Zachary Katznelson
The commission was formed to examine closing the complex a few years after a federal judge approved a settlement in a class action, Nunez v. City of New York, in which the city agreed to several reforms to reduce violence at Rikers, including the appointment of a federal monitor over the jails in 2015. But change remains elusive, and 11 inmates have died in city custody so far this year.
Violence and disorder have persisted on Rikers despite reforms and the city's commitment to close the island entirely, with the crisis exacerbated by the pandemic and ongoing staffing challenges. This year, federal prosecutors even threatened to seek the appointment of a receiver with independent authority to ensure reforms are implemented.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has resisted a federal takeover, with U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain accepting the city's plan for now. The judge will review the city's progress in November, and the federal monitor is expected to issue another report in October.
Katznelson spoke with Law360 about the state of Rikers Island, how the pandemic made the complex more dangerous for inmates and staff and why some advocates want a federal receiver to implement reforms.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There's been a lot of back and forth about the future of Rikers over the past several years, and a federal monitor recently gave the city more time to implement a plan to curb violence and other serious issues at the complex. Where do things currently stand?
There's this consensus, pretty much throughout the entire city and all levels of government, that Rikers has to close, that it's just not fixable. The problems are at every level, starting with the island itself. Three-quarters of the island is landfill. The city dumped its garbage there for years and then built most of the jails on top of the landfill. As that decomposes, the foundations crack, methane gas seeps up into the jails, plumbing leaks, sewage leaks. It's really unstable ground that is not fit to have people living on it.
On top of those physical problems, the Department of Correction has operated for generations with very little oversight, too little accountability, and it led to an environment where you have real dysfunction, real danger for both the staff who work there and the people who are locked up. It's entrenched. There's both these systemwide problems and unique problems for each of the jails on the island, but none of it is fully fixable.
At the same time, the city in 2019 formally agreed to a plan to close Rikers and to replace it with borough-based jails in four of the boroughs, near or much closer to courthouses. That process is underway, and those jails are going to be far better physically than what we have now.
The No. 1 source of weapons at Rikers is the crumbling buildings themselves — broken plexiglass that's made into weapons, rusting steel that's pulled off. The process to replace those failing jails with new borough jails is moving forward and is on pace to be completed by 2027. So the real question is, "What's going to happen between now and then?" We still have some 5,000 people in jail on any given day. We have thousands of staff who work there, and we need to do everything we can to make sure that they are safe.
That really gets to the heart of what the federal monitor has been looking at in the Nunez case, trying to figure out how can we try and change operations, change the management structures, change the administration of the jails on a day-to-day basis to maximize the safety and delivery of basic services, to make sure people actually get access to medical care and get to court, and they actually get to see their lawyer and their families, get outside for recreation — all of these things where Rikers right now is by and large failing. How can we move forward in a positive way to try and make life not just better but safer for people that are in the jails?
Have you visited the complex recently?
The last time I was there was about two months ago.
Can you describe what you saw?
They had advance notice. But I went to one of the mental health units. About half the people at Rikers have mental illness, and about 15-16% have a serious mental illness. About 27% of the women there have a serious mental illness. There are two main units for people at Rikers with serious mental illness. Some are for people with serious mental illness and house up to about 250 people. Those units actually have remarkably low levels of violence, relatively speaking, and they have really positive results in terms of people staying on their medication and getting the kind of help and support that they need.
Correctional staff and medical staff train together — it's really intensive programming and counseling and services for people who [have] really serious mental health needs. But there are about 900 people at Rikers that have a serious mental illness, and while the 250-person units are models for the country developed in Rikers, not enough of those beds are available and there's a real gap there.
Other people are basically warehoused in what are called mental observation units. These are dorms with usually 30 to 40 or up to 50, in open beds or cots maybe two feet apart from each other and just a locker to store their stuff in. And they're just there all day. One of the places I went to on my last visit was one of these mental observation units, and there were 40 men in there. They had almost nothing to do all day. They said they had no programming, and there was no real counseling going on. They hadn't been outside in many days. Some of the men were just sitting on their cots in a stupor. There was no way anybody was getting better in that scenario.
A lot of it was because of the staffing issues where there aren't enough correction officers in a given time to bring people to medical appointments or to bring staff into the units. A lot of nonprofits do provide services at Rikers, but they need officers to escort them to the units and also to stay with them when they're in the unit to provide services. Medical staff sometimes don't feel safe going into housing areas where there aren't correction officers. So, because of the staffing crisis, there are too few officers available in any given shift to cover all the posts at Rikers, and services aren't being delivered. Folks who are just sitting there, almost all of them are pretrial. Whatever somebody may or may not have done, we should be focusing on care, we should be focusing on services, and we should make sure that somebody gets a day in court in a reasonable period of time.
Are some of these issues caused by the pandemic?
There's no question the pandemic has significantly exacerbated the problems that existed already. Even before the pandemic, Rikers was a profoundly dangerous, dysfunctional place. It had basically been declared unconstitutional by a federal court back in 2015, when the consent decree was put in place for the Nunez case to curtail violence. The levels of violence have only got worse since that consent judgment was put in place. That said, the staffing issues that exist now at Rikers and the court delays are definitely related to the pandemic.
For a long time, I think staff there felt very neglected by the city. Investments weren't going into facilities for them. And then in the early days of the pandemic, the department really did a very poor job at providing staff with personal protective equipment and cleaning the units properly. People were getting sick and dying and some felt they were literally left on an island to fend for themselves. So staff started calling in sick because they were sick and also because they were really scared about being sick, and that started to snowball. Because the staff that remained behind were then being forced to work mandatory overtime, double and triple shifts. Each shift is eight hours. So you can be working a 24-hour shift and don't know that [when] you come in to work. You may have child care responsibilities. You may have other family responsibilities, doctor's appointments, whatever it is, and that's upended. Sometimes people weren't even able to leave their posts to go make a phone call to say, "Hey, can you go pick up my kids at school today?"
Under the union contract that exists for the Department of Correction, there's unlimited sick leave. So if you know that you're going to have a very good chance of working a double or triple shift in what can be very dangerous conditions, maybe you're not going to go into work that day. And it snowballs. So you have unstaffed posts, and there are parts of the jail where there are no officers around at all, sometimes for days at a time. At the height of the crisis, it was days at a time. That has led to really dire consequences. In just one example, there was a gentleman earlier this year, Herman Diaz, who choked to death eating an orange and there was no staff member around to provide help and other incarcerated people tried to help and they couldn't, and he died. There are real ramifications for the staffing crisis that exists today.
The city has seen 11 inmates in custody die this year, as of mid-July. Why do you think this keeps happening, in addition to the staffing shortages?
The staffing shortages make everything more difficult. We are starting with a vulnerable population. There are people that tend to be more unwell than the average person on the street. So when people are arrested, making sure they get properly screened and proper services and care is critical. But there also have been a number of suicides over the last year. ... The system has broken down so much that people who should be on suicide watch are not. For instance, how can somebody who's coming straight from a psychiatric hospital to jail not be given some type of special medical attention? All of it needs to be addressed. Rikers is almost entirely a paper-based system. At least in terms of the operations for the Department of Correction on the security side, it's almost entirely paper-based. So things are going to fall through the cracks when you just have these old-school log books or ledgers like you would see in accountants offices from the 1800s.
Why do advocates want a court-appointed receiver to take over control of the jail?
When the new mayor and the new commissioner, Louis Molina, came into office in January, they inherited an absolute mess, a dangerous mess. Since then, the commissioner has been, I think, working as hard as he possibly can to turn things around. He is still faced with incredible levels of violence, incredible levels of use of force by officers against incarcerated people, numbers that dwarf other correctional systems around the country, plus availability of weapons in the jail.
The complete breakdown of control by officers over the jails is really remarkable, and having to try and find a way to reassert that is incredibly difficult. One of the key issues is the lack of staff available to work. Just under 1,000 uniformed officers call in sick every day. Another almost 1,000 people are on some type of medically monitored restricted duty. So you have basically 2,000 officers on any given day who are just not available to work with people that are locked up at Rikers. That makes things incredibly hard.
Some of the people calling in sick are taking advantage of the system, and so a federal receiver could come in and say they are longer going to follow the union contract that says people get unlimited sick leave, and they're not going to allow the same drawn-out accountability process. Today it takes months and months and months to actually go through the whole disciplinary process, and oftentimes someone gets a slap on the wrist. I think the commissioner is doing the best he can to hold people truly accountable if they're gaming the system and have the punishment match the misconduct. But it takes an extremely long period of time, so there's still this core group of people that aren't coming to work even though they're getting paid with taxpayer dollars. A receiver could change that up.
Another key piece is hiring requirements. Right now to be a warden, you have to be a uniformed officer that has come up through the ranks at Rikers. So while there are some very strong wardens, they've been at Rikers for 20, 25 years, and sometimes systems really benefit from fresh thinking and new perspectives. A receiver could come in with fresh ideas that are not allowed under current state law and city regulations, like hiring people from outside. So those are some examples of what's been put forth as to why a receiver might be useful. The city has said we don't need those changes, and we have our own plan. So the federal court has now given the city basically until the end of October to try and show that their plan works.
What does the ongoing situation at Rikers say about our society?
For many years, Rikers has been a dumping ground for people who we don't really know what to do with, and a lot of that has to do with mental illness. These are people who have often cycled in and out of different institutions for much of their lives — whether that's jail, prison, hospitals, homeless shelters — sometimes getting kicked out of schools when they were younger because they had learning disabilities or behavioral issues and nobody knew quite what to do with them. And the vast majority of people are Black or Latinx.
There's very frequently a presumption of guilt once somebody is on Rikers, whether or not they've had a trial. In many ways, people are treated as throwaway lives, and that's not acceptable on any level. Often the officers that are there have also been neglected and ignored, and that's a real failing for our city, too. Because they're human beings and also because they actually have a lot of really good ideas and thoughts about how things can get better.
There are still really problematic people in a problematic system that causes real violence and is deeply disturbing and has to change, but there are staff that can really help be part of the answer. We need to say that Rikers is no longer going to be out of sight, out of mind, isolated and neglected, that we're going to pay attention, dedicate the resources that are necessary, have new facilities that are much better for everybody and try and shrink the inmate population. The end result will be a far better system for everybody.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier and Marygrace Anderson.