Leaders lockdown progress

On Oct. 23, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Councilwoman Carlina Rivera released a statement announcing the re-appointment of the independent Rikers Commission. The commission will be chaired by former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lipman. Adams stated, “It is clear that Rikers is not serving New Yorkers and continues to undermine public safety in our city.” Rivera, the chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, stated “the time is now to move the city forward to meet our legal requirement to open borough-based jails and close Rikers by 2027.”

Rikers continues to undermine public safety partly because of the laws and policies enacted by the City Council that are counterproductive to jail safety and inconsistent with successful jail management.

Further, Rivera wants to open borough-based jails, yet in October the city closed the Vernon C. Bain Center in the Bronx, its safest jail, with only eight of the 291 reported slashings and no detainee deaths in 2023. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who also called for borough-based jails and blamed jail problems on “Rikers” kept the Queens House of Detention, a borough jail, closed for the entire eight years of his mayoralty.

Politicians’ mantra that borough-based jails are the deus ex machina is nothing more than a fig leaf to cover the embarrassment of their abject failure to keep correction officers and incarcerated persons safe for the last nine years.

Marc Bullaro

The writer is a retired NYC DOC assistant deputy warden

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