Adams Administration Wonders: What If the New Rikers Boss Should Actually Be the Same Old Rikers Boss?
An aerial view of Rikers Island. (USGS / Wikimedia)

Adams Administration Wonders: What If the New Rikers Boss Should Actually Be the Same Old Rikers Boss?

As a federal court contemplates taking Rikers out of City control and appointing a receiver, the Adams administration proposes more of the same.

If you were confronted with the reality that you had caused injury to someone else, and that by your actions or inactions you were continuing to harm them, you might feel a range of emotions: shame, regret, a desire to stop causing the harm, and to make amends for the harm that you have caused. You might want to listen carefully to the people you hurt about the best way to do that.

If you'd been running a dungeon where people were killed, beaten, and denied medical care with such frequency that a federal court imposed a consent judgment forcing you to take steps to bring your operation up to minimum constitutional standards, you might carry yourself with some humility in those court proceedings, especially when, nearly a decade later, your dungeon was even more violent than when you agreed to fix the problem.

You'd do that because you lack the great, swinging, megalithic balls of New York City's elected leaders and their lawyers, the kind of fuck-you-I-dare-you-to-stop-me brazenness that's most commonly associated with sociopathy.

To back up a minute: Almost ten years after the City of New York entered a consent judgment committing it to reduce the unconstitutional levels of violence in its Rikers Island jails, the violence has only gotten worse, and the federal judge overseeing the case has indicated that she's about ready to consider the nuclear option: taking the jails out of the City's control altogether, and appointing a receiver who answers to the court to do what the City is evidently unable or unwilling to do. 

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