US Lawyer Looking for Federal Takeover of NYC’s Troubled Rikers Island Jail Complicated

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal prosecutor mentioned Monday his workplace is looking for to have management of New York Metropolis’s trouble-plagued Rikers Island jail taken away from Mayor Eric Adam’s administration, calling circumstances there a “collective failure with deep roots.”

U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York mentioned Rikers “has been in disaster for years” over a number of mayors’ administrations and leaders of the corrections system and he favors a court-appointed outdoors authority to take cost of the complicated.

“However after eight years of making an attempt each instrument within the toolkit, we can’t wait any longer for substantial progress to materialize,” he mentioned in an announcement, including that his workplace would search to have a court-appointed receivership put in place.

An e mail looking for remark was despatched to the mayor’s press workplace. Adams has resisted the concept of a federal takeover of the system and has mentioned his administration has been taking steps to stabilize Rikers, which was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Williams mentioned his workplace would pursue contempt proceedings in opposition to town after a court-appointed monitor last week filed a report saying town hadn’t met its obligations beneath a sequence of court docket orders pertaining to circumstances inside Rikers.

In that report, the monitor mentioned the “tempo of reform has stagnated” and that jail officers had didn’t report incidents of violence.

In a listening to in June, U.S. District Decide Laura Taylor Swain informed attorneys for town and Rikers detainees to formally discuss a potential structure for a federal receivership, and mentioned she would contemplate it in August.

Advocates for these detained at Rikers have loudly known as for a receivership, citing grim realities such because the deaths of 19 folks final yr, following 16 fatalities the yr earlier than. Six folks have died to this point this yr.

The Authorized Support Society praised Williams’ determination to push for federal oversight saying in an announcement, “Too many lives have been misplaced and broken because of the metropolis’s lack of ability to handle the jails humanely. We look ahead to working collectively to hunt the aid needed to finish this tradition of brutality.”

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