New Yorkers Keep Dying on Rikers Island. Does Anyone Actually Care?

Carlos Cruz died while locked up on Rikers Island Wednesday evening, four days after 44-year-old Jimmy Avila died in custody on Rikers. A week before that, 29-year-old Ardit Billa died in custody on Rikers; 12 people have died on Rikers so far this year. Forty-five people have died in Rikers since Eric Adams took office. After Cruz's death, Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie issued a statement offering "our deepest sympathies with his loved ones."

New York City jails, the place where people are locked up while they wait for their guilt or innocence to be adjudicated, are mortally dangerous. From long before the current administration, they have been characterized by brutal violence from guards and detainees alike, by unsanitary, unsafe, and dehumanizing conditions, and by medical neglect. Sitting atop the immeasurable iceberg of trauma, injury, disruption and loss is this most visible and undeniable of statistics, that we as New Yorkers operate a machine where lives are snuffed out on the average of once a month. 

Does anyone care? Not particularly, it seems.