Federal judge orders New York City to prepare for Rikers takeover after contempt finding

A federal judge has ordered New York City to draw up plans to hand over management of the Rikers Island prison complex to an outside trustee after finding the city’s Department of Corrections (DOC) in civil contempt for failing to meet more than a dozen requirements to improve conditions at violence-stricken prisons.

In opinion and order released Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Laura Taylor Swain wrote that she is “inclined to pursue receivership” after concluding that violence and deaths at Rikers have not improved since New York agreed to the court-forced reform of the 2015 plan.

In fact, “use of force and other rates of violence, self-harm and deaths in custody are clearly worse,” Swain wrote.

Swain found that DOC disregarded 18 different provisions of the consent agreement. The agreement was the result of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2012 by the Legal Aid Society of New York alleging rampant brutality by guards against prisoners. In press releaseThe Legal Aid Society praised the court’s “historic decision” finding the DOC in contempt.

“The culture of brutality on Rikers Island has resisted judicial and policy reform efforts for years,” the Legal Aid Society said. “As the court found, the city has repeatedly demonstrated that it is unable to provide the supervision necessary to ensure the safety of all people in its local jails.”

In recent years, chronic violence, corruption and neglect at Rikers have reached record levels. The Rikers crisis is one of the most notorious examples of bureaucratic indifference to unconstitutional suffering in jails and prisons across the country. Losing control of Rikers would be a huge shame for New York, but it would come after years of active resistance by city officials and prison guard unions to efforts to clean up the island prison.

In 2021, a New York state judge ordered the release of a pretrial inmate from Rikers after presented credible video evidence that he was forced to perform at a “fight night” organized by gang leaders under the supervision of guards. New York State Senator he said lawmakers traveling around Rikers that same year saw a man trying to kill himself. A public defender who toured the prison he said Interception that prisoners in one separate reception room were locked in small showers and given plastic bags into which they could defecate.

Monitoring team appointed by the court documented many times widespread security gaps, lack of help for prisoners who tried to commit suicide in front of officers, and low turnover of guards working double and triple shifts.

Although New York City opposes filing Rikers into bankruptcy, the lawsuit largely does not challenge the Legal Aid Society’s arguments that it disregarded the consent agreement. It couldn’t. Swain concluded that the simple facts showed that the Department of Defense had failed to mitigate the daily violence, excessive force, poor conditions and lax suicide protocols in its prisons.

“It is clear from the record that people living and working in the Rikers Island prisons face serious and imminent threats and actual harm every day as a direct result of defendants’ lack of diligence and that the remedial efforts to date by the Court, the Panel Monitors and sites were unsuccessful mitigate this danger,” Swain wrote.

Swain had previously rejected is calling on the Legal Aid Society to place Rikers into federal receivership to allow time for a change in Justice Department leadership, but Swain wrote this week that she has lost confidence that the court can trust the city to act in good faith:

“The last nine years also leave no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the Court’s orders by those primarily responsible to the political authorities would only lead to confrontations and delays; that the current management structure and staff are insufficient to turn the situation around within a reasonable timeframe; that the defendants have consistently failed to comply with the required orders of the Court for years, sometimes under circumstances that suggest bad faith, and that the enormous resources – which the City devotes to a system that is simultaneously overstaffed and underserved; have not been implemented effectively.”

Swain ordered the court monitoring team and both parties to the lawsuit to prepare memos containing a proposed framework for a third-party receivership of Rikers, along with legal arguments for or against, by January 14, 2025.

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