The Rikers Receivership Risk — and Opportunity

Rikers Island is unsafe for its officers, inhumane for its inmates and a risk to the security of the people of the city. 

—Board of Correction Chair Peter Tufo, 1975

[W]e find that a deep-seated culture of violence is pervasive throughout the adolescent facilities at Rikers, and DOC staff routinely utilize force not as a last resort, but instead as a means to control the adolescent population and punish disorderly or disrespectful behavior…our investigation suggests that the systemic deficiencies identified in this report may exist in equal measure at the other jails on Rikers.

—United States Attorney Preet Bharara, 2014

The use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody

are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015… the current rates of use of force, stabbings and slashings, fights, assaults on staff, and in-custody deaths remain extraordinarily high…Worse still, the unsafe and dangerous conditions in the jails…have become normalized despite the fact that they are clearly abnormal and unacceptable.

—U.S. District Judge Laura Swain, 2024

I begin with this disturbing trip down memory lane not to engage in “adoration of the problem,” to paraphrase my friend the late James Bell, but as a reminder of how, in the entire tenure of everyone employed or confined at Rikers, it has been a dangerous, demoralizing place. With federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain on the brink of appointing a “remediation manager” — a receiver in all but name — to run city jails, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani about to take the reins at City Hall, and the city’s official position to terminate the era of Rikers Island jails arriving just around the corner in 2027, this half-century of pain and dysfunction has a better chance of ending than, literally, ever.

It will be beyond terrible if we blow it. 

History repeating itself

From 2018 to 2022, I was an expert witness in a Florida death penalty case of a man who had been incarcerated at Rikers in the 1970s when he was 16. He was the same age as me and we grew up a few neighborhoods apart.

In this capacity, I investigated conditions at Rikers during that period — and then saw recent conditions up close during my brief 2021 stint as Correction Commissioner, affording me a unique opportunity to compare the state of the jails nearly five decades apart. 

The lack of progress was stunning. 

I interviewed several former corrections officials as well as five men who had been locked up at Rikers as teenagers in the ‘70s. Although these men were all now in positions of responsibility ranging from nonprofit executive director to foundation president to reentry counselor, the trauma they experienced was as fresh as if it had happened a week earlier, often entering their thoughts and dreams. Three of them cried during their interviews; many said they had never told anyone what they shared. William vanden Heuvel, who served as Board of Correction chair in the 1970s, summarized the conditions they endured: “If we treated dogs the way we were treating these humans, there would be a march down Fifth Avenue protesting it. But it was hidden from view, not for security reasons, but because no one wanted to see what was going on.”

The same could be said about the Rikers I witnessed during my seven months as commissioner, despite all the legal attention, all the money the city was spending on it and the 2015 consent decree in Nunez vs. the City of New York. The only constant has been misery.

Carpe diem

That’s why it is so important to seize this unprecedented moment, not only to close Rikers Island, but to make sure that the culture of violence doesn’t migrate to new borough-based jails. Yet despite best intentions, I worry we’re about to drop the ball — yet again.

Federal law surrounding jail reform litigation deliberately holds receivership as a remedy of last resort, ordered by courts only after other less drastic steps have been taken. That’s why it took a decade of escalating violence and 112 deaths before Judge Swain ordered the court takeover. Meanwhile, doing what I suspect they believed was their job, City lawyers fought receivership tooth and nail, arguing against it, suggesting they might appeal the court’s order, and asking Swain to review her order after she issued it (a request she roundly rejected). They even suggested that the commissioner Mayor Eric Adams had appointed serve as both the receiver and commissioner simultaneously for a five-year period, which would’ve hamstrung the incoming mayor from replacing her during his entire first term.

While these efforts failed to block a court takeover, they may have watered down the ultimate order. Instead of a “clean” receivership like the one that succeeded in turning around the Cook County (Chicago) juvenile detention facility, the judge has put a triumvirate of cooks in Rikers’ kitchen. Under the current edict, there will be: (1) a court-appointed receiver with control over jail functions related to the lawsuit (in other words, almost everything); (2) a mayorally-appointed commissioner in charge of all other jail functions (details to be worked out between the receiver and commissioner and approved by the judge) and (3) a court-appointed monitor overseeing the court-appointed receiver.

Even with crystal-clear lines of authority, Rikers is a bear to fix. This tripartite set of leaders is a recipe for disaster. Giuliani-era Commissioner Michael Jacobson called the structure “unbelievably confusing and unclear.” Mayor Bloomberg’s jails chief, Martin Horn, agreed, saying, “I think the judge tried to split the baby.” Former Cook County receiver Earl Dunlap wrote plainly, “the Receiver has no chance of succeeding unless he/she is the SINGLE ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITY subject to the Court's lawful orders.”

A “clean” receivership

It doesn’t have to be this way. When I was commissioner, I raised the possibility of the City acquiescing to a receivership, prioritizing the creation of a robust package of powers to get the job done. If incoming Mayor Mamdani’s team could withdraw the City’s opposition to the receivership, they could work with plaintiffs and the court to design a structure that has a real chance of working. This would include a lone receiver (i.e. no commissioner, no monitor) who runs the jails exclusively, like they did in Chicago and also Hinds County (Jackson), Miss. 

Under this setup, the current federal monitor would stay in place only long enough to transfer his functions to the receiver, as happened in Hinds County, where a federal judge wrote that, after 30 days, “the Court will be prepared to discharge…[the] Monitor unless the Receiver determines her services remain necessary.” This would comport with the U.S. Justice Department’s guidance on monitorships, which states that they “should be designed to minimize the cost to jurisdictions” and “must be accountable to the court, the parties, and the public,” further recommending “monitorship term limits of two or three years.” After 10 years at a cost of $26.1 million, it’s hard to argue that current federal monitor Steve Martin and his team should long coexist with the incoming receiver.

The receiver should not only have unobstructed lines of authority but should also have what amounts to emergency powers over personnel to swiftly put a team in place to begin making changes. They should be able to procure fairly but quickly, without being stymied by the City’s glacial procurement process; that would enable them to launch or expand programs to productively occupy people’s time and to make repairs to Rikers’ debilitating physical plant, where homemade shanks can be fashioned out of crumbling infrastructure. And the receiver should have the maximum budget authority permitted under federal law.

Finally, the receiver should have the ability to petition the court to abrogate state and local laws, regulations and contracts when they stand in the way of fixing unconstitutional conditions, as the Cook County, Hinds County, and California receivers were granted. For example, under the federal law, judges can, as a last resort, suspend measures permitting staff to abuse sick leave as well as state laws preventing the hiring of highly qualified supervisory staff.

Unlimited sick leave was abused so heavily during my tenure that more than a third of my staff were out “sick” some days — especially on long summer weekends when staff seemed to fall “ill” more frequently. That kind of obvious abuse creates a cynical atmosphere inside the jails, with staff who actually do their jobs getting “stuck” on mandated double or triple shifts while “sick” staff post pictures of themselves on Caribbean islands.

Just because contracts can be abrogated doesn’t mean they should be. City police have unlimited sick leave and face nowhere near the “sick out” problems that the Correction Department encountered. A smart receiver will sit down with labor to negotiate similar approaches to those at the NYPD, where sick staff must see departmental doctors to affirm their illness, but generous sick leave policies remain in recognition of their difficult jobs.

Since violence is concentrated by person and place, a powerful receiver should launch a highly focused approach to make things safer at jails experiencing the most serious problems — those housing adolescents, people with long jail stays or mentally ill people, to name a few. 

When we did this in 2021 with the adolescent unit, where violence then was three times higher than in the remainder of Rikers, we engaged front-line staff and young people in a collaborative planning effort. We then trained staff and youth in those co-designed units in restorative practices, teaching them to “use their words” — instead of fists and knives — to resolve problems. This resulted in no assaults on staff or fights among the young people from fall of 2021 until the unit was dissolved by Adams’ first commissioner, Louis Molina, early in his tenure in 2022. Importantly, when staff on these units participated in this turnabout, absenteeism plummeted and they became proselytizers of the new approach among their peers. Vital City’s excellent series of articles offers many other hopeful approaches that have been shown to dramatically improve jail conditions. 

Hope floats

Given the persistence of the problems that plague them, it’s understandable that many New Yorkers think that the city’s jails are beyond repair. This is not the case. I have witnessed several jails, prisons and juvenile facilities transform themselves from miserable, violent places into something far better, from San Quentin Prison to the San Francisco Jail to the Missouri Division of Youth Services to D.C.’s Oak Hill Youth Facility. 

Hopelessness is contagious, but so is hope. City jails may very well be on the brink of a new era. This is no time for half-measures. The court, city leaders and plaintiffs counsel should move forward boldly and deliberately to get the job done now.

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Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first “meeting” was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the first issue, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better. 

You answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.

Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration.  We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our “What to Do (And Not to Do)” series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.

To do that, we need your help.

For the first time ever, we’re directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.

If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you’ll join us. Become an inaugural supporter today. 

— Liz Glazer, Founder

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Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first “meeting” was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the first issue, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better. 

You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.

Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration.  We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our “What to Do (And Not to Do)” series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.

To do that, we need your help.

For the first time ever, we’re directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.

If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you’ll join us. Become an inaugural supporter today.

— Liz Glazer, Founder