With its sixth and seventh detainee deaths of the year coming just minutes apart on June 20, 2025, New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex eclipsed its death toll for all of 2024. Benjamin Kelly, 37, and James Maldonado, 56, were the latest of at least 40 people who have died at the jails—or on their way to the jails, or just after release from the jails—since Mayor Eric Adams (D) took office in January 2022. But that number is suspect; a 2023 analysis by City & State found 120 deaths over the previous eight years, far more than the 68 actually reported by the City’s Department of Correction (DOC). 

As Plato said, however, “death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man.” Mentally ill people incarcerated in Rikers Island’s crumbling structures are “deadlocked” in their cells for extended periods, denied programming and medical care, according to a report by the City’s Board of Correction (BOC), which provides oversight to the DOC. But dysfunction in the DOC is so widespread, according to court documents, that jailers systematically deny prisoners and detainees access to medical appointments and then blame them for not showing up. 

Meanwhile, making good on a long-threatened federal receivership, the federal court for the Southern District of New York has decided to appoint a “remediation manager” to oversee operations at the jail complex, which is slated for closure in 2027. Except that’s not going to happen, either, according to another recent report from an independent commission tasked with carrying out the closure. Replacement of Rikers Island was included in a plan adopted by City lawmakers 10 years ago. But reforms announced then to drastically reduce the number of people in DOC custody have since been rolled back, boosting the jail population from a pandemic low under 4,000 in March 2020 to over 7,000 five years later. 

Most of the about-face has occurred on the watch of Mayor Adams. A former captain in the City’s police department (NYPD), he is being forced to seek re-election in November 2025 as a registered Independent, thanks to Democratic pushback from his reactionary embrace of federal immigration crackdowns since the election of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R). Not coincidentally, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has dropped corruption charges against the mayor, which alleged that he peddled his influence in exchange for bribes paid in luxury travel and cash—some of which he illegally diverted from foreign nationals to his re-election campaign. 

But perhaps the most striking thing about the jail’s crisis is how normal it has become; since the last PLN cover story on Rikers Island 42 months ago, the City Council and Adams are still embroiled in a face off over ending solitary confinement. Although no longer called by that name, the pernicious practice continues to drive suicides in the jail complex, especially suicides of mentally ill detainees. Access to mental health care remains spotty for them, as it does for all those incarcerated on Rikers Island. So does access to other medical care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the disease created a shortage of guards needed for escorts to appointments. But detainees still aren’t getting to their appointments now because those same guards enjoy unlimited time off, leaving the DOC with a bloated salary budget and no one on hand to show for it.

Yet it’s crucial to delve into the details of this dysfunction, in order to understand what must be done to right the ship that is currently sinking into the East River—not only sinking metaphorically but literally sinking; the entire island was once a landfill, and the ground underneath the jail complex is subsiding as all that ancient garbage composts and compacts. The resulting structural degradation and deterioration is why an estimated 79% of weapons confiscated from prisoners and detainees have been fashioned from pieces of buildings that have crumbled and fallen off. The filth and the stench are nearly as hellish as the pervasive cries of mentally ill detainees and those held in prolonged isolation. 

The DOC has long fought release of information. It took the New York Times three years of legal battles to get the court-ordered release of surveillance video of Michael Nieves’ August 2022 death. The mentally ill detainee was awaiting trial in a psychiatric unit at the jail when he managed to cut his jugular vein with a shaving razor. Nieves, 40, had previously cut himself with another shaving razor while held in a secure bed in the City’s Bellevue Hospital, requiring emergency surgery to save his life. This time he wasn’t so lucky, though; as guards stood by and watched, Nieves bled out and died while waiting for emergency responders.

According to Dr. Robert Cohen, who resigned from the BOC as the video was made public in July 2025, “There has reached a level of dysfunction on Rikers Island that is being recognized.” Whether that is just a wish remains to be seen. But Cohen’s larger point is undeniable: “People may need to be separated from society for some period of time, but they shouldn’t be sent to a place where they could die unnecessarily.”

Blaming the Sick
When They Don’t Get Care 

The legal complaint that has brought Rikers Island under the watch of a Remediation Manager is just one of two class-action suits against the City and its DOC over conditions at the jail. The other, which is also the more recent of the two, was brought in 2021 by lawyers with the Legal Aid Society on behalf of detainees and prisoners, challenging the low rate at which they are escorted—or “produced”—to medical and mental health appointments with healthcare staffers from the City’s Correctional Health Services (CHS).

Bronx Supreme Court Judge Elizabeth Taylor directed DOC in December 2021 “to immediately comply with its duties to … Provide Petitioners with access to sick call”; when that didn’t happen, she issued a contempt finding in May 2022 and set a deadline for compliance a month later. When that also came and went without a significant increase in the production of detainees for medical appointments, the court began to levy fines—$100 for every missed medical appointment since the initial December 2021 order. As PLN reported, that quickly totaled over $200,000. [See: PLN, Oct. 2022, p.24.]

But the DOC successfully appealed that order to the Appellate Division, First Department, which vacated the lower court’s ruling on June 13, 2023. The appeals court agreed with the DOC that it had largely purged itself of contempt by achieving substantial compliance with the order: From over 8,400 missed medical appointments in December 2021, the number of times that the DOC failed to timely produce a detainee or prisoner for scheduled medical treatment with CHS staff fell to just 186 between May 17 and June 12, 2022. See: Matter of Agnew v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Corr., 217 A.D.3d 490 (App. Div. 2023); leave to file appeal denied on Dec. 19, 2023.

However, by August 2024, Legal Aid Society attorneys were back in the Bronx court to file new data showing that, although the jail’s population has “increased by approximately 16% since January 2022, the rate of non-productions has increased from 16% in December 2021 to 28% in March 2024, an over 50% increase.”

The filing also summarized affidavits of plaintiffs which showed that many of these “non-productions” were well within the DOC’s capacity to remedy. But staff often blamed prisoners and detainees for missing their own appointments, falsely claiming that they refused to attend. The “entire unit” housing detainee Michael Saintume, for example, “was on lockdown on October 7, 2023, and no one from his unit was produced for medical appointments,” the filing noted. Yet DOC claimed that Saintume refused his appointment that day.

Another detainee, Johnny Basnight, was twice listed as refusing CHS appointments. But Legal Aid Society attorneys noted that this was because he is wheelchair-bound, and DOC staff “would not permit him access to a wheelchair to get to the appointments.” On other occasions, “when staff simply do not want to take [prisoners] to their appointments,” or when waiting rooms have reached what the DOC deems “maximum safe capacity,” guards have attempted, sometimes successfully, to coerce prisoners into signing a refusal form.

Despite this sordid history, CHS policy assumes after three consecutive no-shows that “the medical need” for the detainee “has resolved.” So all guards have to do is literally slow-walk the incarcerated until they arrive too late for their appointments—and then all their future appointments get canceled, too. However, as the filing argued, a “non-production” instigated by the DOC—especially when blamed on the incarcerated patient—really amounts to a further denial of access to healthcare. So, the attorneys are asking for a bigger fine, $250 per missed appointment, to incentivize the DOC to comply with its constitutional duty. See: Matter of Agnew v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Corr., N.Y. Sup. Ct. (Cty. of Bronx), Case No. 813431-2021.

Another Class-Action Results
in Federal Takeover

Dating back 14 years, the other class-action suit against the City and its DOC has been marked by repeated threats from the federal court for the Southern District of New York to put the jails under receivership. But Judge Laura Taylor Swain finally began making good on that threat on May 13, 2025. Finding that conditions on Rikers Island had “grown demonstrably worse” over the course of the case, the judge ordered the entire jail complex placed under the authority of a “remediation manager.” Because DOC officials had “placed incarcerated people in ‘unconstitutional danger,’” the judge said, and as PLN reported, “the unsafe and dangerous conditions in the jails, which are characterized by unprecedented rates of use of force and violence, have become normalized despite the fact that they are clearly abnormal and unacceptable.” [See: PLN, July 2025, p.34.]

DOC has been operating under a consent decree that was issued by the district court in 2015. To address pervasive reports of abusive guards and retaliation against whistleblowers, that agreement imposed strict reporting protocols for all incidents involving use of force, as well as ensuring “fair and prompt discipline” for employees who violate the new policies. Also included was a new use-of-force policy, plus more staff training and 7,800 new cameras, as well as body-worn cameras for some guards, as PLN also reported. The cameras—all 3,500 of them—were recalled, after one caught fire and burned the guard wearing it in May 2024. [See: PLN, Sep. 2016, p.46; and Aug. 2024, p.48.]

Perhaps most important among the Consent Decree provisions was the appointment of a Monitor to oversee its implementation. Over the decade since then, the monitoring team led by Steven J. Martin has been tasked with updating the district court on DOC’s compliance with the terms of the decree. The Monitor has repeatedly cited the jail system for “over-reliance” on “hyper-confrontational” guard teams from the agency’s Emergency Services Unit (ESU). “When force is employed, ESU staff often utilize improper head-strikes, violent body slams and take downs,” Martin reported in 2020, adding that the “default response is often exceedingly disproportionate to the level of threat.” 

The following year, as PLN reported, Martin complained that 50 guards were removed from ESU because of disciplinary records that should have kept them from ever being placed in the job; even worse, 16 of those were then later reinstated. Unsurprisingly, “[t]his cleansing of the roster did not catalyze the necessary change in practice for those remaining in the unit,” Martin said. Such persistently critical monitoring reports so irked jail officials that by May 2023 then-DOC Commissioner Louis Molina simply stopped reporting in-custody deaths—accusing Martin of weaponizing the data to make DOC look bad. Replied the Monitor, “[I]t is difficult for the Monitoring Team to keep the Court appropriately apprised of matters when the City and [DOC] take positions and actions that shift day to day and certain information is only provided piecemeal days after the deadline imposed by the Court.” [See: PLN, Feb. 2023, p.28; Apr. 27, 2023, online; and July 2023, p.24.]

Between August 2020 and November 2021, the district court issued three remedial orders, only to hear from Martin in December 2021 that compliance with the consent decree was never going to be likely without addressing the DOC’s “‘foundational patterns and practices’ [that] were ‘stymying compliance’ with court orders, as well as any ‘efforts to reform the agency.’” Instead, the Monitor advised, DOC needed an action plan to address “foundational issues encompass[ing] flawed security practices and procedures, inadequate supervision of staff, ineffective staffing procedures, and limited accountability imposed for staff misconduct.”

Adams took office the following month, appointing Molina to helm the DOC; in turn, the new Commissioner vouched that the agency had “significant input” into the action plan, which the district court then adopted in June 2022. But as it turned out, the DOC’s efforts at remediating conditions in the jail amounted to little more than limiting how far inside new detainees got. Intake areas began to back up with new bookings waiting on assignments to housing units—perhaps the result of a ham-handed attempt to offset chronic understaffing by limiting the number of detainees inside. The Monitor cried foul. The district court threatened receivership. The DOC agreed to incorporate additional steps into its action plan. When nothing happened after that, the process simply repeated itself—again and again.

By May 2023, bodies were piling up as the DOC reported a spate of detainee deaths, raising “serious concerns about the Defendants’ ability to accurately and timely report serious injuries, to safely manage the individuals in its custody, and to provide the monitoring team with timely and accurate information,” as the district court later recalled. When the DOC responded the next month, it admitted to “reporting or consultation that was required did not occur.” But the agency attempted to whitewash those failures as mere “errors,” for which it shouldn’t be blamed entirely because “[t]he demands of reporting to the Monitor are substantial.”

The DOC’s strained relationship with Martin’s team eventually broke down. By October 2023, the district court was chiding the DOC for “unacceptable” attempts to “unduly influence or interfere with the work of the Monitor.” The following month, Molina was gone. Meanwhile, Rikers Island suddenly had cells segregated into a new Arson Reduction Housing Unit—which Martin had never heard of. Less than 24 hours later, the bizarre effort fizzled, and the unit was closed. 

At that point, the Plaintiffs moved to hold the DOC in contempt, a motion that the district court ultimately granted in November 2024, as PLN reported. The “use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015,” the district court found. “[T]he most disturbing” statistic, the district court continued, was a high number of in-custody deaths: 19 prisoners and detainees died in 2022, nine more in 2023, and five between January and August 2024. Based on its review of video footage, Martin’s team found that none of the deaths was “particularly unusual or unique”; rather, each death was “typical of the variety of security problems that plague all the Department’s housing units[,]” including “security lapses like unsecured doors, individuals in unauthorized areas, superficial Officer and Supervisor tours, and staff being off-post or providing inadequate supervision.” The monitoring team concluded that these problems have “become normalized” by DOC staffers, who fail to recognize how their ineffective security practices “elevate the likelihood of a tragic outcome.” [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.54.]

A New Remediation Manager 

While pleased that Martin’s team was cooperating with Molina’s replacement, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, Judge Swain once again threatened “to impose a receivership: namely, a remedy that will make the management of the use of force and safety aspects … of the [the New York City jails] ultimately answerable directly to the Court.” That threat became reality on May 13, 2025, when the district court announced it would appoint a “Nunez Remediation Manager.” 

When they are chosen and appointed later in 2025, the Remediation Manager will have three years to bring the DOC in substantial compliance with the Contempt Provisions of the Consent Decree. The roadmap to get there will be laid out in a Remediation Action Plan (RAP), to be developed jointly by the Remediation Manager, the Monitor, and the DOC Commissioner. 

The “transformative and sustainable initiatives” of the RAP will include “any positive initiatives currently underway that must be sustained or enhanced.” The RAP will further “address relevant recommendations from the Monitoring Team to support advancing compliance with the Contempt …Provisions.” The various actions in the RAP must be “organized into priorities with specified benchmarks to be achieved within 12-month periods.” It will begin with “safety-related areas and actions that are most urgently in need of attention.”

Class Counsel for Plaintiffs will get a draft of the RAP and an opportunity for comment before the final plan is adopted. The DOC, notably, will not get the same opportunity. However, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) will get one—which may not go well for Plaintiffs, given the more reactionary turn that the DOJ has taken under Trump’s appointed Attorney General, Pam Bondi. But as the DOC and the Remediation Manager hammer out the details of implementing the RAP, the district court said, it is the latter who “has ultimate authority.” 

The Monitor must file a report with the district court every 130 days, outlining the progress made toward completing each item on the RAP. After three consecutive reports indicating that an item has been completed and satisfied, the Remediation Manager’s authority over that item will terminate.

To achieve this, the district court granted extraordinary powers to the Remediation Manager— “the authority to exercise all powers vested by law in the Commissioner to the extent necessary to achieve compliance with the Contempt Provisions.” That includes control, oversight, supervision, and direction of “all administrative, personnel, financial, accounting, contracting, legal, and other operational functions of the DOC to the extent necessary to achieve compliance with the Contempt Provisions.” Specifically, the Remediation Manager will have “the authority to enact or change DOC policies, procedures, protocols, systems, and practices.” That authority also extends “to establish[ing] personnel policies and direct[ing] personnel actions,” including the power “to create, modify, abolish, or transfer employee and contractor positions, as well as to recruit, hire, train, terminate, promote, demote, transfer, and evaluate employees and contractors.” Just to remove any doubt, the district court clarified that this includes “authority to assign and deploy DOC staff.”

Authority “to establish personnel policies and direct personnel actions” is also included, along with the power “to procure and contract for supplies, equipment, tangible goods, and services.” Additionally, the Remediation Manager will have authority “to review, investigate, and take disciplinary or other corrective or remedial … actions with respect to any violation of DOC policies, procedures, and protocols.” They may also “hire consultants, or obtain technical assistance, as … deem[ed] necessary.” Importantly, the DOC Commissioner’s authority is subordinated to that of the Remediation Manager, who must merely “use reasonable best efforts to consult and work collaboratively with the Commissioner.” The Remediation Manager may delegate any task to the Commissioner, along with commensurate authority, but any task may also be taken away from the Commissioner.

The Commissioner’s role is plainly subordinate. “It is expected that Defendants, and the Commissioner and DOC leadership, will work closely with the Nunez Remediation Manager to facilitate the Nunez Remediation Manager’s ability to perform their duties under this Order,” the district court declared. If any other power is needed to effectuate the RAP, the Remediation Manager can petition the district court, which promised to grant them “unlimited access to all records and files” maintained by the DOC, as well as access to “all DOC facilities, incarcerated people, and DOC staff.” As with the Monitor and his team, the City of New York will be picking up the tab for the Remediation Manager and their staff. See: Nunez v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Corr., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 90612 (S.D.N.Y.). 

They will also have other suits to contend with filed over conditions of confinement. One putative class action also filed in the Southern District of New York in July 2024 seeks redress for exposing detainees to thick black smoke that filled their locked cells when a fire broke out in the North Infirmary Command in April 2023. Those plaintiffs— Anthony Bellere, Arthur Brown, Adones Betances, Steven Chirse, Ricardo Cisneros, Latik Edwards, Floyd Harden, Wagner Montero, Emiliano Rodriguez, Kabary Salem, Christopher Sanders, Alexe St. Fleur, Darryl Williams, Michael Harris, and David McCall—are represented in their suit by attorneys with Likas Law PC in New York City. See: Bellere v. City of N.Y., USDC (S.D.N.Y.), Case No. 1:24-cv-05131.

Guards in Crises of Attrition, Overtime, and “Deadlocking”

A crisis of attrition threatens the guard staff at the jails. For every new DOC guard hired since 2022, almost five others have left, reducing the total uniformed staff by 2,301 in just three years. Of 5,398 guards employed in mid-2024, almost one-third—1,451 guards—were three years or less from retirement. Still, that’s three guards for every four of the 7,067 detainees on hand in March 2025. The City’s plans to close Rikers Island by 2027 anticipated building smaller lockups in four of its five boroughs with space for a total of about 3,000 detainees. That would require the DOC to downsize its guard staff. But with over twice as many detainees now in custody, the whole plan is in jeopardy, and the City launched a $1.6 million marketing campaign in May 2025 to recruit new guards.

That resulted in 1,495 registrations over the following month for the second of three classes that the DOC Corrections Academy runs every year. But the math is more daunting than it seems. Maginley-Liddie said that the last Academy class had 2,266 registered candidates, but only 774 passed the entrance test—and just 84 of those graduated. Given that graduation rate and the fact that 3,752 guards have either left in the past three years or will retire in the next three years, the DOC will need another 45 Academy classes of similar size—meaning it could take another 15 years to make up the guard shortage. 

Part of the problem is that senior guards are paid three or four times more than fresh recruits, according to figures in the latest union contract signed in June 2024. That agreement covered 5,359 positions, with annual wages averaging $154,446 in 2025. But those who started in 2023 were slated to earn only $51,266, while those who began work in 2004 averaged $171,061. The contract also included $135 million for pay raises over the contract’s five-year life that would compound to a total of 18.78%. Another $65 million was earmarked for incentives and bonuses.

Those at higher pay levels are also eligible for “award posts”—positions that require no interaction with detainees—leaving new guards with the hardest work and the lowest pay. That is not a bug but a feature for Corrections Officers Benevolent Association (COBA) Pres. Benny Boscio, who boasted that the new contract included “guaranteed and contractually protected” award posts “for the first time ever.” Those plum jobs—there are about 844 of them, the DOC said—draw uniformed personnel away from the detainees who need them to provide security. But COBA directed further inquiries from City & State to the Office of Labor Relations.

Martin, the Monitor for the Nunez class-action, said that no one told him about securing the award posts, either. “Five months into the new Commissioner’s tenure, the City offered COBA a labor agreement, which implicates this Court’s orders regarding staffing reform, without engaging with the Monitor or providing timely updates,” he complained to the district court.

Former DOC Deputy Commissioner of Trial and Investigations Sarena Townsend called the contract “proof-positive that COBA executives run the Department of Correction and have the power to sway DOC policy; shamefully, they only wield that power to protect their own rather than the membership at large or the detainees condemned to Rikers Island.”

For those union members not in an award post, being a guard is not a cushy job, given the lousy physical working environment on Rikers Island. But the pay goes higher for those willing to work overtime—and with unlimited time off baked into the COBA contract, there’s plenty of opportunity for that. In 2024, fully three years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the DOC paid $283 million in overtime bonuses to employees who logged a total of 3.8 million overtime hours—boosting some guards’ pay to nearly $400,000, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.14.] That’s an average overtime rate of more than $74 hourly, which goes a long way to explaining how the DOC ended up with so many takers.

What do detainees and prisoners get for that? A lot of missed medical appointments, for one thing; as PLN also reported, a February 2024 BOC report chided the DOC for letting mentally ill detainees—who make up 50% of Rikers Island’s incarcerated population—miss dozens of mental health appointments before they eventually died. [See: PLN, Aug. 2024, p.18.]

More recently, the BOC reported in June 2025 that guards were “deadlocking” mentally ill detainees in their cells. The report confirmed an allegation lodged in October 2024 by whistleblower Justyna Rzewinski, a former social worker on Rikers Island who said that some mentally ill detainees were “deadlocked” in their cells without medical care for weeks on end. The BOC report did not look backward to confirm any detentions that long, but it said that investigators toured 48 randomly selected housing areas between April 8 and May 13, 2025, finding seven cases in which detainees in special mental health units were involuntarily locked in their cells. Worse, guards had recorded a reason for only three of those seven.

DOC “staff must discontinue the practice of unauthorized ‘deadlocking,’” the BOC declared. “Department leadership must employ different tactics to accomplish the discontinuation of this practice.”

“I am saddened to see that, even six months after my testimony, the NYC Department of Correction continues to unjustly confine individuals, especially those in mental health units, to their cells without documentation or oversight,” Rzewinski told the New York Daily News. Noting that the detainees were released from lockdown only after the BOC discovered them, she added: “Without that intervention, it’s unclear how long they would have remained locked in.”

Guards attempted to offer explanations for deadlocking the detainees that the BOC found. One detainee had lice, they said, which the BOC noted was no justification for isolation. In other cases, guards apparently used isolation to punish misconduct; five of the “deadlocked” detainees tried to assault staff, including three who tossed urine or feces, while another had “engaged in self-gratification” in view of guards. None of those allegations justified isolation, either. 

The BOC asked CHS to report any “deadlocking” that its staffers uncovered. But the medical contractor refused to get “involved in patient allegations regarding security-related concerns.” The DOC was told to root out use of the term “deadlocking” and do a better job of tracking “involuntary lock-ins.”

Battles Over Solitary Confinement, ICE Deportations

The skirmish over “deadlocking” is just one more front that DOC staffers have opened in a long war with the City Council over the use of solitary confinement in the jails. The battle kicked into high gear a decade ago, when Khalif Browder, 22, hanged himself with a bedsheet at his mother’s home just after his release from Rikers Island, where he spent two years in solitary confinement. Becoming suicidal, he made several attempts on his own life while he waited—and waited—to face charges for stealing a backpack when he was 16. When the charges were dropped and he was released, he suffered mentally from those years in isolation.

“Prior to going to jail, I never had any mental illnesses,” he told The New Yorker before he died. “I never tried to hurt myself, I never tried to kill myself, I never had any thoughts like that. I had stressful times prior to going to jail, but not like during jail. That was the worst experience that I ever went through in my whole life.”

In 2016, then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D) banned the use of solitary confinement in the DOC for detainees and prisoners under 22. Then-Pres. Barack Obama (D) did the same in the federal Bureau of Prisons, as PLN reported. In January 2019, the City paid $3.3 million to settle a wrongful death suit filed by Browder’s surviving family members. [See: PLN, Apr. 2019, p.54.]

Surveillance video from Rikers Island captured one 2012 beat-down that Browder suffered from a guard, identified in the suit that was filed after the former detainee’s death as Vincent Grinnage. In 2023, just four years after the City paid that huge settlement, Grinnage was promoted to run the ESU, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 27, 2023, online.]

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the City hard. A shortage of available guards left the jails over-reliant on solitary confinement. As the death toll predictably rose, the BOC stepped in with new rules in 2021 to limit the use of isolation. Most of those rules found their way into a new law passed later that year by the state Assembly, the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act.

By then, De Blasio had issued a 2020 executive order banning the use of solitary on Rikers Island, after trans detainee Layleen Polanco, 27, died of a seizure while isolated in a cell. The City paid another huge settlement for that—$5.9 million—in August 2020, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2020, p.34.] De Blasio quietly delayed implementation of his order, though, as the COVID-19 pandemic progressed in 2021. Adams then vowed to overturn the ban when he took office the following year. 

In response, the City Council voted to ban solitary confinement in the DOC in December 2023. Adams vetoed that bill the following month. But the Council overrode him. Adams issued an emergency order in July 2024 that kept solitary alive in City jails, and the mayor has dutifully extended that order every 30 days since. Council Member Tiffany Cabán (D-Astoria) said that when she was a public defender, clients who ended up in solitary confinement—known as “the box” or “the bing”—were “guaranteed trauma,” despite “evidence and research show[ing] that it does not work and causes immense harm.” As for Adams and his executive order, she said, “We are all less safe because of his actions.”

Adams insisted that solitary confinement “no longer exists” on Rikers Island. But the Legal Aid Society’s Mary Lynne Werlwas called that a semantic game. “DOC policies may have changed, but in practice, DOC still holds people in solitary confinement for 23 or more hours in NIC [the North Infirmary Command] and West Facility, and for 17 hours in RESH,” she said, referring with the last acronym to Enhanced Supervised Housing at the Rose M. Singer Center. Other names for the practice include “restrictive housing” and “de-escalation confinement,” as well as “involuntary protective custody”—the official name for deadlocking.

The Nunez monitoring team reported in July 2024 that detainees in NIC were isolated in small chain-link cages that technically allowed them out of their cells but still deprived them of “adequate” interaction with other people or programming. “These are the abuses that the law was intended to curb,” Werlwas added, “and the city’s refusal to develop strategies to reduce isolation does not constitute an emergency.”

Adams, however, had bigger troubles by that time: A federal corruption investigation was underway. The DOJ indicted him in September 2024 on charges of bribery, fraud and taking illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals. But then Trump won a second term in November 2024, and Adams flew to the President-elect’s Palm Beach home the following month. That meeting did not touch on Adams’s case, he insisted, but the next month Trump was inaugurated, and just another month after that, in February 2025, DOJ prosecutors filed a motion to drop the charges against Adams, eventually leading to dismissal of the case.

It was widely speculated that Adams had offered Trump unfettered access to Rikers Island’s large immigrant population, as the new President ramped up mass deportations. Sure enough, after Trump took office, Adams issued another emergency order suspending portions of the City’s “sanctuary” law signed by De Blasio in 2014. Agents with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) got the green light to set up on Rikers Island, where they could nab any undocumented detainees as they were released. 

Furious City Council members filed suit to stop that plan in April 2025, accusing Adams of making “a corrupt quid pro quo bargain” with Trump—ICE access in exchange for dropping his federal corruption charges. The state Supreme Court for New York County in Manhattan has so far sided with the Council, issuing a temporary restraining order on April 15, 2025, followed by a preliminary injunction on June 12, 2025. See: Council of the City of N.Y. v. Adams, 2025 NY Slip Op 25141 (Sup. Ct.).

Rikers Island Closing Plan
in Jeopardy

The plan to close Rikers Island that the City Council adopted in 2017 provided a 10-year window. By the time it was set to close in 2027, and the last detainee left the jails, the City was supposed to have four new jail facilities in each of its boroughs except Staten Island. With a combined capacity of just 3,000 detainees, the new jail plan was never going to work without a serious commitment to jail alternatives, including diversions to treatment for those suffering from mental illness and substance withdrawal, as well as bail reform to leave many more of those arrested for nonviolent crimes awaiting trial outside of jail—rather than suffering disruptions to their work and home life simply because they can’t afford bail.

In a March 2025 report, the Independent Rikers Commission (IRC) threw cold water on hopes of meeting the 2027 deadline. The City Council had already passed zoning changes that will make it illegal for the jails on Rikers Island to stay open after their scheduled closing. The IRC said that the date should not be changed yet, since it wasn’t impossible to empty the existing jail complex by then. A footnote to its report said that “it might be possible to find temporary swing space to close Rikers once at least three of the [replacement] jails and all the secure hospital beds are open, but before the fourth jail—likely Manhattan—is finished.”

Known as the Lippman Commission because it is chaired by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, the IRC was brought up again in 2023, as the closing deadline appeared increasingly in jeopardy. Its new report recommended exploring more jail alternatives, as well as commandeering 100 or more “secure” beds in Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital to hold mentally ill detainees; Rikers Island was holding at least 127 detainees declared incompetent to stand trial but who were waiting for a treatment bed to open at a state psychiatric hospital, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.33.] 

The IRC report also offered hope that several hundred detainees already convicted of crimes would soon depart for state prisons; the state Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) halted intakes in March 2025, after Marcy Correctional Facility guards were charged with fatally beating a prisoner, and fellow guards went on strike at other prisons around the state, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.9.] 

DOCCS announced in early May 2025 that it would resume intakes, but only 75-100 per week. However, the IRC report made clear that the new jails would not be ready in time to meet the current deadline anyway. The Brooklyn jail, which is furthest along, has a target completion of 2029. The one in the Bronx won’t be ready until 2031. Those in Queens and Manhattan won’t be finished until 2032. The price tag for the four lockups: an eye-popping $13 billion.

Meanwhile, detainees on Rikers Island remain exposed to an environmental disaster. “The smell alone would torture you,” recalled former detainee Candie Hailey-Means. “It smells like sewer, mixed with fertilizer, mixed with death.” Before her 2015 release, she was among those held in long-term solitary confinement, locked in a 6-by-9-foot cell for 23 hours a day. Over more than 27 months, her mental health deteriorated in tandem with the physical privations she suffered: the stench, extreme heat or cold, depending on the season, as well as polluted air. Like many others, she attempted suicide to escape as the summer heat descended. “Imagine being stuck in an elevator for three years and the temperature is [unbearably] hot,” she said.

Like most detainees, she was also awaiting trial, meaning her suffering was inflicted on someone not convicted of a crime and therefore legally protected from punishment. Yet it could have ended worse for her; with only one bridge to get on and off the island, another detainee died after a 2016 suicide attempt while waiting on an ambulance that couldn’t reach the lockup during a snowstorm. Hailey-Means ended up homeless and sleeping on subway trains after her release, but she found it preferable to what she left behind on Rikers Island. 

“See one thing with jail—I couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t say, ‘you know what? I’m out of here,’” she said. “At least, that’s the positive side now; I can leave.”

The jail’s most notorious recent detainee, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, 72, managed to get a transfer from the “hell hole”—as his attorneys called the jail, in the brief they filed complaining that he was left to suffer a “nightmare.” He was moved to a treatment bed at Bellevue Hospital in April 2025 to await retrial on sexual assault charges. But for more than 7,000 others stuck on Rikers Island, that is not an option. Nor is it an option for New York City taxpayers, who are billed a ridiculous $507,000 per year for each detainee. What will it take before they finally see their nightmare end?  

Additional sources: Bolts Magazine, City & State, COBA, Gothamist, The Marshall Project, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Vera Institute of Justice

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login

Related legal cases