Up to now, 19 inmates have died within the NYC jail system in 2022.
Matthew McDermott
The nineteenth detainee dying at Rikers Island this yr (after 16 in 2021) is a transparent sign that the jail’s tradition wants altering — but far too lots of the metropolis’s political powers are targeted on the inconceivable plan to switch Rikers completely with 4 borough-based amenities, or (worse but) on ham-handed efforts to put in writing guidelines to by some means repair the troubled system.
Correction Commissioner Louis Molina is bent on altering that tradition of violence and managerial dysfunction, at the same time as he grapples with understaffing and the advanced’s bodily deterioration. That inmates maintain dying of drug overdoses, suicide and by the hands of different inmates reveals he nonetheless has a protracted strategy to go.
One good signal: A federal decide simply OK’d circumventing civil-service legal guidelines, so the town can rent wardens from outdoors the Corrections Division.
That’ll let Molina carry in additional professionals with demonstrated experience and steeped in fashionable jail-management — and finish the chaos left after many correction officers referred to as in sick for a lot of the pandemic, forcing these prepared to point out as much as work triple shifts.
Final week, one other guard pleaded responsible to official misconduct for mendacity and submitting a false report when he was caught not displaying up for work. Final month, a now-ex-Rikers guard confessed to taking bribes and sneaking contraband — marijuana and K2 — into metropolis jails.
For years, then-Mayor invoice de Blasio and jail reformers insisted that lowering the inmate inhabitants would make the jails extra manageable. In actuality, it hasn’t. And the allied drive to switch Rikers is at finest a distraction, encouraging poor upkeep of the jails the town really has and banishing the way more sensible answer of placing up new buildings on the island.
To not point out that deliberate new jails in 4 boroughs would solely maintain a complete inhabitants of three,300, when the town’s now detaining about 6,000 and expects to hit 7,000 by 2024, per Molina’s testimony to the Metropolis Council final Tuesday.
Even within the unlikely occasion that each one 4 new jails get constructed, shuttering Rikers would require springing 1000's despatched there regardless of the laxity of the no-bail legal guidelines.
In the meantime, the council pushes shiny concepts like utterly ending solitary confinement. Much better to determine the best way to clear the backlog within the metropolis’s courtroom system — and the best way to pace up Molina’s reforms.
And the complete political institution must drop the replace-Rikers fantasy.
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