Mayor Mamdani is now running the city, but soon he and the Department of Correction will not be running Rikers Island, the troubled jail, as Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain is due to appoint a receiver (Swain says “remediation manager”) to take charge. Bring it on, your honor.
Last week, Rikers Monitor Steve Martin released a report that mostly contends with DOC’s potential implementation of Local Law 42, passed in 2024 by the City Council to place additional constraints on the operations of DOC personnel, especially as they relate to things like use of force and procedures for lock up. Martin laid out what we all know, what has been true about Rikers forever: it’s complicated. Well-intentioned as the law might have been, there are simply no easy fixes.
The problems first identified on Rikers more than a decade ago remain. They wax and wane over the years, but they have never come close to being resolved through successive administrations. Hopefully, that may soon change, not as a result of the city’s efforts necessarily but because of Swain’s selection of a receiver/remediation manager who will have real executive powers to cut through the years of inaction and implement real forms, above and beyond city authority.
This is happening despite perennial objections from the outgoing Adams administration, but its level of success depends at least in part on collaboration from city authorities. Mamdani has an opportunity here to make this difficult process easier by throwing his office’s weight behind the remediation effort and making clear that his administration won’t attempt to interfere with this work.
Mamdani is certainly a man who hopes to have many long-term legacies and one of them could be finally getting the Rikers mess under control, a situation that has eluded multiple predecessors. We do not doubt the mayor’s commitment to addressing the litany of issues that have so long been identified and written about in exhausted detail by Martin’s team and journalists, but we doubt his capability to do so. Rikers is a problem that might really not have a solution rooted in local control, mired as that control is in overlapping political, contractual and labor considerations.
This does put Mamdani in a bit of a bind insofar as he is now tasked with selecting a DOC commissioner who will have to understand and accept that a great deal of the normal authority will instead lie with the court-appointed professional. Current Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie seems like a solid enough pick to continue on the job, just as well as she understands that her role will not be the same as it has been nor as it’s been for commissioners past.
Ultimately, this is all happening in tandem with the effort to close Rikers altogether, which due to delays and procedural obstacles and the logistical challenge of a growing jail population means that the Aug. 31, 2027 closure deadline will not happen. The Rikers closure law must be changed or it will be broken.
Long before then, the island needs to be made safer for detainees and officers. That will be the job of Swain’s receiver and Mamdani’s commissioner working together.
