Got yourself a dreaded case of the Mondays? Start your week off right by catching up on last week's episode of the Hell Gate Podcast. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Saturday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped Stanley Richards for one of the toughest jobs in his new administration: ending the endemic violence on Rikers Island while simultaneously shutting the jails on the island down.
Richards, who is currently the CEO of the Fortune Society, a non-profit that assists formerly incarcerated people, is the first Department of Correction Commissioner to have been locked up in the facilities under his purview. In the mid-1980s, Richards spent two-and-a-half years on Rikers Island for robbery charges, then served an additional four-and-a-half years in prison, before being released in 1991.
"I made the decision when I was incarcerated to dedicate my life to helping others realize that they didn’t have to live in a cycle of incarceration,” Richards said last year.
He will inherit an agency that a federal monitor described last month as having "an entrenched culture that opposes and/or resists reform." The results of that resistance have been stark: in 2025, 15 people died in the city's jails system, with 48 deaths total occurring in city custody since 2022.