In appointing a receiver by another name to run Rikers Island, Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain has rightly assigned the task to an independent outsider with the power to clean up the awful jail, which poses a threat to the safety of detainees and officers alike.
This is the outcome that advocates and federal prosecutors have been calling for to repair the broken Department of Correction.
It’s not a traditional receiver, with the judge instead embracing the hybrid solution of a so-called remediation manager that would be appointed to work alongside DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, working to mitigate the violence and neglect that had Swain recently find the city in contempt of court. Both would run the department, with the sort-of receiver getting the powers needed specifically to address the deficiencies.
We understand the judge’s decision. It is no small matter to take a municipal department entirely out of the hands of the city’s elected civilian government and place it in the hands of one individual who is answerable exclusively to the court. That said, successive municipal governments have had plenty of time to try to address the issues that have been identified over and over by the monitoring team, advocates and others.
The core of what’s going wrong on Rikers has not substantively shifted in the decade-plus that this federal lawsuit case has been ongoing. The contours remain the same: negligent and mismanaged staff fail to prevent frequent incidents of violence in ways that harm both the people incarcerated at the facility and the staff themselves.
There is little accountability for failures in the chain of command, and leadership is often in thrall to political interests, including the powerful correction union.
We wish we shared Swain‘s optimism that maintaining some level of DOC control won’t hinder the pseudo-receiver’s work. Unfortunately, we cannot, at least in part because we don’t believe that the intent and competence of the commissioner is determinative of the department’s ability to turn things around.
No one can ultimately deny that Maginley-Liddie is a more serious and committed manager than predecessor Lou Molina. But, as we have often said, the issue is structural to the department and historically rooted in a way that makes it hard to believe that any individual manager within the longtime departmental culture can get us to where we need to be
The danger here in part is that the lack of clarity about where the quasi receiver’s powers begin and end will generate both confusion and a certain timidity on their part, or the inability to move decisively in the ways that are necessary.
The manager’s proposed powers are already very broad, ranging from hiring to setting policy to participating in contract negotiation to directing the commissioner herself to take specific executive steps.
That is incredibly expansive to the point that it may as well have been a full-fledged receiver. We understand that the principle of maintaining some tether to local control is important, but we are not sure if it’s important enough to introduce the additional friction and confusion that will result from this power-sharing structure.
Only time will tell, and we hope that the judge is prepared to take additional steps in case it ends up not being enough. No more half measures; people entrusted to the city’s supervision are suffering.
