‘Can’t rehabilitate Rikers’: Borough prez stands by jail closure plan after tour

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards recently took a trip to Rikers Island. The BP said that while improvements have been made, the jail complex still needs to be closed down and federal receivership should remain on the table.  File photo by Ryan Schwach

By Jacob Kaye

Despite seeing improvements during a recent visit to Rikers Island, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards says he believes no amount of refurbishment will be enough to justify keeping the troubled jail complex open – and that a federal takeover of the jail should remain on the table.

Speaking with the Eagle about a recent visit to the jail complex where over two dozen people have died in the past two years, Richards said that he was impressed by a number of improvements made by recently appointed Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie.

Nonetheless, the BP said that the systemic issues that have plagued Rikers Island for decades are bigger than any one person and that true reform will require drastic action.

“It felt like a breath of fresh air, going in with this specific commissioner,” Richards said. “But she can't fix, obviously, decades of disinvestment.”

“I still believe – and this is just based on my visit – that you can't rehabilitate Rikers Island,” he added. “The facilities will never meet the needs of those who we want to take out of the system.”

Richards’ tour comes as the future of Rikers Island hangs in the balance.

The population of the jail has steadily increased since Mayor Eric Adams took office, threatening the feasibility of the city’s legally mandated closure plan, which involves opening four borough-based jail facilities throughout the city to replace Rikers Island, including one that will be built right behind Borough Hall in Kew Gardens.

With the population growing – and little effort being made by the Adams administration to lower it, advocates say – the mayor recently reconvened the Lippman Commission, which crafted the first plan to close Rikers, and asked that it create a new plan “in the context of the changed realities of a post-COVID New York City.”

Whether or not Rikers’ 2027 closure deadline, which was passed into law by the City Council in 2019, will be met, remains up in the air.

Separately, the city is currently defending itself in an ongoing court case in which a federal judge is weighing the possibility of stripping the city of its control of Rikers and handing it over to what is known as a federal receiver.

The Legal Aid Society, which represents the defendants in the case, claims that beyond appointing a receiver, the court has run out of options to get the DOC to comply with the 2015 consent judgment reached in the detainee rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, which centered around abusive treatment from correctional officers.

In its receivership filing submitted in November, the public defense firm argued that the DOC has “overwhelmingly” not complied with the heart of the consent judgment. Use of force incidents have continued, and the DOC hasn’t done much to hold staff accountable when they cross the line, the filing claimed. The Legal Aid Society also argued that the DOC has generally failed to keep detainees safe on Rikers Island and that “the risk of severe harm in the jails is as imminent, if not more imminent, in the present moment as it was when the consent judgment was entered.”

The official request for receivership came about a month before Adams appointed Maginley-Liddie to serve as DOC commissioner, taking over for now-Assistant Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Louis Molina, who was accused on multiple occasions of antagonizing the federal monitor charged with keeping track of conditions on Rikers on behalf of the judge in the receivership case. Maginley-Liddie’s appointment appeared to be an attempt by the Adams administration to stave off receivership.

And by a number of accounts, Maginley-Liddie has approached leading the DOC with a reform mindset, and has attempted to be transparent about the issues facing the agency and the jail complex – a more robust accounting of Maginley-Liddie’s first several months in office is expected to be released on Thursday by federal monitor Steve J. Martin.

For those who say Maginley-Liddie has made a good faith effort to turn Rikers around, Richards concurs.

“This commissioner really is trying to curtail some of the issues,” the borough president said.

Richards made particular note of what appeared to be improvements to detainee programming.

Last year, the Adams administration cut a $17 million contract with a number of nonprofits running social services programs on Rikers, claiming that the DOC could provide the same services themselves. However, shortly after the contract was cut, programming became less and less frequent in the jail complex, the Eagle previously reported.

It wasn’t until Maginely-Liddie took office that the DOC began to bring in outside providers in an attempt to make their programming offerings as robust as they previously were.

Additionally, Richards said that on previous visits to Rikers, he would always smell bleach in the facilities he toured, indicating that the area had been cleaned in anticipation of his visit, obscuring the everyday conditions experienced by detainees. This time, however, was different.

“This was the first tour where I can say that I did not smell bleach,” Richards said.

The BP also said that he appreciated that Maginley-Liddie appeared to have a report with a number of detainees, suggesting she had met with them before.

Despite the city’s waffling on the closure plan, Richards said he stands by his 2019 vote as a councilmember to shutter the jail complex.

He said he also believes receivership should be seriously considered, but that his full support for what would be an extreme judicial order would depend on a number of other factors.

“I would say that I've been a proponent of receivership, without a doubt,” Richards said. “But receivership wouldn't be some magic bullet, either.”

The borough president said that he’d likely continue to support the call for receivership unless the DOC was able to make a number of changes to the way detainees are locked up in New York City, and to make them quickly.

To start, Richards said the agency should fully restore the programming it cut last year and additional programming that was lost during the pandemic. He also said the city needs to do a better job providing mental health care to detainees – in an effort to expand the number of detainee beds in the borough-based jail facilities, Adams recently said his administration would cut a number of planned mental health beds in the yet-to-be-built jails.

But most of all, he wants to see detainees held in humane conditions.

“You want an environment to be more conducive to ensuring people can rehabilitate – you have to invest,” he said. “[But] at this moment, I would still say, ‘Yes [to receivership], unless those key things were met.”