By Molly Crane-Newman & Graham Rayman via NY Daily News
A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday directed top Department of Correction leadership and civil rights attorneys representing Rikers Island detainees to flesh out a plan to restructure how the city’s jails are run amid staggering and increasing levels of brutality.
Chief Judge Laura Swain issued the directive at a packed Manhattan Federal Court hearing
where she weighed a request to hold the city DOC in contempt for failing to abide by years-old
court orders to curb violence in the city’s jails.
Swain, who is also considering whether or not to place the city’s jails under the feds’ control,
reserved issuing a decision on the contempt motion, but said Wednesday’s arguments presented
“a clear and unavoidable need for the imposition of new measures addressing fundamental
vulnerabilities in the current system and structure of leadership and the policies and practices of
the Department of Correction.”
Violence has only increased on Rikers Island since the city agreed to reform the pattern and
practice of excessive force in a landmark settlement in 2015, civil rights lawyers for detainees
and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office told Swain at the hearing.
Two administrations, five jail commissioners, 15 reports by federal monitors finding the city noncompliant, and DOC brass “have not done what they agreed to do,” Assistant U.S. Attorney
Jeffrey Kenneth Powell said.
