Now Under Fed Receivership, NYC Rikers Island Jails Still Have No Plan to Improve Reprehensible Conditions, No Closing Date. Death Toll Passes the 2024 Total in Facility Run by Elite Liberals

THIS SNITCH ASS NEGRO AIDING GOVERNMENT CAN’’T GET OUT OF OFFICE FAST ENUFF. PLEASE GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!

From [HERE] With its sixth and seventh detainee deaths of the year coming just minutes apart on June 20, 2025, New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex eclipsed its death toll for all of 2024. Benjamin Kelly, 37, and James Maldonado, 56, were the latest of at least 40 people who have died at the jails—or on their way to the jails, or just after release from the jails—since Mayor Eric Adams (D) took office in January 2022. But that number is suspect; a 2023 analysis by City & State found 120 deaths over the previous eight years, far more than the 68 actually reported by the City’s Department of Correction (DOC). 

As Plato said, however, “death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man.” Mentally ill people incarcerated in Rikers Island’s crumbling structures are “deadlocked” in their cells for extended periods, denied programming and medical care, according to a report by the City’s Board of Correction (BOC), which provides oversight to the DOC. But dysfunction in the DOC is so widespread, according to court documents, that jailers systematically deny prisoners and detainees access to medical appointments and then blame them for not showing up. 

Meanwhile, making good on a long-threatened federal receivership, the federal court for the Southern District of New York has decided to appoint a “remediation manager” to oversee operations at the jail complex, which is slated for closure in 2027. Except that’s not going to happen, either, according to another recent report from an independent commission tasked with carrying out the closure. Replacement of Rikers Island was included in a plan adopted by City lawmakers 10 years ago. But reforms announced then to drastically reduce the number of people in DOC custody have since been rolled back, boosting the jail population from a pandemic low under 4,000 in March 2020 to over 7,000 five years later. 

Most of the about-face has occurred on the watch of Mayor Adams. A former captain in the City’s police department (NYPD), he is being forced to seek re-election in November 2025 as a registered Independent, thanks to Democratic pushback from his reactionary embrace of federal immigration crackdowns since the election of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R). Not coincidentally, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has dropped corruption charges against the mayor, which alleged that he peddled his influence in exchange for bribes paid in luxury travel and cash—some of which he illegally diverted from foreign nationals to his re-election campaign. 

But perhaps the most striking thing about the jail’s crisis is how normal it has become; since the last PLN cover story on Rikers Island 42 months ago, the City Council and Adams are still embroiled in a face off over ending solitary confinement. Although no longer called by that name, the pernicious practice continues to drive suicides in the jail complex, especially suicides of mentally ill detainees. Access to mental health care remains spotty for them, as it does for all those incarcerated on Rikers Island. So does access to other medical care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the disease created a shortage of guards needed for escorts to appointments. But detainees still aren’t getting to their appointments now because those same guards enjoy unlimited time off, leaving the DOC with a bloated salary budget and no one on hand to show for it.

Yet it’s crucial to delve into the details of this dysfunction, in order to understand what must be done to right the ship that is currently sinking into the East River—not only sinking metaphorically but literally sinking; the entire island was once a landfill, and the ground underneath the jail complex is subsiding as all that ancient garbage composts and compacts. The resulting structural degradation and deterioration is why an estimated 79% of weapons confiscated from prisoners and detainees have been fashioned from pieces of buildings that have crumbled and fallen off. The filth and the stench are nearly as hellish as the pervasive cries of mentally ill detainees and those held in prolonged isolation. 

The DOC has long fought release of information. It took the New York Times three years of legal battles to get the court-ordered release of surveillance video of Michael Nieves’ August 2022 death. The mentally ill detainee was awaiting trial in a psychiatric unit at the jail when he managed to cut his jugular vein with a shaving razor. Nieves, 40, had previously cut himself with another shaving razor while held in a secure bed in the City’s Bellevue Hospital, requiring emergency surgery to save his life. This time he wasn’t so lucky, though; as guards stood by and watched, Nieves bled out and died while waiting for emergency responders.

According to Dr. Robert Cohen, who resigned from the BOC as the video was made public in July 2025, “There has reached a level of dysfunction on Rikers Island that is being recognized.” Whether that is just a wish remains to be seen. But Cohen’s larger point is undeniable: “People may need to be separated from society for some period of time, but they shouldn’t be sent to a place where they could die unnecessarily.” [MORE]