After former Mayor Eric Adams stalled on a key element of the plan to close Rikers Island, the Mamdani administration on Monday reversed course, transferring three jail facilities out of Department of Correction control and reviving a jail decommissioning process required by city law.
Read MoreWhile the federal monitor tasked with tracking conditions on Rikers Island appears optimistic about the leadership of the two new officials in charge of the city’s jails, violence in the troubled complex remains high, the monitor said in a new report.
Read MoreThe powerful union representing correctional officers on Rikers Island this week asked a federal judge to "reassess" the recent hiring of an ex-Department of Correction investigator tapped by the remediation manager to reprise her role in the city’s jail complex.
Read MoreThe dispute over the existence of “deadlocking,” or the practice of locking up detainees on Rikers Island for weeks or months at a time in violation of Department of Correction policy, cutting them off from health care, services and other people in custody, continued during a jail oversight meeting on Tuesday.
Read MoreThe commissioner of the Department of Correction on Tuesday defended a nearly 600-officer cut proposed by the mayor, despite asking the City Council for more funds to hire and recruit officers only a couple of months ago.
Read MoreTwo detainees died on Rikers Island in quick succession of each other on Monday and Tuesday as the jail’s top officials were across the Atlantic, touring jails in Europe.
Read MoreInvestigations into alleged abuses by Rikers Island officers will no longer be handled by the Department of Correction, according to a new organizational structure that puts a court-appointed remediation manager in charge of probing misconduct inside the jails.
Read MoreThe City Council this week demanded the Department of Correction answer long-ignored questions about how it's changed – or hasn’t changed – its often criticized process for fielding and addressing complaints detainees make about conditions on Rikers Island.
Read MoreThe city’s Department of Correction may soon begin to implement parts of a local law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails, nearly two and a half years after the bill was first passed.
Read MoreAdvocates are urging the Mamdani administration to transfer a long-vacant Rikers Island jail facility out of Department of Correction control, saying the city must revive a jail decommissioning process that came to a complete halt under former Mayor Eric Adams.
Read MoreThe Department of Correction has stonewalled a court monitor looking for answers about fire safety practices in the city’s jails, even as more than 40 fires were started by detainees over the last weeks of 2025, according to a new report.
Read MoreThe city still doesn’t have a timeline to open an already-constructed hospital jail ward meant to hold detainees with serious physical illness, despite new leadership in City Hall and the Department of Correction, who say they are fully committed to reversing the massive delay.
Read MoreA former Rikers Island correctional officer who was convicted last December of sexually abusing a woman in his Queens home was sentenced to two years in prison on Monday.
Read MoreThe number of times Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents asked the Department of Correction to give them a heads up before a detainee’s release so that they could make an arrest more than doubled during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, compared to the year prior.
Read MoreA library at the women’s jail on Rikers Island reopened this week after the resource had been shut down for nearly a year as correction officials struggled to manage a swelling jail population caused by a state prison staffing crisis.
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