Order on the island

Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark did more than secure a solid indictment last week against 15 Rikers Island inmates who either hurled fists at a Department of Correction captain on Thanksgiving Day or, wielding stolen pepper spray, prevented other guards from coming to his aid.

She also issued a searing indictment of the punishment-free climate within city jails for inmates who repeatedly commit violence against guards and against one another, and demanded sure action from the jails’ oversight body.

“I urge the Board of Correction to work with the Department of Correction to implement severe consequences for inmates who repeatedly assault other inmates and correction officers,” Clark said as she announced the indictments on robbery, gang assault and more.

“They cannot continue to brutalize with impunity. The mindset must be changed because this violence must be prevented.”

Strong words — made necessary by an alarming spike in violence on the island coinciding with the board’s sharp rollback starting in 2015, with the support of Mayor de Blasio and then-Commissioner Joe Ponte, of solitary confinement as punishment for inmates who lash out.

Instead, the Department of Correction is steering dangerous inmates into new treatment units designed to reward them for good behavior, as though Crips and Bloods will say “please” and “thank you.”

Please. On any given day, 1,200 known gang members swarm city jails. As criminal justice reform steers small-time offenders away from Rikers, hardcore violent felons like them run the roost. No wonder fights and assaults against guards and inmates have surged.

Clark says the inmates plotted for weeks to get their revenge on Capt. Awais Ghauri after he broke up a fight, in “an orchestrated, retaliatory attack on the captain for doing his job.”

Reformers who think closing Rikers Island will magically turn such assailants into pussycats are kidding themselves, complicit in the harm done to guards and to inmates cruelly put in harm’s way.

What the Board of Correction should be doing is bringing down the hammer on those dead-set on committing crimes behind bars while testing and fine-tuning alternative units — if not punitive segregation, then systematically revoking privileges like recreation time.

Instead, it’s left to the Bronx DA to clean the bloody mess left on the floor by a stampede to declare solitary confinement defeated.