“The Mayor Is Not in Charge of the Jails Anymore”

Ten years after Kalief Browder’s death by suicide, his story lingers as a reminder of both the horrors of New York City’s Rikers Island and the cascading consequences of solitary confinement. At 17 years old, Browder was sent to the Rikers Island jail complex, where he was held for three years pending trial—nearly two of which he spent in isolation. His death galvanized a coalition of formerly incarcerated people and other advocates, which successfully lobbied the city to officially end the use of solitary confinement for people 21 and under. In 2021, in response to the death of Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman held in solitary at Rikers, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio formally ended solitary more widely as one of his last acts in office. In recent years, officials have claimed that the practice is no longer employed at Rikers. In 2022, then-Department of Correction commissioner Louis Molina told the New York City Council that solitary confinement “does not exist” in the city’s jails.

But despite these reforms, the practice of isolating incarcerated people remains stubbornly persistent on Rikers Island. “Whatever name you want to put it by, it’s still solitary confinement,” Victor Pate, a survivor of solitary at Rikers who leads the Coalition for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, said emphatically. 

New York Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander visited Rikers twice in 2023, and he agrees. “It would put me over the edge, it would put anybody over the edge,” he told Bolts. “It looks like torture—it is torture.”

The latest saga involves an active and ongoing effort by current Mayor Eric Adams to obstruct a near-total ban on solitary passed overwhelmingly by New York’s city council last year. The council responded with a lawsuit that’s now working its way through state court. The city’s mayoral election this November was poised to break this stalemate: Adams faces a steep uphill battle to reelection, making it likely that the city will soon have a new mayor to oversee the city’s jails and deal with New York’s powerful prison guard unions. Many of Adams’ challengers have been more supportive of solitary reform than he has. 

But a federal judge this month ordered Rikers into receivership, meaning that a “remediation manager” appointed by the judge will soon take control of the city’s lock-ups. This has abruptly shifted the balance of power. “At the end of the day, the mayor is not in charge of the jails anymore,” Sandy Nurse, a New York City council member who chairs its criminal justice committee, told Bolts. 

The receivership wasn’t imposed because of solitary confinement—it has to do with violence and use of force—but will almost certainly affect how the practice is used on Rikers: The remediation manager, who has yet to be selected, will have broad authority to restructure the system, including overriding union contracts and bypassing state and local laws, and organizers and city officials alike say they’re uncertain how this will affect their ongoing efforts to end isolated confinement. 

In the past decade, organizing campaigns, policy overhauls, changes of leadership, and laws have all ultimately failed to meaningfully change the status quo in the city’s jails. Now, federal control could be the thing that finally upends it—or it could create yet another roadblock in the long fight to end solitary confinement at Rikers Island.

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Anisah Sabur spent time in solitary on Rikers back in the early 1980s, where she still recalls being forced to inhale toxic fumes after guards refused to release her and others from their isolation cells when another prisoner lit their mattress on fire. Around 2012, Sabur got involved in a campaign to end isolated confinement throughout New York State, hoping to draw attention to the particular harms that women suffer under such conditions. One woman she knew was forced to give birth in solitary; one of her twins died. Another spent a thousand days in solitary at Rikers—even longer than Browder’s ordeal. “Every day she talks about committing suicide,” Sabur told Bolts.

In 2021, the same year de Blasio, Adams’ predecessor, officially ended solitary at Rikers, the coalition’s years of organizing culminated in a landmark victory: the New York state legislature passed the HALT Act, intended to end the use of long-term solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails. Several lawmakers who are also mayoral candidates this spring, Zohran Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, and Jessica Ramos, were vocal supporters of the bill at the time; then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, another mayoral contender, signed it into law.

On the ground at Rikers, though, little changed. When Lander visited in 2023, he observed people held in what the system terms “involuntary protective custody.” “What it is, is solitary,” he told Bolts. “The vast majority of the day, you are just in that tiny 6-by-6 dark space with no contact with anybody else.”

New York’s borough-specific public defender organizations have reported various forms of solitary confinement still in effect on the island, from medical isolation to the standard restrictive housing designed to punish incarcerated people for infractions. Last October, a former clinical supervisor and associate director of mental health at Rikers, Justyna Rzewinski, testified before the city’s Board of Corrections that she had observed the widespread use of “deadlocking,” or guards locking individuals with mental health needs inside their cells for days, weeks, or even months at a time, cutting off access to their medication and frequently causing their mental state to deteriorate even further. When we spoke, Rzewinski recalled a call she made to her mother during a break in her workday where the noise of people’s distress was so piercing that it was clearly audible on the other end of the line. (A city watchdog agency is currently investigating Rzewinski’s claims. In their amicus brief supporting the council’s lawsuit against Adams, the public defender organizations also detailed clients’ experience with deadlocking.)

New York’s jails are run not by a sheriff but by the Department of Correction, whose commissioner ultimately answers to the mayor. In response to a request for comment, a department spokesperson told Bolts that “the Department does not practice solitary confinement as constitutionally defined and has not since 2019.” When asked for clarification regarding which constitution was being referenced, another spokesperson then invoked the UN’s definition of solitary confinement. She did not respond to a request for clarification regarding which policy change in 2019 ended solitary confinement.

The guards’ unions, meanwhile, are a formidable political force in their own right. “Quite frankly, the political situation is: mayors don’t want to be in conflict with the correction officers union,” Nurse said. 

Adams, who spent most of his career in the NYPD before entering politics, and eventually becoming mayor in early 2022, has long supported preserving solitary confinement as a tool to address violence within carceral facilities, in keeping with the correctional officer unions’ stance on solitary. That put him on a collision course with his more progressive city council, which had been exploring a ban on solitary confinement since at least 2020, well before Adams took office.

In December 2023, over the objections of the mayor and the guards’ unions, the city council passed Local Law 42, which set out a notably broad definition of solitary confinement, essentially banned the practice with some limited, clear-cut exceptions, and created more due process for incarcerated people to challenge punitive restrictive housing. “When formerly incarcerated New Yorkers eventually return to their communities, the lasting trauma of solitary confinement follows them home, and affects us all as neighbors and members of a shared community,” Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams (no relation to the mayor) said in a statement.

The following month, Mayor Adams vetoed the bill. The council overrode him, 42-9, but in July 2024, the day Local Law 42 was supposed to go live, he took the unprecedented step of issuing two executive orders declaring a state of emergency in order to prevent it from taking effect.

The mayor initially said his orders were temporary, but he has continued to extend them each week for 10 months now. 

In the meantime, solitary confinement continues to morph and evolve at Rikers: In February, the city quietly debuted a new “special management unit” that only permits 7 hours of out-of-cell time—in line with the statewide HALT act requirements, but just half what Local Law 42 requires.

“I do not anticipate Local Law 42 being enacted at all for the rest of the year, and certainly not while we have Mayor Adams in this position,” Nurse said. When the city council sued Adams, they argued that he lacks the power to “usurp” the council’s policymaking authority: “Losing a policy debate with the Council is not an emergency.” 

A spokesperson for the mayor reiterated his opposition to Local Law 42, telling Bolts: “We will never support any law that compromises the safety of our staff or the people in our custody, which is exactly what Local Law 42 would do—and the federal monitor agrees.”

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Since 2015, Rikers has been monitored by a federal judge as the result of a settlement in a lawsuit, Nuñez, that sought to address violence and use of force in the city’s jails. In early May, amidst mounting evidence that conditions at Rikers were backsliding after nearly ten years under this arrangement, the judge, Laura Taylor Swain, took the nuclear option and ordered Rikers under full federal control—only the tenth time this has happened nationwide since 1974, according to the New York Times. “The use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015,” Swain’s order stated. In the coming months, the city’s jail system will be given over to a “remediation manager,” akin to a receiver, who will enjoy broad power to remake the system and who will report to Swain.

Advocates for ending solitary confinement at Rikers have been generally supportive of a federal takeover, owing to their pessimism that positive change can occur while the city’s Department of Correction remains in charge. “It’s a good first step in terms of attempting to turn around the dysfunctionality of Rikers Island,” Pate told me. Lander, who has been a vocal proponent of receivership, also emphasized that a remediation manager will not be bound by the correctional officers’ union contract (though there is some confusion about the extent of this power). Nurse emphasized how that change could disrupt an existing dynamic where the DOC commissioner is beholden to the powerful correctional officers’ unions. “The political challenges when you have that union involved creates real friction and inability to move forward,” she said. (The union did not respond to a request for comment). 

But the same broad powers that could permit the remediation manager to sideline the unions also empower them to petition the judge to bypass state and local laws if they conflict with the scope of their duties. In February, in response to a request from Mayor Adams and the DOC commissioner, the federal monitoring team published a report that took issue with Local Law 42’s broad definition of solitary and argued that certain provisions of the law, if implemented, would “only exacerbate the already dangerous conditions.” The report stopped short of concluding that Local Law 42 should never be enacted, saying that matter should be deferred until the judge made a decision about the federal receivership, and offering to come up with a list of recommendations for how to improve the “problematic” provisions of Local Law 42 within 30 days of that decision, or by mid-June. 

Sabur thinks the report’s conclusions were shortsighted. “They should attempt to implement some of the provisions of the law before they say the law can’t work,” she said. But now, Nurse acknowledged, “It’s up in the air in terms of what parts of Local Law 42 can be enacted under the remediation manager.” Still, she said, “the council stands behind Local Law 42 and continues to push for it to be implemented.”

“I’m hoping that the remediation manager recognizes solitary confinement as an international taboo… and as a practice we should eliminate in our city jails, in all of its various forms,” Nurse added.

The ability of the remediation manager to bypass existing law worries Pate—“to me, it’s like a dictatorship – you’re not answerable to anybody,” he said—but he hopes whoever ends up in the position will include stakeholders like the Coalition for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement and be “willing enough and open enough to at least give [Local Law 42] a try before you make a decision.”

“This is a fight that we must continue,” Sabur said. “We cannot just let them come in and say, ‘the court said it can’t be done, so we won’t do it.’”

In 2019, de Blasio joined with the city council to commit to close Rikers entirely and replace the complex with four borough-based jails by an original deadline of 2026, which the city later pushed to 2027. But even the extended timeline is contingent on a successful reduction of the city’s incarcerated population, and the NYPD has arrested more and more people each year since Adams became mayor. State court backlogs are also causing the headcount at Rikers to soar. In March, the number of people jailed on the island surpassed 7,000, the highest headcount since 2019. Meanwhile, construction on the four new jails is behind schedule.

In his capacity as mayor, Adams is tasked with overseeing this plan, but the New York Daily News reported that he is lately questioning whether to shutter the complex at all. (A spokesperson for the mayor disputed the Daily News’s reporting and added, “While we have always supported the closure of Rikers, we have been clear that we can’t be so idealistic that we’re not realistic about the true impacts a 2027 closure could have on our city’s public safety.”) Adams would need the council’s approval to alter the law mandating closure, and Nurse told the paper in no uncertain terms that any attempt to interfere with the timeline would be met with legal action). 

Almost every other candidate, however, has reaffirmed their desire to see Rikers closed. Cuomo, who remains the frontrunner, has said that he supports closing Rikers in theory but that it won’t happen by 2027.

Cuomo’s campaign did not respond to Bolts’ questions on Rikers and the use of solitary, nor did those of Adrienne Adams, Mamdani, Ramos, or Scott Stringer, all of whom will face off in the June 24 Democratic primary. Myrie’s campaign shared a written statement, saying Myrie would “work with the Remediation Manager and City Council to close Rikers as quickly as possible, transition to borough-based jail systems, and ensure the safety of staff and inmates.”

The federal takeover of Rikers has thrown closure into even further doubt, since the remediation manager would have the power to override the legally mandated timeline. “The law to close Rikers Island is still in effect until negotiated further,” Nurse said. “It’s still what we need to be moving towards.”

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To Sabur, Pate, and the activists who have worked for years to end solitary confinement in New York, the current moment feels precarious—a moment where real change could happen, but also one that could undermine the legislation they’ve worked hard to pass. Beyond the federal takeover of Rikers in New York City, solitary reform at the state level is also in jeopardy. 

The HALT Act was considered a model bill, but full implementation has proved elusive. “From its inception, the department pushed back,” Sabur told Bolts. “They did not want to give people the out-of-cell time. They did not want to give people access to recreation. They did not want to give people access to education or programming or services.”

Then, on Dec. 9, the same day the city council filed its lawsuit, 10 state prison employees brutally beat an incarcerated black man named Robert Brooks, who died of his wounds the following day. Body camera footage of the attack provoked widespread outrage. In February, as whispers of criminal indictments against the employees spread, correctional officers went on a wildcat strike. One of their biggest demands: repealing the HALT act.

At least nine prisoners died during the three weeks that guards refused to work, including another black man, a 22-year-old named Messiah Nantwi, who was beaten to death by prison employees on March 1. As with Brooks, 10 people were charged in connection with his killing. The strike ultimately ended when New York Governor Kathy Hochul struck a deal with the guards that froze some provisions of HALT for 90 days, until June. But just this week, a group of 55 state lawmakers sent a letter to the state prison commissioner alleging much wider violations of the HALT act. 

As the budget cycle wrapped up in Albany in May, Senator Julia Salazar, who chairs the New York Senate’s Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Correction, criticized Hochul and fellow legislators for failing to include the “serious reforms to New York’s abusive and flawed prison system” that they had promised in the wake of Brooks’ and Nantwi’s violent deaths. But as the legislative session continues, some lawmakers have proposed repealing HALT entirely, and Sabur worries that the prison guards’ union and the state department of corrections will try to roll it back further. (Neither the union nor the department responded to a request for comment). 

“You haven’t even really tried to implement any of the pieces that would actually help to reduce violence, save lives, keep people safe, keep the staff safe,” she said. “You’d rather just continue this violent process so that people can continue to die.”