Bharara’s Unique Idea: Do The Principled Thing

Preet Bharara, the most interesting man in New York government, sees a nexus between corruption on Wall Street and in local politics and the “broken” governance of Rikers Island that he recently asserted has left adolescent inmates with as much to fear from violence at the hands of correction officers as from their fellow prisoners.

Referring to the report he did on conditions in its primary adolescent jail that led him eight weeks earlier to describe Rikers as “a place where brute force is the first impulse rather than the last resort,” Mr. Bharara at a Sept. 30 Crain’s New York breakfast said that there was “a problem of accountability and of culture there that rivals all the problems that I’ve been talking about in other areas as well.”