Welcome to Hell Island
Attempts to fix the brutal and corrupt Rikers Island jail have failed. Should New York City throw away the key?
WHEN THE MAYOR of New York City chose a new correction commissioner in 2014, the city’s largest jail—rikers Island—was notoriously inhumane and violent. Mayor Bill de Blasio selected as his new jails chief Joseph Ponte, a man with a progressive record of transforming jails in Maine and Tennessee. The New York Times welcomed Ponte with the front-page headline, “De Blasio Setting Up a Test: Prison Reformer vs. Rikers Island.”
Three years later, conditions at Rikers are still horrific, and the commissioner was scheduled to step down on June 28 after a city probe revealed he had repeatedly driven his municipal vehicle back to Maine and spent three months there last year, even as conditions at Rikers worsened. So with Ponte’s stint as correction head coming to an end, the answer to de Blasio’s test is clear: Rikers won in a rout. And to cap off Ponte’s time in New York, less than a week before his last day, de Blasio released a plan to close the facility in 10 years.
But criminal justice experts argue that doesn’t reflect badly on Ponte, because reforming Rikers is impossible. “Ponte has tried to do some good things, but Rikers continues to be an accelerator of human misery. You come out worse than when you went in,” says Jonathan Lippman, chairman of an independent commission that in March called for the shuttering of Rikers. Lippman, former chief judge of New York and now a counsel at the law firm Latham & Watkins, tells Newsweek that other cities, like Denver and San Diego, have jails that are safer and more humane. “The only dramatic impact that a commissioner could have would be to lead the charge to close Rikers. Otherwise, it’s all Band-aids.”
A report the Lippman commission released in March called Rikers a “stain on the city” and described the harm the facility does to correction officers working in dangerous conditions, the approximately 10,000 inmates imprisoned there on an average day and the taxpayers who cough up billions of dollars to fund the facility. It recommended the facility be replaced with smaller ones in each of the city’s five boroughs. It also noted that 89 percent of Rikers’s inmates are black or Latino and that the burden of incarceration, with attendant costs like eviction, unemployment and family dysfunction, falls mainly on those minority groups.
New York City Councilman Rory Lancman takes a dimmer view of Ponte’s tenure, calling the commissioner’s record “mixed” and noting that “when you start with the ninth level of Dante’s Inferno, the expectation is you’ll do better than mixed.” Stabbings and slashings in city jails increased last year by almost 20 percent, and medical staffers are afraid to care for inmates, he said. “It’s certainly fair to say that if Joe Ponte couldn’t fix it, who can? So let’s start over.”
True reform of New York’s jails would require a massive overhaul of the city’s criminal justice
system. The police department would have to move away from broken-windows policing, which pulls too many people into city courts, and there would need to be reform of the city’s bail system so that people are not kept in jail just because they’re poor, Lancman says. The report from the Lippman commission, of which Lancman is a member, raises this point, stating that every day about three-quarters of the approximately 9,700 people in the city’s jails are awaiting the outcome of their cases—nearly all of them behind bars merely because they can’t afford bail. The report also recommends reforms like moving low-level misdemeanors out of the criminal courts and into civil courts, getting mentally ill people into public health services instead of jail and eliminating short jail sentences.
While the election of Donald Trump as president and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as head of the Department of Justice don’t have a direct impact on local jails, a rightward shift in criminal justice policies at the federal level does influence local facilities like Rikers Island. Moves by Sessions, like his push for mandatory minimum sentencing in prosecutions, influence local prosecutors to do the same, says Heather Thompson, a history professor at the University of Michigan who studies mass incarceration. A Sessions-led DOJ will also be less likely to support civil rights lawsuits meant to force reform on facilities like Rikers. “You’ve got nobody in the feds to bring your state abuses to,” says Thompson, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for her book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Thompson says the idea you can reform a broken institution like Rikers by bringing in a savior (like Ponte) is absurd. “We in America have a long history of naively hoping that one guy can come in and fix something that is...rotten,” she says. “So why are we surprised when he fails?”
Asked how she would compare Rikers Island to Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where 43 people were killed after prisoners demanded better living conditions and took over the prison, Thompson doesn’t hesitate. “It’s holding American citizens who have not been convicted of a crime as animals. On those grounds alone, it’s much worse than Attica.”
“WE HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF HOPING THAT ONE GUY CAN COME IN AND FIX SOMETHING THAT IS ROTTEN.”