When you stick a needle in your eye, the immediate need is to stop the blood and eyeball goo from gushing out.* But once you’ve stopped the bleeding, you need to give some thought to not sticking a needle in your eye anymore. The problem isn’t that needles are sharp, or needles can pierce eyes, or eyes are filled with goo. The problem is that you stuck a needle in your eye.
Rikers Island is an eyeball after the needle’s been stuck in it. Former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman recounts the goo.
Fourteen people incarcerated in the New York City jail system have died since December 2020, at least six apparently by suicide. Overflowing toilets and mold plague the jails. A federal court-appointed monitor has issued increasingly scathing reports outlining profound mismanagement and rampant violence.
Staffing shortages compound these problems. As of early October, around 30 percent of New York City correction officers were unavailable to work with incarcerated people. The officers who did show up were sometimes pressed into double or triple shifts.
Some housing units go many hours without any officer inside. Those incarcerated at Rikers, New York City’s main jail complex, frequently go without the most basic of services — medical appointments, court dates, showers, family visits, religious services and more. The jails are awash in weapons, mostly metal and plastic shanks manufactured from the crumbling buildings and fixtures themselves. There is virtually no staff available to routinely search for and confiscate them.
90 percent of the human beings subjected to the appalling conditions at Rikers are there pretrial, many because they cannot afford bail. Almost 1,600 have been waiting for a trial for over a year. Almost 700 have been waiting for more than two. Languishing cases can drive up both the current epidemic of jail violence and recidivism.
Gee whiz, Rikers is a shithole and its problems are outrageous, massive and, as Judge Lippman calls them, “morally unacceptable.” But here’s the part that went unsaid, as these are chalked up to pop excuses of the pandemic and social justice: These were and are the same problems we knew with absolute certainty were happening and were going to happen, and were going to get worse, for decades, including the time when Lippman was still the chief judge and could have, perhaps, actually done something useful.
Rikers isn’t falling down because somebody went in there in the middle of night and pulled the plaster off the walls. It’s falling down because it’s been neglected for decades. It’s falling down because you shoved thousands where hundreds were as many bodies as it could take.
And that there were thousand isn’t because space aliens showed up at night with new defendants to warehouse, but because judges were too scared of seeing their face on the cover of the New York Post as “Worst Judge in New York” for releasing some defendant on his own recognizance when the ADA demanded a zillion dollars bail for a homeless person and he committed some heinous crime after the judge cut him loose.
Judge Lippman rightly emphasizes the mentally ill in Rikers, but wants to take them off the Rock put them in imaginary facilities where they can be treated and ride unicorns. But he’s old enough to remember when Willowbrook was in the news, and when the mentally ill asserted their right to not be locked away in asylums or forced to take psychotropic medications against their will. And so they ended up in cardboard boxes with needles in their arms and, when they needed money for a fix, they bopped some sweet old lady on the head. Hard. And Rikers became their new home.
Maybe it would be better in Rikers if there was an occasional guard to protect the weaker from the stronger and their shanks, but staffing is so low that they’re on their own. At least they won’t be put to the gladiator battles as they were when the joint was fully staffed. So why not fire the guards who fail to show up for work, since you kind of need them in a jail with bad dudes who do bad dude stuff?
You can’t fire the guards, of course, because they’re union. Not that public sector unions aren’t an inherent untenable travesty, but the mantra of “union good” makes it impossible to admit that you can’t run a jail with screws, and now there’s nothing you can do about it.
And then there are the pandemic delays, one, even two (!!!) years. Has everyone forgotten about the three years Kalief Browder spent on the Rock before his case was dismissed, long before the pandemic was a twinkle in Andy Cuomo’s eye? There were always ridiculously long delays, and judges let it happen as prosecutors always had a one-day excuse that lasted six months.
Yes, what’s happening at Rikers Island is morally unacceptable, but it’s the product of years of sad tears, bad choices and judicial bullshit that was destined to eventually collapse into this dangerous and untenable situation. It’s not as if I hadn’t been saying this for years, not because I’m so damn smart but because I refuse to hide behind excuses to deny the obvious and wrap it up in a pretty pink bow of bullshit excuses.
The morally unacceptable and life-threatening crisis on Rikers Island has crystallized the need to close its long-dysfunctional jails permanently. But until they are shuttered, we need to enact safe, pragmatic and sensible strategies to bring the incarcerated population down to a level that the Department of Correction can realistically handle.
At the moment, Judge Lippman is right that we need to stop the bleeding, the eyeball goo from spilling all over those pristine judicial robes. Here’s a pragmatic “strategy” that didn’t make Judge Lippman’s cut and would fix an awful lot of the problem: Release every defendant held on less than $5000 bail. Some will go out and kill somebody, but most will return to court and get their 20 hours of community service and move on. All it takes is judges willing to take a chance and honor the presumption of innocence. And stop kissing baby prosecutor butts.
But if we don’t stop sticking needles in our eyes, we’ll be right back to the same problems. Building new jails to neglect, filled with union guards who don’t show up for work, and stuffed with defendants who need therapy we can’t provide, isn’t going to fix anything, even if we can kick the can down the road until it becomes the next former chief judge’s problem.
*Eyeball goo is a highly technical medical term. Don’t try this at home.
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