The Court-Ordered Takeover of Rikers Shows the Crisis in American Prisons and Jails

A federal judge on Monday stripped control of the Rikers Island jail complex from New York City and ordered the appointment of an independent manager to fix rampant violence and persistent constitutional violations at the infamous lockup.

Citing nearly a decade of cyclical reform and backsliding at Rikers, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Laura Taylor Swain rejected a proposal from New York City to appoint the current correction commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, as a "compliance director," and instead will put control in the hands of an independent official "empowered to take all actions necessary" to end the chaos at the jail.

The ruling is no surprise. Swain warned city officials last year that she was inclined to impose a receivership after finding that the city was in contempt of 18 provisions of an agreement it entered in 2015 to settle a lawsuit over brutality at Rikers. In fact, violence, death, use-of-force, self-harm, and most other metrics of human misery got demonstrably worse at Rikers in the ensuing decade, despite repeated orders from Swain and recommendations from a court-appointed monitoring team to improve conditions.

"There is no doubt that these less extreme measures have proven futile," Swain wrote in Monday's order.

The monitoring team repeatedly documented widespread security lapses and failures to help inmates who were trying to commit suicide in plain view of officers.

In 2021, a New York state judge ordered a pretrial inmate released from Rikers after he presented credible video evidence that he'd been forced to perform in a "fight night" organized by gang leaders while guards watched on. A New York state senator said lawmakers touring Rikers that same year saw a man trying to kill himself. A public defender who toured the jail told The Intercept that inmates in one segregated intake unit were locked in small showers and given plastic bags to defecate into.

The loss of direct control of Rikers is not only a huge embarrassment for New York City; it's one of the loudest warning sirens so far that something has gone profoundly wrong in American prisons and jails. Swain's order is an acknowledgment that there's an impossible contradiction between what our country's founding documents say about the dignity of all people and the barbaric indifference that goes on behind prison walls, out of public sight.

The Eighth Amendment guarantees incarcerated people the right to basic healthcare and hygiene, but at many lockups at the local, state, and federal levels, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment is a dead letter.

Last year, a Justice Department investigation found "dehumanizing" filth and violence at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia. The Justice Department launched the investigation after a 35-year-old mentally ill man died covered in feces and bedbugs. An independent autopsy found that the man died of complications from "severe neglect," including malnourishment and dehydration.

The Justice Department found unconstitutional conditions at three Mississippi prisons last year as well. The report concluded that the prisons failed to protect incarcerated people from rampant violence and sexual assault, and placed hundreds of people in solitary confinement "for prolonged periods in appalling conditions."

In one Texas county jail, three people died of thirst over a two-year period. And in Texas state prisons, which lack air conditioning, people are being cooked to death in the summer heat.

On the West Coast, one man lay dying for four hours before jail staff noticed him. By that time it was too late. Lawyers for the family of a man who died in the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, California, released information showing that jail staff ignored the man's corpse for three days.

We don't even understand the scope of this problem. A 2022 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that the Justice Department undercounted the number of jail and prison deaths by at least 1,000 the previous year.

These aren't just numbers. I report on medical neglect in jails and prisons for Reason. I've had to cold-call sons, daughters, husbands, and wives to ask for details about how their loved ones died behind bars. They told me how prison staffers hung up on them when they called desperate for information. One woman learned her incarcerated husband died when his status on the federal Bureau of Prisons website changed to "deceased."

In 2023, I interviewed Elmer Williams, a formerly incarcerated Florida man who spoke to me over the phone from a hospital bed. For months, Florida prison officials ignored Williams' deteriorating health and extremely high indicators for prostate cancer, until he was terminally ill, paralyzed, and afflicted with infected bed sores on his buttocks that rotted to the bone. There are pictures accompanying the Eighth Amendment lawsuit he filed. They're not for the squeamish.

"Slowly, slowly, slowly, they just let me fall apart," he told me in a quavering voice that barely rose above a whisper.

Williams' lawsuit uncovered an email showing that when he pleaded for help, describing how he was completely paralyzed from the stomach down, a Florida Department of Corrections official wrote, "This is not an emergency."

Receivership is a rare but not unheard of judicial remedy to persistent constitutional violations. In 1995, a federal judge placed the medical services of the District of Columbia's jail in receivership following decades of litigation. In the most sweeping example, a three-judge panel in 2005 placed the medical services of the entire California prison system under receivership and ordered the state to reduce its incarcerated population to alleviate extreme prison overcrowding. 

Receivership is an extreme measure that strips control away from local officials, but when habitual constitutional violations are allowed to flourish in places like Rikers, they don't tend to stay hidden. Like gangrenous wounds, they fester and spread until they kill their host or are excised.

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