Can the Department of Correction's new commissioner fix Rikers Island?
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Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Mangley-Liddie. AP file photo by Ted ShaffreY
By Jacob Kaye
Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie is concerned about the crowd of people following her.
Trailing her through the Robert N. Davoren Center on Rikers Island during a tour organized for the Eagle are several correctional officers, her security detail and a number of high-ranking officials within her newly formed leadership team. The cluster of people moves slowly through the long hallways, sending echoes of jangling keys and bootsteps through the jail facility.
Several times, she says under her breath that she’s worried the group is too large.
The mass, which also includes this journalist, can be an unwelcome distraction in an already hectic place. It can appear intimidating, the commissioner says, and that’s not the image she’s hoping to project to anyone within the city’s notorious jail complex.
Maginley-Liddie, now in her sixth month as DOC commissioner, was picked to lead the historically troubled agency at a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the two years preceding her appointment, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has taken little to no action toward preparing Rikers Island for its legally-mandated closure in 2027, leaving the city’s original plan to shutter the jail almost completely unusable. Also looming over her appointment is the existential threat of a court-ordered federal takeover of the jail, which a judge is expected to rule on in the coming months. If the judge rules in favor of what’s known as a federal receivership, Maginley-Liddie would likely become a commissioner-in-name-only, forced to relinquish a bulk of her powers to whoever is picked to run the jail until the violence and dysfunction that has plagued it for decades is quelled.
Despite the circumstances, Maginley-Liddie says that she can reform the jail and the agency’s culture, which has been cited in court as the driver behind so many of Rikers’ problems. She’s reversed several policies put in place by her predecessor that advocates, lawmakers, attorneys and judges said had made the agency less transparent and intentionally obtuse. She’s claimed to have revived programs aimed at reducing both recidivism rates among the jail’s detainee population and the level of violence behind bars. The commissioner has also tried to champion the voice of the agency’s dwindling number of uniformed officers, who have been described by the mayor and others as the most overlooked and unappreciated law enforcement agency in the city.
But Maginley-Liddie is not the first reformer to be asked to lead the DOC during a time of crisis. Violence on Rikers Island has been stubbornly persistent over the past decade and remains an all too frequent occurrence.
Given the depth and knottiness of the seemingly endless issues facing the agency, sources say her efforts may be too little, too late. However, inside the jail, Maginley-Liddie appears confident that change is possible, and that she can be the one to deliver it.
Back on the tour, Maginley-Liddie still hasn’t been able to shake her swarm. But after sitting down in a staff lounge, the commissioner spots an opportunity to slim down her flock.
“Seriously?” she says while shooting a disappointed look to her staff.
Her plea doesn’t exactly work. Some in the group leave but most stay, shuffling a little further away from one another in an effort to only appear less like a crowd.
At least she tried.
A new commissioner
Maginley-Liddie is the daughter of a pastor, and is an attorney by trade. Both perspectives – though they may clash, at times – appear to guide her work as commissioner.
Born in Antigua, a small island country in the Caribbean Sea, Maginley-Liddie said that her father’s work taught her the value of community service, and for caring for those who society may have tossed aside or ignored.
Her father would frequently invite people with intellectual disabilities over to the family home on Saturdays for a barbeque, and on several occasions, the family swung by the local police station while on their way to church to bail out a parishioner.
As a young adult, Maginley-Liddie moved to New York to attend the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she got her bachelor’s degree. She stayed in the city and went on to get her law degree from Fordham University. After a stint working at a private law firm, Maginley-Liddie said she made the move to the DOC in 2015 because she again felt the call to service.
“I believe in the mission of this organization,” she said. “I think a lot of times people forget people in jail, and they sort of move on.”
Maginley-Liddie’s first job with the agency was as an attorney in its legal division. Much of her earliest work with the DOC was focused on attempting to ensure that the agency complied with a 2015 consent judgment stemming from a case known as Nunez v. the City of New York. The consent judgment required the agency to stem violence committed by officers against detainees, as well as other dangerous conditions in the city’s jails.
During the Eagle’s tour of the Robert N. Davoren Center, Maginley-Liddie mentioned the court orders, which touch on nearly all aspects of the DOC’s work, several times, making sure to point out where the agency was succeeding in its compliance.
Her legal understanding and familiarity with the case may have been one of the biggest reasons Adams in December chose to appoint Maginley-Liddie as commissioner, a position that had opened up when the mayor announced that he was moving Maginley-Liddie’s predecessor, Louis Molina, to serve as an assistant deputy mayor – a position the Adams administration created specifically for Molina, the mayor’s longtime ally.
Molina’s promotion came at a curious time. He was moved from the agency weeks before the Legal Aid Society, which represents the plaintiffs in the Nunez case, officially called on the judge overseeing it, Laura Swain, to appoint a federal receiver to take charge at Rikers Island. The Legal Aid Society claimed that the city had not only failed to honor the 2015 consent judgment in the case, which Maginley-Liddie had worked on for years, but that the agency, under Molina, had repeatedly spurned oversight and reform efforts.
The push for receivership came as no surprise to those involved in the case.
Rikers Island has been plagued by decades of dysfunction. Its new commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, claims that she can reform the jail complex. AP file photo Ted Shaffrey
Molina’s relationship with Steve J. Martin, the monitor appointed by Swain to track conditions in the jail and the agency’s compliance with the consent judgment, had quickly deteriorated in the final months of the former commissioner’s tenure.
But Maginley-Liddie, who served as the second-highest ranking DOC official under Molina, appeared to be a welcomed contrast to her predecessor.
Swain, the monitor and the DOC’s oversight body, the Board of Correction, heaped praise on the new commissioner’s apparent commitment to reforming the dangerous jail. Maybe just as important, Martin said that he viewed her appointment as an opportunity to repair what had become a severely fractured relationship between the agency and the monitoring team.
Martin said in a recent report that the DOC’s “lack of transparency, reticence and failure to consult and collaborate with the monitoring team that characterized much of 2023 – and parts of 2022 – have essentially been eliminated with the current commissioner’s appointment.”
Despite defending Molina in his battles against the monitor and others, the Adams administration has quickly embraced Maginley-Liddie’s invitation for oversight.
The city’s attorneys have used Maginley-Liddie’s appointment and commitment to reform in their arguments against receivership.
“Only hard work will achieve the needed reforms, and, under Commissioner Maginley-Liddie and with the monitor’s input, DOC has been doing, and will continue to do, the work,” the city said in a March filing.
“Well-reasoned improvements in the city’s jails are underway,” the filing continued. “The imposition of a receiver would introduce uncertainty and potentially remove an effective commissioner from her role, frustrating DOC’s current progress.”
‘Persistent dysfunction’
Convincing a judge that any one single commissioner can turn around the violence on Rikers Island will be difficult.
Four years into the decade, Maginley-Liddie is the fourth commissioner to head the DOC and the fifth to serve since the start of the 2015 consent decree.
Other reform-minded commissioners have come before her, including Vincent Schiraldi, who Maginley-Liddie served under as first deputy commissioner. Schiraldi, who now serves as Maryland’s secretary of Juvenile Services, was a prominent advocate for criminal justice reform prior to his appointment to commissioner by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in mid-2021.
But during his brief, seven-month tenure, the crisis on Rikers Island, spurred on by the pandemic, reached its peak – Maginley-Liddie called her work under Schiraldi and during the pandemic a “baptism by fire.” He left the job the day before Adams took office.
The Legal Aid Society pointed to Schiraldi and others in their May response to the city’s arguments against receivership.
The city claims the Department of Correction’s new commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, can turn around Rikers Island, which has been plagued by violence, dysfunction and a lack of transparency for years. AP file photo by Ted Shaffrey
“[The city] asks this court to again trust their plans and promises instead of their actual track record,” the Legal Aid Society said. “They point to a new commissioner who — like commissioners before her — says she is committed to change. But, as this court observed when the city last trotted out this argument, we cannot ‘[r]estart the clock on reform because a new administration has taken office.’”
Though slashings, stabbings and use of force incidents are all down when compared to last year, they are higher or on par with the numbers seen at the time the consent decree was issued. The agency is hemorrhaging staff while the jail’s population is ballooning. In addition to the agency’s poor management of its officers, the decrease in its ranks has made it so that detainees often aren’t taken to their medical appointments, court appearances, recreational time or classes. The lack of movement leads to frustration and idle time, which can then lead to violence and death.
For nearly a decade, reform on Rikers and within the DOC has moved at “a glacial pace” and “the department has only successfully remediated a very small number of its fundamental deficiencies,” the monitor said in June
“The past eight years of monitoring have consistently revealed that the department continues to face critical barriers, both internal and external, in its effort to improve the conditions of the jails,” Martin said in the June 27 report. “Its decades of poor practice have produced and solidified a maladaptive culture in which deficiencies are normalized and embedded in every facet of day-to-day operations, trapping the department in a state of persistent dysfunction.”
Getting their five minutes
Maginley-Liddie doesn’t necessarily disagree with the monitor’s assessment of the agency’s damaged culture. She’s made reforming it a central feature of her commissionership.
Step one is basic – get people, both officers and detainees alike, to say hello to each other.
“It's about respect,” Maginley-Liddie said. “When you walk into a room, you say, ‘Good morning,’ you say, ‘Good afternoon.’”
“That's the expectation,” she added. “We're all human beings, and we deserve respect. That's really big for me.”
But the culture on Rikers Island has issues deeper than its lack of pleasantries.
During her first few months as commissioner, Maginley-Liddie began ordering high-ranking staff within the DOC to take tours of the various facilities on the island as “a way for them to see firsthand what's happening.” Some DOC employees had never stepped foot on the island, despite the power they had over it.
“I had a problem with that,” the commissioner said.
Under the commissioner’s orders, top officials within the DOC have begun walking through the jails and providing the commissioner with reports about issues they saw and any actions the commissioner’s office could take to mitigate those issues.
But whether or not the tours have been effective remains unclear.
Martin said in a May report that the tours were recorded in an ad hoc manner and that the reports they yielded were “too burdensome for the department to collate and produce.” The new policy appeared to be marred by the same inability to manage staff the DOC had been plagued by for years.
When asked about Martin’s criticism of the tours, Maginley-Liddie said he was missing the point.
“It’s not to see all of this data, it’s also changing the culture, to get people in the facility, something that hasn’t been pushed for before,” she said. “How are you going to know what issues we have if you're not present?”
There appears to be little dispute that Maginley-Liddie herself is present on Rikers. While officers, detainees and staff may seem a little nervous around her when she greets them inside the jail complex, they don’t seem surprised to see her.
During the Eagle’s tour with Maginley-Liddie, she stopped to speak with a young officer about bringing his retired mother, herself once an officer, back onto the job. She listened to a man leading a religious program for detainees about his desire to expand his work on the island. She complimented a pair of detainees on their coffee-making skills – both were slinging lattes and other drinks inside a staff lounge as part of a new work-study program. And after some feigned reluctance, Maginley-Liddie also spoke with a delegate with the Correctional Officers’ Benevolent Association who frequently reminded her, “You said I could get my five minutes,” before giving her a knowing smile.
If Maginley-Liddie has buy-in from anyone, it’s the correctional officers and their union, which has made life difficult for commissioners it disagrees with – the union has also fought reform efforts from the monitor, BOC and council regardless of its attitude toward the person leading the agency.
“In the short time that Lynelle Maginley-Liddie has been DOC commissioner, we have had an open and candid dialogue about many of the challenges my members continue to face,” Benny Boscio, the union’s president, told the Eagle. “She has expressed a sincere willingness to listen to our concerns and to improve the working conditions of our officers. Moving forward, we are hopeful that we can continue that open dialogue to find common ground and move this agency forward.”
The feelings have been reciprocated by the commissioner.
Asked by the Eagle what she wished the average New Yorker knew about Rikers, she said that she “would like for them to know that we have an incredibly hard working staff who are heroes.”
“They don’t get the recognition they deserve,” she said.
In recent weeks, the union and the DOC came to an agreement about a new labor contract.
Though the DOC was required to tell the monitoring team about the new contract, age-old issues with transparency and communication have persisted. The agency did not tell the monitoring team about the negotiations until an agreement had essentially been reached.
‘Not convinced’
Though most believe Maginley-Liddie is sincere in her desire to reform Rikers Island, not everyone believes she’ll be able to achieve much even if she’s given the opportunity.
Beyond the scope of the issues at the center of Rikers’ rot, there are the opinions and policies of the commissioner’s boss, Mayor Adams, potentially standing in the way.
Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie and Mayor Eric Adams. File photo via NYC Mayor’s Office
Several criminal justice reforms started by de Blasio have effectively come to a complete halt under the current mayor.
The mayor has shown little interest in taking steps toward closing Rikers and opening the four borough-based jails to replace it by 2027. Current projections show the first of the four new jails opening at least two years after Rikers’ closure. The Adams administration has yet to provide any insight into how it might meet its legal obligation to shutter Rikers Island nor has it provided any answers about what the future of the city’s jails might look like.
Under Adams, the population on Rikers Island has grown by more than 1,000 detainees on average on any given day. His administration has cut programs that advocates and lawmakers claim would not only reduce the population within the jail but would make both Rikers and New York City’s streets safer.
“I genuinely believe that this new commissioner really wants to get things right,” City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, told the Eagle. “But intention can only go so far if you are not empowered to take action and I’m not clear that this commissioner is empowered to take actions that align the department with the goals that are legally mandated for it.”
“Can a commissioner change things around if the executive is not invested in it?” she added. “I don’t believe that can happen.”
Adams – like many mayors before him – has shown little tolerance for commissioners or appointees who run afoul of his policy positions.
The mayor reportedly refused to allow his first NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell, to have autonomy over the department, blocking her attempts to make certain promotions or take disciplinary actions against officers accused of wrongdoing. Additionally, Sewell reportedly felt she was operating under a shadow commissioner in Phil Banks, the deputy mayor for public safety. Maginley-Liddie also operates under Banks.
“I’m not convinced that this commissioner has the power or influence to move the mayor,” Nurse said.
But Maginley-Liddie and Adams aren’t completely unaligned in their approach to the city’s criminal justice system.
Each week since taking office, Adams has passed an executive order declaring a state of emergency in the city’s jails. The order allows the agency to skirt around a number of requirements for caring for detainees put in place by the Board of Correction.
Despite the alleged fixes Maginley-Liddie and Adams have made to Rikers, Maginley-Liddie told the Eagle that she still believes the executive order is warranted and that the agency remains in a state of emergency. At the center of that crisis, Maginley-Liddie said, is the agency’s staffing numbers, which have declined by over 3,000 officers since the start of the pandemic.
Like Adams, Maginley-Liddie has also said she doesn’t support a new law from the City Council that would effectively ban the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails – the law, which was passed by a super majority in the council, has long been a priority for a number of criminal justice reform advocates.
Not long before the City Council voted to override the mayor’s veto of the solitary confinement ban bill, Maginley-Liddie released a two-minute video discussing the “flaws” of the bill – among them was Maginley-Liddie’s claim that the DOC no longer uses solitary confinement, an assertion that has been disputed by detainees, attorneys, lawmakers, oversight agencies and researchers.
In June, the Eagle asked Maginley-Liddie what the agency was doing to prepare for the law’s implementation, which is set to begin at the end of July. The commissioner said that she had been consulting with the city’s Law Department about putting the law into practice in the jail. When asked specifically if that meant the city would be challenging the law in court, Maginley-Liddie declined to explain.
“We’ve just been working with the Law Department on next steps,” she said.
Later that day, the mayor’s attorney’s asked Swain to put the law’s implementation on hold. Swain is expected to make a decision on the city’s request on Tuesday, July 9.
It also appears that Maginley-Liddie, like Adams, isn’t convinced that Rikers’ closure, a policy almost universally supported by criminal justice advocates in New York City, is necessary to reform.
“I think location is one thing, but people are people,” Maginley-Liddie said. “We're trying to break down barriers and change culture. You’ve got to start here.”
In a statement to the Eagle, the mayor praised Maginley-Liddie’s vast legal and correction’s experience, as well as emotional intelligence,” and blamed the issues facing the DOC on “decades of mismanagement prior to our administration.”
“She fights for our hard-working staff, the dignity of the people in our custody, and she supports this administration’s efforts to reform the city’s jails,” Adams said. “I am proud of her for taking the reins, where she continues to prove she is the right leader at this pivotal moment for the department.”
A new game
It makes sense that Maginley-Liddie is rooting for the little guy.
Standing in a warm and sweaty gym inside the Robert N. Davoren Center, the commissioner is cheering on a basketball team made up of young adults and teenagers waiting for their cases in criminal court to be resolved. They are playing a group of older detainees, most of whom appear to be in their mid- to late-20s.
Both teams have professional-looking uniforms and are being coached by correctional officers, who are out of their uniforms and wearing athleisure. The referee, also an officer, appears to be calling a fair game.
Maginley-Liddie has a fondness for these games and for the younger team, in particular, which has yet to notch a win.
“Last week, I came in when they were practicing and they were like, ‘Don't worry commissioner, we will make you proud,’” she said. “They got beat so miserably.”
But this game appeared to be going differently. The young men were consistently on top.
Like the team’s success, the basketball tournaments were new. The agency had recently begun to roll them out facility by facility after Maginley-Liddie said she felt they drove home the ethos of her culture change. Everyone was part of the game while on the court. One’s rank as an officer, status as a detainee, or gang affiliation – it didn’t appear to matter within the confines of the tournament.
“One of the guys said to me today, ‘I didn't feel like it was in here [when I was playing],’” Maginley-Liddie said.
With only a few minutes left on the clock, Maginley-Liddie asked her security guard to check the score. The young detainees were still winning.
At least for today, the bonds of history were broken. No one was more shocked than the commissioner.
“They’re winning?” she said. “Are you sure?”
