In the early morning of December 7, Rikers detainee Aramis Furse was found “unwell” in his cell by an officer. Less than 90 minutes after being transported from the facility to a hospital in Queens, he was pronounced dead. Furse was the 14th person to die in the custody of the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2025. Another Rikers inmate had died in custody less than a month earlier.
“The safety of everyone in our care is always our foremost concern,” said Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, NYC Correction Commissioner, in a news release regarding Furse’s death. She added that the Department is “mourning the tragic death” of Furse and will fully investigate the event.
The announcement of Furse’s death sparked outrage among prison reform advocates who have long been calling for conditions at Rikers to be improved until the facility can be shuttered.
Inmates at Rikers “have suffered immense violence, medical neglect and preventable deaths,” said Yonah Zeitz, Advocacy Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, an organization working to build community power and win systemic change.
The organization is urging Governor Kathy Hochul to sign legislation that would overhaul the State Commission of Corrections (SCOC), the agency responsible for overseeing New York state correctional facilities, including Rikers. After reviewing more than 200 SCOC inspection reports, news outlet New York Focus found that major problems went unresolved for years, contributing to violence and deaths in correctional facilities. Although the agency released a report in 2018 labeling Rikers the worst jail in the state, it has taken no action to intervene as conditions have continued to deteriorate.
The Katal Center is also campaigning for the city to continue on the path toward closing Rikers, which Zeitz said the Adams administration had “abandoned.”
Introducing the city’s planned borough-based jails is “one step in terms of improving the culture that we have behind bars,” said Alana Sivin, director of the Greater Justice New York program at the Vera Institute of Justice, a policy organization committed to ending overcriminalization and mass incarceration. The new facilities will feature increased access to medical and mental health care, and smaller units will allow for better monitoring. Sivin added that “as long as we have our jail system as it is right now, that’s not a system that treats people with dignity.”
Medical neglect at Rikers has been documented for years. City records show that during April 2022 alone, people detained on Rikers Island missed nearly 12,000 medical appointments. A state judge ordered the New York City Department of Corrections to pay fines to inmates who had been deprived of medical care. The ruling was called a “critical step toward holding the City accountable for its unwillingness to ensure the health and safety of people incarcerated in its jails” in a joint statement from the Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, and Milbank LLP, the firms that brought the lawsuit.
Following Furse’s death, the Legal Aid Society and Brooklyn Defenders emphasized that the DOC has proven ill-equipped to manage conditions on Rikers Island.
In May 2025, state judge Laura Taylor Swain announced she would appoint an independent remediation manager to work alongside the DOC Commissioner.
“Neither court orders nor the Monitor’s interventions are sufficient to push the DOC toward compliance,” Swain said.
Although a remediation manager has not yet been named, Sivin said she hopes the appointee will recognize that conditions within the DOC cannot improve while Rikers remains open. She also expressed hope that mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s administration will maintain a close working relationship with the manager, reduce the jail population by investing in alternatives to pretrial detention, and accelerate construction of the borough-based jails.
Furse’s family told News 12 that they were not notified when he was transported to the hospital and only learned of his death after seeing it reported in the news. They said they had been trying to enroll him in a drug treatment program and described him as otherwise healthy, soft-spoken, and respectful. Furse was arrested in early 2025 and was scheduled to appear in court the week of his death.
“Even though the conditions surrounding him,” Furse’s father said, “he was very optimistic.”