Friday, Federal Monitor Steve Martin will submit his latest report on the situation at the ignominious Rikers Island complex. It will come just over four months after Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain ordered the city to put into practice an action plan to address the consistent threat to the life and safety of staff and detainees.
We know some of what this report will say. It will no doubt mention that, a week earlier, Rikers’ George R. Vierno Center was the site of the 17th death in custody so far this year, as 28-year-old Erick Tavira took his own life and pushed the body count past all of last year’s. It might mention that, as reported last week by Gothamist, fewer than one in five Department of Correction officers had completed a supposedly mandatory annual training in suicide prevention, even as suicides in the jails have skyrocketed.
It might allude to well-supported allegations by the Board of Correction and the Legal Aid Society that DOC staff have tampered with internal records to obfuscate noncompliance with an earlier order by Swain, which had directed the department not to keep detainees at intake for longer than 24 hours.
It may mention that, as reported by the Daily News’ Graham Rayman Sunday, “brown water spews from faucets and shower heads in at least one Rikers Island housing area, detainees say — a condition they blame for rashes and stomach woes.”
In sum, though real progress has been made under Commissioner Louis Molina, he and DOC leadership have proven simply unable to take the steps necessary to bend miserable trend lines that are ruining and ending lives. It wasn’t possible in the prior four months, and it won’t be possible in the next four, nor the four after that.
Decades of mismanagement have too deeply entrenched violence and dysfunction into our own offshore gulag, and it will continue to be a floating human rights catastrophe until an empowered federal receiver can step in and take an ax to a rotten culture and bureaucracy.
