january3–16, 2022 | newyork 152021 began with Rikers Island in a miserable state,
with every indication that conditions would soon get much
worse. covid was spiking. The staff was depleted, and the jail
was getting more crowded. In January, its population rose above
5,000—an increase of more than 25 percent from the spring of
- After nearly two years without a suicide at the facility, a
man hanged himself before the month was out. A gruesome
incident followed in early March, then anothersuicide,thenan
overdose. The people incarcerated at Rikerscontinuedtodieat
such a steady rate that the agency charged with investigating
deaths in custody couldn’t keep up.
Rikers is a complex of jails, not a prison. A small number of
peopleareservingshort sentencesformisdemeanorsorparole
violations, but the vast majority are
waiting for trial. Many are there because
they can’t make bail. Ninety percentare
Black or brown. Their alleged offenses
range from graffiti and shopliftingto
rape and murder. They are innocent
until proven guilty, though noone
treats them that way. The city spendsan
annual $550,000 per incarceratedper-
son, compared with $28,000 perstu-
dent in its public schools, for conditions
that a court-ordered monitor described
as “rife with violence and disorder.”
On March 17, an officer namedTimo-
thy Hodges testified to the Boardof
Correction, the body that overseesRik-
ers, that the jail was facing a personnel
crisis and could not provide a basicstan-
dard of care. “We’re trying to pointout
to upper management and to additional
people like you that we’re doing ourbest
and we’re trying to make this work,”saidHodges.Butthestaff
shortages, he predicted, would leadtochaos.
In May, officials were forced tolockdowntheisland’s largest
jail, the Anna M. Kross Center, whichhousesthosewithmen-
tal illness, because too many postswereunmanned.Laterthat
month, the Department of Correctioncommissionerresigned
hours before a federal monitor assignedtooverseeRikersissued
a scathing report. Men were sleeping onthefloorofintake cells
and defecating in plastic bags. Violencewasrife,inflictedby
inmates and guards alike. Emergency“probeteams,” withoffi-
cers dressed in riot gear and wielding batonsandpepperspray,
regularly burst in to suppress disturbances.Bangingtheirheads
against walls, slashing their wrists, attemptingsuicide—detain-
ees were harming themselves at the highest rate in fiveyears.
In July, the correction-officers union sued the city over
working conditions. Officers told reporters they feared the
place; more than 90 percent of the staff at Rikers are people
of color, and nearly half are women, who endureharass-
ment and assault. “We feel like we’re the forgotten souls,”
union president Benny Boscio Jr. said. More than 1,
correction officers had resigned in the previous two years.
Through the summer, crime and fear of crime were rising,
prosecutors were pushing for lockups, and Rikers detainees
kept dying. On any given day, nearly one-third of the staff were
out sick, unable to work with detainees because of injury, or
simply awol. In early September, the jail system’s chief medi-
cal officer sent a bracing letter to the City Council. “While some
might ascribe recent deaths ... to long-standing dysfunction of
Rikers Island, it represents a new and worsening emergency
that has developed over the course of the last year,” Ross Mac-
Donald wrote. Jail conditions had “meaningfully contributed”
to the deaths, he said. In his opinion, the city could no longer
keepitsstafforthepeopleinitscustodysafe.
There were, toward the end of the year,
a few signs of progress. Governor Kathy
Hochul signed the Less Is More Act,
authorizing the release of 191 detainees
with technical parole violations. The Rik-
ers staffing crisis began to ease. “I’m not
popping a Champagne cork,” said the
new commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi,
on December 1. But things were “bend-
ing in the right direction as the popula-
tion declines.”
On January 1, Rikers and its problems
will be inherited by the new mayor. Eric
Adams has called the complex a “national
embarrassment” and a “stain on our city.”
He has signed on to a plan to close Rikers
by 2027 and replace it with smaller jails
in each borough and said he will restore
rehabilitative programming in the mean-
time. He has also promised to bring back
solitary confinement, despite the opposi-
tionof 220 advocacy organizations, 74 state lawmakers, and all
12 ofthecity’sDemocratic congressional representatives.
Confrontingtheomicron variant will surely be Adams’s first
orderofbusiness.After hovering around 1 percent for months,
thecovid-positivity rate among detainees shot up to 17 percent
onDecember21.That means an end to in-person visits, cur-
tailedprogramming,and, likely, more staffing shortages. Things
willgetworsebefore they get better.
Inall, 15 people died at or shortly after leaving Rikers in
2021.(Another man in custody died before he could be sent to
theisland.His name was Anthony Scott.) They are, of course,
morethanstatistics or symbols of a broken system, and we
spentthelast two months of the year talking to family, friends,
attorneys, city officials, correctional staff, doctors, and incar-
cerated men—some 75 interviews in all—to learn their stories.
These are their lives—and how they came to an end.(To read about William Brown, whose death was announced
by the Department of Correction as this issue of the magazine was
closing, visit nymag.com.)BY BLISS BROYARD
AND
LISA RIORDAN
SEVILLEFi fteen peopleat Rikersdied in 2021.These aret h e i r s t o r i e s.