No more chances at Rikers: Gradual improvement not enough when lives are at stake

We commend City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Comptroller Brad Lander for their unannounced visit to the great shame off the coast of Queens: Rikers Island.

As has been made clear by the Department of Correction’s years of dodges and obfuscations, including the recent stunt of touting dropping sick leave numbers without noting that the overall staffing levels remain the same, it’s clear that the best way to understand the crisis is through one’s own eyes and ears.

While the trio acknowledged that conditions overall seem to have improved from the absolute horrors that the island became notorious for, that’s a low bar to clear, and there is plenty of violence that the still occurs away from the gaze of city electeds (and, all too often, correction officers themselves, who seem to be deployed in a way that leaves swaths of the detention center unmonitored).

The officials also described seeing up close the lack of medical care that has become a hallmark of the facility, with detainees complaining of not receiving medications and consistently missing appointments. Lander’s recently unveiled Rikers dashboard, a boon for transparency at Rikers, shows thousands of appointments being missed a month, including about 12,000 between March and June of this year classified under the nebulous reasoning of “other.” It’s easy to call such numbers unacceptable, but far too little is being done to render them otherwise.

DOC officials must also explain the exact reasons that someone might be taking into so-called involuntary protective custody. According to the visiting group, for several people who were in this type of confinement, those in charge could not adequately explain the criteria under which they had to be separated out. It’s understandable that jail overseers might need to remove especially dangerous inmates from the general population, but it must clearly articulate why that’s happening when it happens.

All in all, what the mounting evidence makes clear is that the city doesn’t have a handle on Rikers. Bring on a federal receiver.