The justice system is a revolving door. Here's how we stop it.

Alex rias is running for city council in district 26. photo courtesy of rias.

By Alex Rias, special to the Eagle

The idea that social behavior is best corrected through deprivation, punishment and isolation through the justice system is now exposed as patently false in a moment when our city grapples with its relationship, or obsession, with incarceration.

Society’s relationship with punishment has built a revolving door. Now, we have a duty and opportunity to stop it from spinning further out of control.

I left the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office because the office tried to squeeze the thirst for change out of me. I’m not the only one.

We learned the hard way that the revolving door of our system cannot be changed by any single lawyer, or a small group of lawyers for that matter. The system needs deep structural change across several agencies and through the city’s budget. It may not be easy, but we can accomplish it with a deeply progressive City Council.

I know how quickly the system can pull someone into the revolving door. My family members and friends have been detained on Rikers Island.

One night in my late teens, I feared that I would wind up on there, too. While walking to a bodega in Queens, a car drove onto the sidewalk in front of me. Two NYPD officers hopped out and cornered me between the car and the wall. They rushed toward me, told me to shut up, pushed me around and rifled through my pants, shoes and shirt. I felt violated, embarrassed, and paralyzed between fight and flight reflexes. When it was all said and done, I was left standing there frustrated and confused.

Years later, I would go on to work with progressive City Council members to bring reforms and oversight to the NYPD through City Hall and the courtroom. Though reforms like mandatory body cameras and creating an NYPD oversight agency were new and progressive ideas at the time, those reforms are just a drop in the bucket of what we need today.

Passing new laws alone won’t fix the root social issues caused by social and economic inequality. The City Council must use the budget to address the issues that are baked into our widening wealth gap, our distressed social safety nets, our health and wellness disparities, the de-unionization of our workforce and our segregated education system.

To shift toward a true social justice system, we must address our society’s relationship with punishment. We must defund the carceral system to refund the people and communities.

We have a duty and opportunity in this moment to finally grapple with the justice question. 

After months of sustained national protests pushing the system to be more responsive to the people has put on full display the deep contradictions between our country’s practices and its founding principals. The idea that we are all created equal may be true in theory but is clearly selective in practice. A quick look at arrest and incarceration rates or the lengths of sentences by race reveals how deeply damaging the consequences of our selective practice are.

It is clear that supporting communities in a full and comprehensive way is a more equitable solution.

The system is crowded by the kinds of offenses that are evidence of need and desperation by our neighbors who are kept at the margins of society. The city and district attorney’s offices have reshuffled the deck by removing some petty arrests from criminal court and into administrative courtrooms. However, without reallocating resources designed to promote community support, the system relies on threats of punishment to force “correction.” The revolving door continues this way, deepening racial, social, and economic inequality, and resentment.

We should be working to stop the revolving door, not to maintain it.

As a former legislative and budget director at the City Council, I know that we can defund agencies like the NYPD to refund education, healthcare, housing, and the social services we need now more than ever.

Having witnessed it in action at the grassroots level during the pandemic, our city should embrace a mutual aid model as one way to ensure resources find who needs them locally. Our elected officials must be open to new ideas for social justice in this period of change. Change doesn’t come easily.

The City Council can do better for our neighbors by getting its priorities straight. We can pave a way through this mess by defunding inadequate systems to refund the people and systems of support for our neighborhoods, our families, and our workforce.

We can correct “corrections.” We can forge a shift away from punishment. We can get to the root of the matter by addressing our identity crisis and our relationship with incarceration. We can stop the revolving door.

Alex Rias is candidate for Council District 26 in Western Queens. He is the former executive director of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus of the City Council and a former legislative director.