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Wake-Up Call

Rikers and criminal justice madness

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Almost twice on average each month this year, a Rikers Island detainee has died by suicide or under mysterious circumstances that are sometimes suggestive of official neglect, avoidable accident or human error.

These deaths are unnatural and tragic, even when they're not directly inflicted, but still allowed to happen due to lapse of vigilance, sloppy code enforcement, poor supervisory training, callous indifference, tolerance of prison subculture or ignored disease.

A small percentage of these victims were predators who wrought agony on society and on themselves. But even they should be mourned. 

All human life must be valued, or else we're on a very slippery slope towards invalidating ourselves as moral beings.

Rikers Island is a particularly inhospitable hellhole. But it should not be closed as planned. As property, it is more amenable to rehabilitation than are evidently its administrators. The brick and steel has held up; it's the human operational structure that has collapsed.

Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg started this weird transfer of accountability, punishing buildings, treating them as proxies for management. He padlocked hundreds of schools under the theory that the problems that occurred within their walls were attributable to inanimate infrastructure and unmotivated architecture.

If we relocated district attorneys' offices, would crime go down?

Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, says the 40-acre Rikers prison complex is "past its shelf life.”

Rikers'  isolated, escape-proof location makes perfect sense. The plot to house inmates in residential communities in almost every borough defies logic, is uneconomical, impractical and stokes fear and resentment from communities.

Most importantly, it does nothing to advance the cause of justice for the incarcerated.

Rikers Island is a grim and bleak place. It creates new and aggravates existing dehumanization. It must be radically transformed.

It must become a viable living place for the inmates and also the jaded correction officers who are severely understaffed, exhausted by massive compulsory overtime, and frustrated by leniency towards those who assault them.

Officers are fed up with what they claim is lack of support from the Department of Correction and most politicians, who blame officers' alleged abuse of unlimited sick leave and chronic absenteeism for their own deficiencies.

Rank has its privileges, including perpetually scapegoating subordinates.

Seven years since the start of  federal court-mandated oversight, the DOC has made little progress. This has prompted calls for receivership. Mayor Eric Adams feels that would send a message that "says we can't do our job. We're not surrendering this city to anyone who believes we can't do our job.”

Receivership would  also be a backdoor betrayal of union members, as the receiver would not be legally bound to respect their negotiated contracts.

Apart from anarchists luxuriating in their gated communities who pretend to feel differently, everyone knows that prisons are necessary. Of course, the devil is in the details.

Many of the inmates at Rikers are detainees, not convicted criminals. They are awaiting trial, which means they are still  constitutionally innocent. (The same could be said, while holding our noses, about many of those arrested for the Jan.6th insurrection still awaiting their "day on court" two years later.)

Before the bail reforms, many inmates were at Rikers simply because they had no rich relatives to spring them. But according to the New York Post, however, rape, robbery, burglary and weapons offenses were the alleged crimes of three-quarters of the Rikers pre-trial detainees.

Bail reform was a laudable concept abysmally executed.  Reducing the classification of an outrageous crime does not reduce the anguish or confer  restorative justice, even if it clears the court dockets and thins out the prison population.

In its push to "finally shut down NYC's most notorious jail,” Slate magazine and similar voices almost never express sympathy for the victims of crimes, nor advocate for their right of redress.  Perhaps it's comparing apples and oranges?

Building smaller, more quaint prisons and sprinkling them around the city will not stop the troubles that afflict Rikers. The philosophy and administration of punishment must be updated and made more enlightened: solitary confinement, lockdowns, general standards and protocols, etc.

A formula must be found for doubling-down on surveillance to prevent smuggling of weapons, contraband, gang and individual violence, including suicide, while prohibiting gratuitous invasions of privacy. And there must be job-training and a vast and diligently coordinated effusion of mental-health treatment resources. A ward at Bellevue Hospital, currently under construction, to be used for this purpose is a step in the right direction.

A few months ago, Mayor Adams observed that the number of people then in custody was greater than the combined capacity of all the boroughs' planned new jails. "Those who created a Plan A … obviously didn't think about a Plan B,” he said.

There will be overcrowding and strife, unless we release even more predators on their scouts' honor.

Although we are told that crime levels have descended from outer space height to the mere stratosphere, we know that official numbers are less raw data than cooked books.

The City Council  already voted to forbid the use of Rikers Island  for incarceration beyond 2027. Since they were acting within the scope of their authority and if no appeals are possible, the expedient of closing Rikers is presumably irreversible.

And if the Urban Justice Center gets its way, Rikers will become "a renewable, regenerative and restorative post-carceral future as a green energy hub.”

When Rikers is scrapped or spared, it will be the end of a chapter of the Doomsday Book that New York's criminal justice system has become, but the surrealistic nightmare will accumulate many more pages beyond the index of casualties.

Only reforming the reforms will close the book.

Reclassification of even major violent felonies to enable their "alleged" (perhaps there should be a provision in the law that recognizes degrees of "alleged"?) perpetrators to wreak havoc at sunrise and go clubbing at dusk is madness. 

Forbidding judges to factor a defendant's history when determining whether they would be a danger if released (all other 49 states allow it) is insanity.

Last month, a man was arrested in Washington Heights with 20,000 fentanyl pills in his possession. He was freed without bail. It was not on a technicality. It was not a fluke. That degree of outrage is a daily occurrence.

It is lunacy for criminals to have been arrested a hundred times for the same significant offense and for them to be released without consequence. Tylenol at CVS is more likely to be locked up than a "booster" who robs the store on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the Rite-Aid on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Sunday may be pot-luck or a day of rest.

"Clean Slate" is another complex criminal justice-related issue. Should convicted felons who have completed their sentences have their past criminal pasts hidden from prospective employers and background checkers?

Are some debts to society by their nature unpayable?

The New York State Penal Law defines "hate crimes" and requires that crimes so deemed must be punished more severely than they would otherwise be, all else being equal. "Hate crimes,” according to the law, "tear at the very fabric of free society … send a powerful message of intolerance … intimidate and disrupt entire communities … and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes..."

The penal law is tough and uncompromising and its language is powerful and unarguably on point. It is strict, harsh and unforgiving, as it should be.

But isn't it implicitly redundant to call a random attack with a machete or a shove onto subway tracks a "hate crime"? Could it ever be otherwise? The law assumes that we know precisely what fantasy or impulse triggered the slaughter, as long as it was inter-racial or religious, but that it is unknowable or irrelevant  in intra-racial or religious cases.

The added penalties for "hate crimes" should be extended to crimes where the material facts are identical.

Criminality is an insult to society and Rikers Island is society's stain. Prisons are necessary evils. But wisdom is even more necessary. 

And that's why it is such hard work to uphold justice for both its upholders and its offenders.

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