Rikers Island is a horrible place to die, and this year, two New Yorkers have already lost their lives there. Barry Cozart, 39, died on March 25, followed shortly by 49-year-old John Price, who died on Sunday. Cozart and Price are the first people to die while being held on Rikers during the Mamdani administration, and under new Department of Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards, the only DOC commissioner to have firsthand experience of being held on Rikers.
But if the pattern of the last few years holds, Cozart and Price will not be the last. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, 15 people died on or immediately after release from Rikers in 2025, four in 2024, nine in 2023, and 17 in 2022.
“While we do not yet know the cause of death, too many have died on Rikers Island for far too long. Rikers must close, and we will pursue every avenue to do so as quickly as possible,” Mamdani wrote on X on Wednesday. “The Mamdani administration is committed to closing Rikers Island and is moving full steam ahead to replace it with borough-based jails,” Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, told Hell Gate. “These new facilities, already under construction, are key to building a smaller, more humane system—one that prioritizes care, safety, and dignity. It means creating
conditions where people are treated as human beings, not forgotten, and where they remain connected to their families, their lawyers, and their communities.”
But the mayor did not promise to hit the legal benchmark that the City Council mandated back in 2019: closing Rikers Island by August 2027 and replacing it with four borough-based jails, to be built by 2026. The new DOC commissioner—who immediately prior to his appointment to the Mamdani administration worked as the CEO of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that connects formerly incarcerated people with job opportunities—expressed similar condolences, without making concrete promises about prison reform or shutting Rikers down. “The Department mourns the loss of an individual who passed away in our care,” Commissioner Richards said in a statement. “The safety, support, and well-being of every person entrusted to us are of the highest importance.” (The commissioner did not immediately respond to requests for further comment from Hell Gate.)
In January, after years of bleak and depressing reports from a federal monitor and more than a decade of grueling legal back and forth, Rikers Island officially came under the control of “remediation manager” Nicholas Deml, whom a federal judge appointed to take charge of finally reigning in the violence in the jail complex, as part of a 2015 City settlement in a federal lawsuit about the rampant and systemic abuse taking place there.
But advocates say that there are concrete steps the mayor and his DOC commissioner can and should be taking to shut down Rikers and prevent more deaths, as they work with Deml and the federal monitor who continues to watch over the jail. Namely: doing whatever it takes to reduce the number of people being held on Rikers Island.
“To prevent more deaths, we have to get the number of people in jail down. DOC is under much better leadership now, but that doesn’t mean that every officer immediately starts operating with a real sense of responsibility for the people in their care, and it also doesn’t erase the problems that come from operating out of crumbling buildings on an isolated island,” Darren Mack, codirector of Freedom Agenda, told Hell Gate. “We know because we’ve seen it before that when the mayor and City Hall put a real focus on convening criminal legal system partners and actively working to utilize the diversion opportunities our City has, we can move quickly to bring down the number of people in jail, even while we keep working to expand community-based alternatives.”
What could measures from the mayor to reduce the jail population look like? For one thing, the Mamdani administration could use its influence at district attorneys’ offices to decrease the number of New Yorkers being held on Rikers Island, per a Freedom Agenda spokesperson: “They are technically independent offices but they are funded by the City, and if City Hall is telling them they want to see them to stop requesting
outrageous bail amounts and consent to ROR and/or alternate release programs that are evidence-based, it will have an impact.”
Yonah Zeitz, the advocacy director for the Katal Center of Equity, Health, and Justice, said that the mayor should also be looking to the City budget for ways to reduce the number of people being held at Rikers, like increasing funding for alternatives to incarceration and supportive housing. He should also work with courts and DAs to reduce long stays on Rikers Island, and be “pushing judges to impose the least restrictive non-monetary pretrial conditions.”
Zeitz also pointed to the Treatment Court Expansion Act, a piece of state-level legislation that, if passed, would drastically expand mental health treatment courts across New York, thereby strengthening the City’s diversion network and keeping more people out of jail. “Closing Rikers is obviously complex, but it doesn’t need to take decades and can and must be done faster. It must be a priority of both the mayor and City Council and, frankly, the state government as well,” Zeitz told Hell Gate. (This includes getting a handle on the reported 40,000 calls made to 311 about conditions at Rikers that went out into the void in 2025.)
And one final, simple way to reduce the number of people in City jails: decrease the number of low-level arrests made by NYPD officers. Hmm, if only there was somebody totally in charge of Commissioner Jessica Tisch who could demand that she does just that…