Moment of truth
At 2 p.m. today, in Courtroom 17C of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in downtown Manhattan, a ray of hope may gleam through to the thousands held on the Rikers Island gulag roughly 10 miles northeast. Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain will consider the new support for federal receivership by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, the Board of Correction and many other parties, following Federal Monitor Steve Martin’s increasingly dire reports. The public can listen in on live audio. Rikers detainees should also have a way to hear.
Today could mark the first step on the complicated road to receivership. Even when considering the breadth of the support in favor of this drastic step — a mark of just how bad things have gotten that an array of typically cautious groups want to break the glass — Swain will not just order a receiver today. Ideally, she will clear the way for motions towards receivership, which the Legal Aid Society and the U.S. attorney will have at the ready.
The city is certain to oppose these motions, though, as we’ve written before, Mayor Adams shouldn’t see a receiver as an interloper or a punishment, but rather a real opportunity to cut the Gordian knot of Rikers and leave the derelict facility and its cultures of violence and unaccountability in a stable position that the city can much more easily manage. None of it will be easy or painless, but if in a couple of years a competent receiver can turn over a jail cleared of the brush of decades of mismanagement that’s not a danger to the detainees and staff, of course do it.
We’ve spent many words talking about a faceless receiver as an abstraction, but if and when Swain takes the plunge there will have to be an actual administrator who can take the wheel and turn this system around before it careens off a cliff. We are not headhunters and would not presume to tell the judge how to go about this delicate task, except to offer one very concrete piece of advice: whoever it is needs to come from wholly outside the NYC political and administrative sphere.
City officials and lawyers might argue that an insider would know the system best and be in the optimal position to intervene, but that assurance has failed to bear fruit over and over again. No one who even smells like they might be interested in New York political office or have any deference or allegiance to the city’s political apparatus can get the job done. Their only obligation must be to safeguard the people at Rikers and set the whole system on solid ground.
Let’s not jump the gun, though. Before all that, a receiver must be appointed, and while stopping short of that step could be chalked up to due caution and deference for home rule before, few arguments remain for doing so now. Almost everyone’s singing from the same songbook now for a reason, and that reason is that this isn’t a game or a theoretical exercise. People are dying and being put at needless risk each and every day of the current status quo, and there seems to be little urgency to fix that.