Day late, dollar short

Time’s up for the Department of Correction. It had weeks to draft and revise an action plan to address Rikers Island’s persistent culture of violence and dysfunction, counseled by the experienced hand of Federal Monitor Steve Martin and incorporating the combined efforts of the Legal Aid Society and the Manhattan U.S. attorney.

This comes after almost seven years of a federal consent decree, various remedial court orders, and heaps of solemnly issued and immediately broken promises. After all this, what it’s ended up with is a plan that suffers from much of the same vagueness as the initial draft, pledging reforms that might trigger déjà vu for those who’ve read earlier iterations of the city’s failed undertakings, and crucially refusing to commit to a recommendation from the monitor to seek court action whenever it runs into legal barriers to its proposed changes.

Such legal impediments have derailed various prior efforts and set the stage for the system’s most significant challenge: chronic absenteeism among a staff that can take unlimited medical leave and a lack of consequences for misconduct. There’s no reason to think that trying more of the same will work now, particularly since the city is also refusing to follow a suggestion to hire wardens from external talent pools.

This lack of imagination and urgency would be problematic for any city agency, but it’s deadly in DOC as detainees continue to face the risk of serious injury and death in the floundering Rikers complex. The city has been given chance after chance to remedy things on its own. There can be no more hand-holding.

It is time for the plaintiffs to formally ask for, and the judge to order, the installment of a federal receiver that could take direct executive action, breaking through systemic barriers to change that can be tolerated no longer. Rather than kicking and screaming, the city should accept that this must be done and do whatever it can to facilitate the receiver’s work. No half measures.