall.
Maginley-Liddie, who most recently served as the DOC’s first deputy commissioner, will now become the seventh person to hold the top position at the DOC in the past decade. And while her predecessors have overseen the agency during varying levels of crises, Maginley-Liddie is taking over the agency at a pivotal moment.
During Molina’s tenure, the city has drawn closer and closer to having its main jail complex, Rikers Island, seized by a federal judge and turned over to a court-appointed authority.
Maginley-Liddie, who has served under four different DOC commissioners, will now serve as the face of the city’s defense against the takeover, known as federal receivership.
Announcing her appointment on Friday, Adams, who has resisted the mourning calls for receivership, again denied that anyone was better suited to fix the violent conditions on Rikers than the DOC itself, a view the federal monitor, numerous public defense firms, the New York City Bar Association, the state’s attorney general, the city’s public advocate and comptroller, countless criminal justice advocates and the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York disagree with.
“We want the challenge,” the mayor said. “We can get it right, Rikers can be fixed.”
It appears unlikely Maginley-Liddie’s appointment wasn’t directly tied to the very real threat of federal receivership.
One month after she first began working at the DOC in 2015, the consent decree that the Legal Aid Society recently claimed the city was in violation of first went into effect. Her first role with the agency was as one of its attorneys, working to “ensure that [the DOC] were in compliance” with the court order. It’s been her primary role in the agency ever since.
“The one thing that is tremendous here is that this commissioner…is familiar with the consent decree as an attorney and she knows what the court is requiring for us to do,” said Sylvia Hinds-Radix, the city’s corporation counsel leading the city’s defense against receivership.
Three years after Maginley-Liddie joined the agency, she was promoted to serve as deputy general counsel. She continued rising through the ranks at the DOC, until she was named first deputy commissioner and chief diversity officer by former DOC Commissioner Cynthia Brann in 2021.
Her appointment drew praise from Steve J. Martin, the federal monitor tracking conditions in the ongoing civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
“In her work at the department, the monitoring team has found the commissioner to be transparent and forthright,” Martin said in a court filing on Friday. “She also oversaw one of the most candid, insightful, and transparent assessments of department practices during her tenure as the first deputy commissioner.”
“The commissioner is well acquainted with the Nunez court orders, the requirements necessary to advance much needed reform, and the need to work collaboratively and constructively with the monitoring team,” he added.
Martin’s comments Friday marked the first time he’s spoken positively about the relationship between the DOC and the monitoring team in months.
While he expressed optimism over Maginley-Liddie’s appointment, he also reiterated that he believes the relationship between the monitor and the department is currently at an historic low, mostly thanks to Molina.
“The monitoring team continues to have concerns regarding interference and obfuscation of its work,” Martin said.
The monitor said that he was particularly concerned about Molina’s continued power over the DOC, citing his past “interference, obfuscation and management failures.”
But just how much power Molina will exert over the agency remains unclear.
City Hall has yet to publicly specify the exact responsibilities Molina will have in his new role but the former commissioner has suggested he’ll be partially responsible for overseeing Rikers Island.
Martin said that the Adams administration has not responded to the monitor’s requests for an explanation of Molina’s new role.
City Hall similarly did not respond to requests for comment regarding Molina’s responsibilities on Friday.
Molina was not present at Maginley-Liddie’s appointment announcement on Friday. Nor was Deputy Mayor Phil Banks, who both Molina and Maginley-Liddie will directly report to.
Adams has long been one of Molina’s most staunch defenders, and that mostly remained true on Friday. However, the mayor seemed to suggest at several points during the afternoon press conference that Molina sullied the relationship between the city and the monitoring team.
“We want to show good faith and good communication,” Adams said. “We're no longer trying to give the impression that we have eroded to the point that we can't communicate. We can communicate and we will communicate.”
Nonetheless, the mayor claimed that Molina turned the department around from a moment of crisis at the start of 2022.
“I know what we inherited Jan. 1, 2022, and we're a long way from that,” the mayor said.
But while some metrics of violence on Rikers have improved, others have only been made worse or remained consistent.
Molina’s first year as commissioner was the deadliest year on Rikers Island in a decade, with 19 people dying in DOC custody. Nine people have died in DOC custody this year. Use of force incidents, which sparked the consent judgment in the first place, remain as high as they were when the consent judgment was first reached.
The continued violence and poor conditions on Rikers, mixed with what the monitor and Legal Aid Society is the DOC’s unwillingness or inability to adhere to the court’s orders, were the basis for Legal Aid’s request for a receiver.
Though the public defense firm said that they hope that Maginley-Liddie “will take immediate and meaningful steps to address the myriad of health and safety risks that incarcerated New Yorkers suffer each and every day,” they said that reforming Rikers “is well past the ability of a single commissioner to correct.”
“Only an independent body in the form of a receiver can secure the necessary systemic changes that two administrations, multiple correction commissioners, countless recommendations from the Nunez monitor, remedial orders and, most recently, the Adams Administration’s ‘action plan’ have all failed to achieve,” a Legal Aid spokesperson said in a statement.
