Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Rikers guards’ brutality raises call for shutdown
Critics say recurrence of problems makes case
NEW YORK — The latest in a string of brutality cases against Rikers Island guards has added fuel to a growing debate on whether New York City’s notoriously violent jail complex has become so dysfunctional that it should be shut down.
At least 35 staff members at Rikers have faced criminal charges in the past three years, including 13 for assault or attempted assault. Federal prosecutors have also charged more than a half-dozen Rikers guards with violating inmates’ civil rights through excessive force, smuggling drugs and other charges since 2014.
“Rikers Island is one of these longterm injustices and abuses that every New Yorker should be outraged about,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “The situation is intolerable.”
Inmate activists have for more than a year argued that shutting down the sprawling, 10-jail complex on the East River is the only solution for a cycle of abuses that include violence by guards and gang members, mistreatment of the mentally ill and juveniles and unjustly long detention for minor offenders.
Among the other arguments for closing Rikers is that the island facility is too isolated, cutting off inmates from the outside world in a way that hinders oversight and rehabilitation.
Daily populations at Rikers have recently been falling below the 15,000 capacity listed on a city website — averaging less than 10,000 — a trend city officials attribute to reducing detention for those charged with misdemeanor drug possession. Advocates say that makes it viable to dismantle Rikers and replace it with a combination of new and expanded existing jails in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Cost estimates have reached as high as $10 billion.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has stuck to his position that reforms and improvements at Rikers are both the least costly and most practical approach.
A 2015 settlement of civil litigation over pervasive brutality at Rikers imposed various changes, including the addition of thousands of surveillance cameras, stricter policies on use of force and the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee conditions.
The latest brutality case stems from security videotape in a maximum-security shower area that shows guard Rodiny Calypso viciously attacking an unidentified inmate in February 2014, a criminal complaint says. After the pair exchanged words — Calypso claims the inmate spit on him — the guard handcuffed the victim and punched him in the face and the head several times, it says.
Calypso, 38, was released on $150,000 bond.
An independent commission headed by the state’s former chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, is close to announcing recommendations for reforms in the city’s criminal justice system, including whether to shut Rikers for good.
The challenge, Lippman has said, is “to imagine a state-of-the-art criminal justice system in New York City that does not rely on a de facto penal colony on the outskirts of town.”