(The Center Square) — New York City’s troubled jail system will be put under the watch of an independent monitor after a federal judge seized control of the Rikers Island jail and other city-run lockups.
The order by U.S. District Court judge Laura Swain, issued Tuesday, faulted the Department of Correction officials for failing to address “dangerous conditions” in Rikers under a decade-old court case ordering them to fix the problems. The directive will place the jail system under the watch of a receiver, or independent manager, with a mandate to implement new safety requirements over the next three years.
“The continued existence of extremely dangerous and unsafe conditions led the Court to hold Defendants in contempt of a staggering eighteen provisions of the Nunez Court Orders and indicates that the Department has not yet taken the bold steps required to move the jails toward safety levels that comply with the Constitution,” Swain wrote in the 77-page ruling.
The ruling follows a December order issued by Swain that held the city in contempt of court for failing to deal with “alarming and unacceptable” conditions in the complex. Swain wrote in that 65-page ruling that rates of use of force, stabbings, fights, assaults on staff and deaths are extraordinarily high at the jails and there has been “no substantial reduction in the risk of harm.”
The 400-acre jail, which houses an average of 6,000 detainees, has been operating under a federal consent decree since 2015.
Mayor Eric Adams opposes receivership for the city’s jails but has pledged to shut down Rikers Island by 2027, despite skepticism from criminal justice advocates that his administration will meet that deadline.
Adams told reporters on Tuesday that he would follow the judge’s orders despite his concerns about putting the facilities under the watch of a federal monitor.
“If the federal judge made a determination that they want to do something else and they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s a federal judgement,” Adams said at a press briefing. “We’re going to follow the rules.”
The move was praised by The Legal Aid Society — plaintiffs in the original lawsuit that led to the 2015 consent decree — which called Swain’s ruling a “critical turning point” in a decade-long fight to improve safety in the city’s jail system.
“For years, the New York City Department of Correction has failed to follow federal court orders to enact meaningful reforms, allowing violence, disorder, and systemic dysfunction to persist in the jails,” the group said in a statement with other legal aid lawyers. “This appointment …is an overdue acknowledgment that City leadership has proven unable to protect the safety and constitutional rights of incarcerated individuals.”
