Will COVID-19 Hasten the End of Rikers Island?
By Jem Bartholomew MA ‘20
In late January 1992, a blue and white vessel sailed past New York harbor and into the East River. The barge, almost 200 meters long, was unlike the other ships it passed that day. Instead of ferrying goods, it was fated to enclose men. Up to 800 prisoners would be locked up in the barge’s makeshift cells, built as an overflow for the crowded Rikers Island jail complex in the river between Queens and the Bronx.
At the time, Republican George H. W. Bush was president, prisons were overflowing after the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, and Democrat David Dinkins was sitting as the first African-American mayor of the city. Expanding the capacity of Rikers — and toughening law and order policies — was considered necessary and non-controversial, supported across the party divide.
But a quarter of a century later, a junior aide to Mayor Dinkins at the time, Bill de Blasio, would declare three years into his own term as mayor that the Rikers Island complex should be torn down by 2026, and the aggressive prosecution model it represented should be scrapped. Inmate numbers were to be cut in half and smaller misdemeanors would not be pursued so vigorously through the clogged court system. “Today we made history,” de Blasio said after the City Council approved his closure plans, in October 2019. “The era of mass incarceration is over.”
The changes prefacing the fall of Rikers, however, are more complex than the eloquent speeches of bold actors following their moral conscience. Instead, it’s a story of activists who spent decades shouting into the wind, dogged reporters sifting through stacks of grey paperwork, prestige-hunting attorneys and image-conscious politicians herded into positions they tried to avoid. It’s a story of young black men who suffered years of detention without trial and their determination to fight for justice. And it’s a story — with a deadly coronavirus outbreak now engulfing the island — that could see its ending accelerated.
Today, the majority of inmates at the ten-jail Rikers Island complex — roughly 85% — are men awaiting trial. Opened in 1932, the jail complex has ballooned over almost nine decades, and the average inmate population is around 10,000, with 9,000 staff. Dogged by overcrowding, violence and scandal, activists have been fighting to close Rikers for decades.
In recent years, activist groups such as Shut Down Rikers, Close Rikers and No New Jails have lobbied for the end to mass incarceration — and for investment in educational resources and support for mental health, addiction and homelessness services instead. But campaigns to shut Rikers go back to the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the prison abolitionist ideas of academic and activist Angela Davis. “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings,” she wrote in 1998.
But these calls were not heard in the centers of power. In 1994, the political support for prisons reached its peak with the passing of Democratic President Bill Clinton’s federal crime bill. Earmarking $30 billion in funds, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act multiplied the U.S. prison infrastructure, expanded death sentencing, and included a mandatory “three strikes” life sentence for repeat violent offenders. “It will be used to build prisons to keep 100,000 violent criminals off the street,” Clinton said. Critics say it disproportionately impacted African-American young men, hollowing out communities of color.
Although New York’s crime rate fell during the 2000s, Rikers saw a drip-feed of scandals and rumors of brutality. In 2007, Graham Rayman, a reporter for The Village Voice, revealed that corrections officers were using inmates to enforce discipline, under a scheme referred to as “the program.” In 2008, Rayman reported the story of Steve Morales, who, at age 18, committed suicide due to lax oversight and violent conditions. While court cases followed and reform seemed inevitable, the idea underpinning Rikers — a largescale correctional facility siphoned off from the city — remained strong. When de Blasio ran for mayor, in 2013, it was uncontroversial that Rikers was planning to increase capacity by a further 1,500 beds.
A break came with de Blasio’s candidacy. Running on a progressive ticket, and describing himself as a “democratic socialist,” journalists began holding de Blasio to account for the progressive values he claimed to represent, and activists sensed an opportunity to pressure City Hall into action. His first year as mayor, 2014, was the year that signaled the end for Rikers. In April, de Blasio installed Joseph Ponte as the Department of Correction Commissioner, who, reacting to previous scandals, replaced 12 out of the 14 senior leadership roles at Rikers.
But if City Hall thought reforming Rikers would be an easy job, the scandals did not stop after officials tinkered with personnel. In July, the New York Times published a major investigation, documenting, among other things, that 129 inmates suffered serious injury at the hands of guards in 2013. Hot on its heels, in August a damning federal report from Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, documented how Rikers was routinely trampling on inmates’ constitutional rights. “It is a place where brute force is the first impulse rather than the last resort, a place where verbal insults are repaid with physical injuries, where beatings are routine while accountability is rare,” he wrote. In October, the inmates of Rikers were given a human face, with Jennifer Gonnerman’s profile in the New Yorker of Kalief Browder, who was arrested at age 16 in 2010, and held at Rikers for three years without trial. It sparked a national debate and clamoring calls for reform that de Blasio found it hard to ignore.
In November 2014, the mayor urged a “culture change” at Rikers. The next month, he visited the complex himself, and announced an end to holding 16- and 17-year-old inmates in solitary confinement, as Browder had been. When Browder took his own life in 2015, de Blasio said: “His death shook the whole city and opened everyone’s eyes and made people think twice.” Activist groups, frustrated that City Hall had kept its eyes closed for so long, were emboldened, and now began to proliferate, calling for Rikers’ complete abolition. As Akeen Browder, Kalief’s brother and the founder of Shut Down Rikers, put it in 2018: “‘Reform’ indicates that we have a working system and we just need to make some changes.” He added: “It’s not like we’ve been doing this incarceration for just a few months or even a decade. We’ve been doing [mass incarceration] for more than a century. And it still isn’t working.”
But it wasn’t just activists who sensed the wind was changing. Heads in the legal world began to turn, too. In 2015, in Davis v. Ayala, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited Browder’s case directly when denouncing solitary confinement. In 2016, the conversation reached all the way to the White House, with President Barack Obama writing an Op-Ed in the Washington Post attacking solitary confinement.
Now, with activists, journalists, lawyers and even the president involved in a conversation centering on the brutality of Rikers, de Blasio needed to decide: reform or abolition? Abolition was still risky for the mayor. Many New Yorkers remained supportive of Rikers and did not want smaller jails in their boroughs; and it would be hard to satisfy activist demands for the closing of all prisons. De Blasio risked being politically isolated if he moved to shut down the complex. But by 2017, the cost of inaction was greater than the cost of action, and de Blasio committed to abolishing Rikers within ten years.
In 2020, City Hall, reporters, activists and lawyers are still fighting over how life after Rikers will look. Plans have been drawn up for four or five smaller jails closer to courthouses, which many criticize for its potential to push up the incarceration rate, and others reject out of a “not in my backyard” instinct.
Today, against this backdrop, a new crisis is accelerating at Rikers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Overcrowded conditions, one toilet to every 29 inmates, and a lack of cleaning protocol are brewing a health crisis that could lead to a “mass death,” says Scott Hechinger, a Brooklyn public defender. The facility has reported the explosion of the virus among inmates — with 9.11% of all inmates infected as of April 19 — and the death count is rising fast. “People trapped on Rikers right now are sleeping close enough to reach out and touch the next person,” Hechinger tweeted. Almost 400 people — nonviolent inmates or those with health conditions — are scheduled for release, but activists are pleading for greater action. They see the pandemic as an opportunity to end New York’s mass incarceration chapter faster than 2026, as planned.
At this new juncture, De Blasio faces more tough decisions: does he release hundreds or thousands more inmates, potentially averting a humanitarian crisis and speeding up efforts to close Rikers? Or does he let them await trial, and see justice? If the mayor chooses the former, it’s unclear how he will prevent former inmates spreading COVID-19 across the city, with confirmed Rikers cases currently at 362. But if he doesn’t act, more deaths seem highly likely. For New York City mayors, difficult decisions are hard to avoid. Activists may find that, when it comes to influencing de Blasio, his record suggests whoever shouts the loudest may have the best chance of success.
Jem Bartholomew is a Fulbright scholar and a member of the M.A. Class of 2020 at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
