Fifty Years of Injustice at Rikers

The long-overdue decision by Federal District Judge Laura Taylor Swain to place Rikers Island under receivership marks a critical turning point in a decades-long struggle for justice. But before anyone celebrates, it’s essential to understand and take to heart the many times potential progress has been thwarted. Only by understanding what went wrong — and why — can those who want to build better jails create the conditions for success.

Over 50 years ago, as project director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, I engaged with my colleagues in litigation that repeatedly exposed the inhumane conditions in New York City’s jails, including detention facilities on Rikers Island. The story began when the newly established Prisoners’ Rights Project initiated litigation in the federal courts of the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, challenging a wide range of conditions in borough jails. These cases addressed issues such as overcrowding, double celling, sanitation, fire safety, non-contact visitation, severe movement restrictions, excessive lock-ins and the broader maltreatment of individuals awaiting trial.

One major outcome of these legal efforts was the closure of the infamous Tombs jail in lower Manhattan after the City failed to comply with a court injunction. In response to that case, and to judicial orders to end overcrowding in detention centers across Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, City officials attempted to circumvent these rulings by relocating thousands of detainees to Rikers Island — a remote and imposing facility. We, however, continued to fight, following our clients to Rikers Island and launching further lawsuits to address conditions there.

In our litigation over conditions at Rikers Island, we presented overwhelming documentary and testimonial evidence demonstrating that detention centers there, in their location, design and operation, were fundamentally unfit to hold individuals awaiting trial, and were plagued with conditions like those we had successfully persuaded federal courts to condemn in the borough jails. It is both frustrating and tragic that these same conditions persist today, despite our warnings all those years ago.

Half a century ago, our federal civil rights lawsuits showed that Rikers Island is uniquely and cruelly isolated. Thousands of people charged with crimes — yet not convicted — are torn from their communities and transported to a remote outpost in the middle of the East River. Accessible only by a single bridge and far from mass transit, Rikers severely restricts access for attorneys, making it extraordinarily difficult for detainees to confer with counsel and prepare their defenses. Families, too — spouses, children and loved ones — face immense challenges in maintaining contact, further deepening the isolation. Even if Rikers were a humane detention center, its location alone would make it intolerable.  

But tragically, it is the very opposite of a humane environment. At trial, we demonstrated that, even then, Rikers’ jails were decrepit, poorly maintained and deeply unsanitary. Peeling paint, unpalatable food and a lack of basic fire safety measures were just some of the many deficiencies. New Yorkers detained inside those walls were denied even a modicum of human dignity.

More recent litigation in Nunez v. New York City Department of Correction revealed yet another horror: the pervasive risk of violent assault at the hands of both staff and fellow detainees. Inadequate supervision leaves those incarcerated at Rikers vulnerable to unchecked brutality. Thus, for those sent to Rikers Island, the reality is stark: isolation, inhumane conditions and persistent danger. This remains the system of pretrial detention that tens of thousands of New Yorkers endure each year.

Decades ago, the City of New York did not mount a serious defense against our claims that the City’s Department of Correction was failing in numerous ways to respect the constitutional rights of pretrial detainees in its custody. Indeed, Mayor Ed Koch — soon after taking office — publicly admitted that our concerns were “indisputably justified” and vowed to address the crisis. In response, we negotiated comprehensive consent decrees, signed by the City and approved by Federal Judge Morris Lasker. These decrees provided a detailed blueprint to remedy these longstanding issues, including a host of topics ranging from sanitation and fire safety to due process and protection from aggressive searches. These decrees gave us reason to believe that change was coming. 

How wrong we were. Now, 50 years later, a new generation of talented, dedicated attorneys has had to make many of the same arguments about the failure of the City to meet its responsibility to keep detainees safe and to treat them humanely that we made before they were even born. At last, their voices have been heard. Recently, Judge Swain found that “the continuing existence of extremely dangerous and unsafe conditions,” and the City’s failure to meaningfully address them, warranted the appointment of an independent remediation manager. This necessary step is encouraging but from my perspective it is long overdue. For 50 years, over a hundred thousand — if not more — New Yorkers have suffered injustice that the City pledged to eradicate. That is inexcusable.

Three big reasons why change hasn’t happened yet

The possibility of meaningful change is cause for hope, but a lingering question remains: Why has it taken 50 years to reach this point? Looking back, three primary reasons explain why the horrific treatment of New Yorkers detained on Rikers Island persisted for half a century — long after one might have reasonably expected reform.

First, while there was a fleeting moment in the late 1970s when then-Deputy Mayor Herbert Sturz led a visionary effort to overhaul the City’s prison and jail system — including a 1980 proposal to sell Rikers Island to the State and fund borough-based facilities — the commitment to change was never deep enough to endure beyond his tenure. Successive administrations failed to prioritize jail reform. The effort to sell the Island to the State fell through during the Ed Koch administration. 

The indifference, if not outright opposition, to the enforcement of constitutional rights of people held in New York City’s jails continued thereafter. Mayor Rudy Giuliani actively resisted change, not only neglecting to enforce consent decrees but aggressively seeking their dissolution. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for his part, rarely engaged with his first corrections commissioner, who might have been empowered to achieve reform had he been given the opportunity. Mayor Bill de Blasio did not prioritize reform, was a latecomer to the decision to close Rikers Island and failed even to visit Rikers Island until his failure was so well reported that he finally went. The administration of Mayor Eric Adams, as the court demonstrated in its recent ruling, has failed to meet the challenge as well.

Second, Congress provided the City with a powerful mechanism to unravel progress when it passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996. This deceptively named law severely restricted incarcerated persons’ access to the courts to vindicate their rights and allowed cities, like New York, to break their commitments under consent decrees. That law allows consent decrees to be vacated even when not complied with, unless the plaintiffs can meet an arduous burden not imposed on any other group of litigants. A consent decree is a promise by the government to do what it says. But when it came to the City’s jails, despite not doing what it said it would do, the City demanded that the decrees be dissolved, and they were. Thus, Giuliani leveraged this law to eviscerate nearly all provisions of the consent decrees, effectively erasing the small amount of progress that was made under the direction of Judge Lasker to enforce these decrees. The ongoing tragedies at Rikers are a direct result of this law and the City’s willingness to exploit it.

Third, the courts — led by the Supreme Court — have steadily narrowed the scope of protections for incarcerated individuals. While they have not fully returned to the “hands-off” doctrine, under which courts refused to intervene regardless of the severity of mistreatment, a series of rulings has left only a small opening for justice. In Bell v. Wolfish, the Supreme Court upheld jail restrictions even when they infringed upon fundamental rights, requiring only a reasonable explanation from the government — regardless of whether less harmful alternatives existed. In Wilson v. Seiter, one of the most damaging rulings in the Court’s history, a 5-4 decision held that prison conditions depriving individuals of even life’s most basic necessities were nonetheless lawful unless plaintiffs could prove that officials deliberately intended to harm them or were willfully indifferent. No matter how dire or life-threatening the conditions, this heightened standard made relief extremely difficult to obtain. 

Moreover, 50 years ago, the Rikers Island case benefited from the oversight of the aforementioned Morris Lasker, a brilliant and deeply committed federal judge. There are few judges on the bench any longer of the caliber of Lasker and those who are struggling under the admonitions of the Supreme Court warning that enforcing the rights of marginalized people is not a priority. Thus, because of the City’s reluctance to safeguard human rights, the formidable legal obstacles imposed by Congress and the courts’ persistent erosion of prisoners’ protections for five decades, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have endured injustices that the City once vowed to eliminate. 

Cautious optimism

Now that the City has been held in contempt and the court has ordered that an independent remediation manager be appointed with power to take all necessary action to correct “ongoing violations of the constitutional rights of people in custody in the New York City jails,” have we finally reached the moment where meaningful reform can no longer be postponed? After half a century of delay, is there reason to believe this time will be different?

Despite the many setbacks I have witnessed over the years, I hold onto the hope that change is finally within reach. Unlike in the past, public awareness of jail conditions has grown, thanks to the relentless advocacy of dedicated individuals — many of whom have personally experienced incarceration — and the diligent reporting of the media. For decades, jails and prisons operated out of sight, allowing abuse to persist unchecked. But when the public is informed, reform becomes possible.

Most significantly, for the first time, control of the jails is being taken out of the mayor’s hands and placed under an independent entity accountable directly to the court — a critical step in overcoming entrenched barriers to change. These factors provide compelling reasons to believe that, unlike before, the conditions necessary for meaningful reform are finally in place.

Time will tell whether this moment marks a true turning point. But one thing is certain: by confronting decades of neglect head-on, the preconditions for meaningful change are finally in place. The opportunity is here. One hopes that this time, history will not be allowed to repeat itself.