Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain handing control of Rikers Island to her appointee Nicholas Deml must be respected by Mayor Mamdani and his Department of Correction. Deml, backed up by the judge, needs the executive power to address the many overlapping emergencies on Rikers and she instructed him to get to work immediately. Swain gave Deml and the city just three weeks to come up with a joint logistical plan for Deml to begin carrying out his mission. Good; we have no time to waste.
Deml himself seems like a good man for a colossal undertaking, having recently served as commissioner of Vermont Department of Corrections after a career in the CIA. That experience might be relevant, but Deml should understand that he’s dealing with a different beast here.
Rikers incarcerates some four times what Vermont’s statewide system did, and even a seasoned corrections professional like Swain-appointed Rikers Monitor Steve Martin, who for more than a decade has examined conditions there, seems consistently appalled at the scope and depth of the issues with violence, mismanagement, lack of care and other issues.
Swain seems to have stopped just short of a full receivership out of the calculation that it will be better for everyone in the long term if this takes the form of a collaborative project between the city and Deml, who she is calling a “remediation manager.”
Taking an entire department away from the chain of command of the democratically elected municipal government is of course a big deal, and Swain is likely thinking about not just the immediate future but the DOC post-manager, when the city must maintain constitutional conditions on its own. To this end, it makes sense to bring the city along as a collaborator, even if the manager gets the ultimate say.
Needless to say, this structure would be much more fraught if the DOC has to be brought in kicking and screaming, a situation that would waste everyone’s time and efforts and do nothing to safeguard both the people detained on Rikers and the staff that runs it. That goes for whether it was Mayor Adams or Mayor Cuomo or Mayor Mamdani at City Hall. The mayor must be a good-faith partner in this.
Now, the fledgling Mamdani administration gets an opportunity to demonstrate that it will take a serious and conciliatory approach, understanding that the manager is there solely because the bulk of the evidence — collected the years by Martin and journalists including here at The News — has shown that the city cannot do this on its own.
A first big choice here will be the selection of the correction commissioner. So far, the Adams-appointed Lynelle Maginley-Liddie remains in the role, and she has at least demonstrated some awareness that the city was underwater and that it had to answer for a lack of progress.
Whomever Mamdani picks to run the troubled department, she (or he) must understand that this won’t be a standard commissionership but one in some ways operating under the manager’s authority and be prepared to assist Deml in bringing the department into compliance. We cannot afford jurisdictional brawling or lack of transparency or any of the other characteristics of DOCs past. This is an opportunity for a real legacy of justice, if the city can take it.
