Federal judge appoints former Vermont DOC boss to take over Rikers Island
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Nicholas Deml, a former CIA agent and commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, will soon take over significant control of Rikers Island and the city’s Department of Correction. Photo via Court filing
By Jacob Kaye
After more than a decade of failed reforms, mounting deaths, and repeated warnings from the courts, a federal judge on Tuesday took the extraordinary step of wresting control of New York City’s jail system from City Hall, appointing a former CIA agent and correctional expert to assume sweeping authority over Rikers Island and the Department of Correction.
Federal Judge Laura Swain, who oversees the detainee civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, tapped Nicholas Deml, the former commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, to serve as her remediation manager, taking charge of the city’s dangerous jail complex, which Swain said in November 2024 was so violent that the city was violating detainees’ constitutional rights.
Deml, who once worked as a CIA agent, will have significant powers over Rikers Island and the agency that runs it. He’ll have the power to hire, train, promote, demote, transfer, investigate, evaluate and fire anyone currently working for the DOC except the commissioner, whose power will be largely transferred to the remediation manager.
He’ll answer only to the judge.
Deml’s appointment, which will be made official in the coming month, could mark a monumental change for the city’s jails, which face an uncertain future.
The city has failed for the past decade to tamp down violent conditions on Rikers, Swain ruled in 2024. The judge said in May 2025 that she would take the extreme measure of appointing a remediation manager, or a federal receiver, to assume control over the city’s jails.
Swain’s Tuesday appointment comes less than a month after Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office. Mamdani, who has regularly denounced conditions in the jails, has largely been supportive of the appointment of a receiver, unlike his predecessor, Eric Adams, who argued for years that the city was best suited to address Rikers’ deeply rooted dysfunction.
The appointment also comes a little more than a year and a half before the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers Island and replace it with four borough-based jails, a deadline that criminal justice experts throughout the city claim is nearly impossible to meet. Though Swain’s order is unrelated to Rikers closure plan, it’s likely Deml’s work as remediation manager will clash with the effort to shutter the dangerous jail complex where over 100 people have died in the past decade.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Deml was one of more than two dozen people who applied to serve as the Rikers receiver.
In a biography attached to Swain’s Tuesday order, Deml was described as bringing “a people-centered approach to stabilizing organizations, restoring trust, and advancing transparent, accountable leadership to create meaningful and lasting change.”
The 38-year-old currently works as the managing director of Everly Bly & Co., a boutique consulting firm focused on corrections, public safety and national security.
Earlier in his career, he worked as an aide to U.S. Senator Richard Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the Office of the Assistant Majority Leader.
He served as the Vermont DOC’s commissioner from November 2021 until August 2025, several months after Swain began soliciting receiver applicants.
While leading the agency, Deml was credited with implementing a “philosophy shift” to help solve several crises within the state’s prisons and jails, according to reporting by Vermont Public.
Toward the end of Deml’s tenure in Vermont, the state’s prison population hit a five-year peak with more than 1,550 people behind bars. The total is less than a quarter of the current population on Rikers Island, where 6,878 people were detained on any given day in December 2025.
His appointment was celebrated by the Legal Aid Society and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, the two firms representing detainees in the decade-old Nunez case.
“Today’s appointment of Nicholas Deml as remediation manager for the City’s jail system is a historic step toward ending the egregious constitutional violations that incarcerated New Yorkers continue to endure each day in New York City jails,” the firms said in a joint statement. “This decision reflects the court’s recognition that incremental measures and past promises have failed to deliver the systemic change necessary to protect basic rights and human dignity.”
The attorneys said that in conversations with Deml prior to his appointment, he understood “people in custody need real solutions to the dangerous dysfunction harming them — even, and especially, when those solutions require a break from the status quo.”
Swain ordered Deml to “promptly” meet with the city to begin to discuss his budget, staffing, and the many logistical details that will need to be fleshed out in order for him to assume his powers over the jails.
The judge said the city should submit a confidential report about the agreement they reach with Deml by mid-February. Once Swain gets the report, she’ll formally appoint Deml as the remediation manager.
Once he assumes the role, Deml will be charged with creating the first of several remediation action plans, which will include “specific and concrete steps and milestones designed cumulatively to achieve compliance” with the 2015 consent judgment in the Nunez case. The first plan will be due to the judge 90 days after Deml officially takes office.
Deml, who will work full time either from Rikers Island or within DOC headquarters, will have administrative, financial, contracting, legal, operational and other powers over the city’s jail system.
He’ll have “unlimited access to all records and files maintained by the DOC” and “unlimited access to all DOC facilities, persons in custody, and DOC staff.” Deml will also be allowed to confidentially interview staff and detainees.
While there’s no determined timeline for the receiver’s work, Swain suggested the city could begin to work itself out of the constraint in around seven years, granted they meet the goals set out by the receiver.
According to the order, the city will regain its powers over the jail gradually. Should it come into compliance with a specific action item over two consecutive six-month periods, the receiver will have 60 days to turn the responsibility back over to the city. However, should the city ever fall out of compliance with that action item again, it would go back into Deml’s portfolio.
Some similar receiverships across the country have lasted anywhere from a couple of years to more than a decade.
