A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday directed top Department of Correction leadership and civil rights attorneys representing Rikers Island detainees to flesh out a plan to restructure how the city’s jails are run amid staggering and increasing levels of brutality.
Chief Judge Laura Swain issued the directive at a packed Manhattan Federal Court hearing where she weighed a request to hold the city DOC in contempt for failing to abide by years-old court orders to curb violence in the city’s jails.
Swain, who is also considering whether or not to place the city’s jails under the feds’ control, reserved issuing a decision on the contempt motion, but said Wednesday’s arguments presented “a clear and unavoidable need for the imposition of new measures addressing fundamental vulnerabilities in the current system and structure of leadership and the policies and practices of the Department of Correction.”
An aerial view of the Rikers Island prison complex. (Photo by Debra L. Rothenberg/Getty Images)
Violence has only increased on Rikers Island since the city agreed to reform the pattern and practice of excessive force in a landmark settlement in 2015, civil rights lawyers for detainees and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office told Swain at the hearing.
Two administrations, five jail commissioners, 15 reports by federal monitors finding the city noncompliant, and DOC brass “have not done what they agreed to do,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Kenneth Powell said.
“Now, despite all of those orders, the jails are more violent and less safe than they were when the consent judgment was ordered,” Powell said, noting 33 people had died in city custody since 2022.
“It’s hard to imagine a more robust record to form the basis of a contempt finding.”
Citing a federal monitor’s findings of 587 instances involving head strikes in just a year and a half, Legal Aid lawyer Kayla Simpson said, “Where excessive force should be rare, here it is commonplace.”
Simpson said there had been 47 head strikes in December 2023 alone, a stark contrast to levels of violence in larger U.S. jail populations like in Los Angeles, which logged 52 head strikes in 2022.
She noted that the DOC identified more than 3,000 instances of violent force from 2021 to 2023 and that the monitor believes that’s an undercount.
Chief Judge Laura Swain. (Rick Kopstein/AP)
Representing the city, attorney Alan Howard Scheiner pushed back on allegations the DOC had made no progress and was willfully noncompliant rather than struggling to institute reforms. He argued that progress had been hindered by changes to the makeup of the city’s jail population since the order.
“The number of people charged with homicide, as a percentage of people in our custody, has doubled,” Scheiner said. “The city is dealing with a different population than in the past and quite possibly a different sort of population in other systems.”
Scheiner said every staff member on every level was struggling to manage people with complicated needs safely.
“The problems are different from one, you know, period to another — from one month to another, from one quarter to another, from one year to another.”
“But there’s a court order that says a security plan is supposed to be developed,” Swain interjected.
Eric Adams on Rikers Island in 2022. (Benny Polatseck/Mayoral Photography Office)
Swain said she would issue a decision in writing as soon as possible on the contempt motion but that the vulnerabilities presented warranted immediate action, whatever she decides.
“Chief among these vulnerabilities is that leaders who are appointed by political authorities on an at-will basis change at the will of those authorities,” Swain said.
“Every time that it does happen, the new leaders understandably need to learn the territory, frame their own perspective on the past and the present, and they will seek to make their mark, build their own relationships with powerful stakeholders and the system, including but not limited to the unions, and often try to reset the clock in some way — notwithstanding the clear presence of the judicially imposed requirements and existing violations of those requirements.
“And in the meantime, while all of this is going on, the lives of persons in custody and staff are in terrible danger. And those lives simply can’t continue to be vulnerable to such cycles in this way,” the judge added.
Swain directed meetings take place under the direction of the monitor between the parties, including top DOC leadership, and come up with “a fully fleshed-out description” of the authority and structure a federal receivership might take or another outside party who could be brought in to address the issues.