Tuesday, May 13`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 37
WABC: A federal judge Tuesday seized control of New York City’s notorious jail complex on Rikers Island, which will now be run by an official who reports directly to the court.
In the past 50 years, a federal judge has seized control of an American jail fewer than a dozen times.
Critics have described brutal, violent and inhumane conditions inside the jail for years. There have been suspicious deaths and suicides.
In a 77-page ruling, Judge Laura Taylor Swain wrote that she found the conduct of city over the last nine years “leaves no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the court’s orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay.”
She also wrote “that the current management structure and staffing are insufficient to turn the tide within a reasonable period; that defendants have consistently fallen short of the requisite compliance with court orders for years, at times under circumstances that suggest bad faith; and that enormous resources — that the city devotes to a system that is at the same time overstaffed and underserved — are not being deployed effectively.” Mayor Eric Adams said the city would obey the court order and cooperate, noting “the problems at Rikers are decades in the making.”
“The inmates are predominantly Black and Brow, the correction officers are predominantly Black and Black and Brown, I think almost 44% are women, they were always treated unfairly,” Adams said.
The mayor said the law requiring Rikers to close in 2027, which he has since said cannot be met, hamstrung his administration because “it stated you can’t make any capital improvements on Rikers Island, we can’t spend money on Rikers Island to improve the conditions.”
Adams insisted that conditions at Rikers have improved under his administration.
