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A few weeks before Eric Adams<\/a> took office as mayor of New York, two of his advisers, Philip Banks and Timothy Pearson, who both, like Adams, once served in the N.Y.P.D., sat down for a meal at a Queens diner with the commissioner of the Department of Correction, Vincent Schiraldi. \u201cI think there\u2019s a way out of this,\u201d Schiraldi told them. \u201cBut you gotta throw down.\u201d Schiraldi, a reformer whom Bill de Blasio plucked from a research job at Columbia University, had been commissioner for about six months. During that time, conditions on Rikers Island\u2014the city\u2019s notorious jail complex in the East River, where people facing local criminal charges are sent if they can\u2019t afford bail\u2014had unravelled to previously unthinkable levels. Schiraldi had been digging in for battle against the correction-employee unions, whose members were calling out sick from their shifts at Rikers by the hundreds, fuelling the crisis. He wanted to stay on in the new administration\u2014with one condition. \u201cI\u2019m willing to get ninety-five per cent of the blood on me,\u201d Schiraldi told Banks and Pearson. \u201cBut five per cent is going to get on the mayor. And when that happens he\u2019s got to say, \u2018Vinny\u2019s my guy, there\u2019s no daylight between us.\u2019 And if he can\u2019t say that he shouldn\u2019t hire me.\u201d<\/p>\n Schiraldi is now back at Columbia. \u201cHe didn\u2019t hire me,\u201d he said, in a phone call this week.<\/p>\n Fourteen people died in city custody last year. For a stretch in the summer and fall, each new report out of Rikers was worse than the last. In the jail complex\u2019s overloaded, understaffed intake areas, people languished in cells for days and weeks without reasonable access to food, bathrooms, or medical care. Violence between detainees, and between detainees and guards, rose dramatically. Suicide attempts happened so frequently that a group of local lawmakers witnessed one while taking a tour. Public defenders began begging<\/a> arraignment judges to search their consciences before consigning defendants to pretrial detention. Some detainees participated<\/a> in a hunger strike.<\/p>\n By all accounts, the city had lost control of the island\u2014though problems at Rikers are nothing new. For decades, the island\u2019s name has been a byword for municipal horrors, and an example of the costs of mass incarceration. Political neglect, administrative turmoil, and failed attempts at reform have been the norm. Harm to thousands has been the consequence. In 2014, my colleague Jennifer Gonnerman wrote an article for this magazine about Kalief Browder<\/a>, a teen-ager who spent three years languishing on Rikers after being accused of stealing a backpack. (The charges against him were eventually dismissed.) Browder died by suicide in 2015, and his experience spurred a new round of calls for change. That year, city officials agreed<\/a> to the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee the jail complex. But arguments about how to improve conditions on the island continued to treat safety as zero-sum. Moves taken to improve conditions for inmates drew bitter complaints from the guards; support shown for the guards was seen as endangering inmates. In the meantime, conditions worsened.<\/p>\n Regaining control of the island is now largely Adams\u2019s responsibility. Last month, at a press conference introducing Louis Molina, the man he tapped to replace Schiraldi, Adams offered a few hints as to how he wanted to proceed. First, the battle with the unions was being called off. \u201cHold on, what are we doing?\u201d Adams asked, as a press aide tried to move union representatives away from the podium. \u201cI want my unions here with me. We\u2019re partners here.\u201d Molina, when he spoke, chose his words carefully, acknowledging the need for changes while also making it clear that he was taking the guards\u2019 interests into account. \u201cThe need for reform of our city jails has never been more urgent than it is now,\u201d he said. \u201cI will work with Mayor Adams to immediately improve conditions on Rikers Island\u2014for correction officers and<\/em> the incarcerated population.\u201d<\/p>\n The unions applauded the appointment. \u201cIt\u2019s a breath of fresh air,\u201d Benny Boscio, the president of the Correction Officers\u2019 Benevolent Association, the largest and loudest of the unions, said. \u201cIt was pretty much adversarial the last eight years.\u201d Molina, a Bronx-born ex-Marine who served prior stints in the N.Y.P.D., the Brooklyn District Attorney\u2019s Office, and as an official in the Department of Correction, fit perhaps the most important criteria that the rank-and-file union members were looking for in a new boss: he\u2019s previously worn a uniform. Adams shares this affinity for the lived experience of law-enforcement agents. At the press conference, he pointed out that Molina would be the first Latino leader of the Department of Correction. \u201cWhen I sat down with Louis, what touched me the most was hearing his life story,\u201d he said. This is \u201cone of the most significant appointments I can make.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet beyond de-escalating the situation with the unions, the Adams administration\u2019s plan for Rikers is still mostly undefined. Adams has expressed support for the use of solitary confinement\u2014another of the unions\u2019 top priorities\u2014which he argues is necessary as a deterrent against violence in the jails, despite evidence of the harmful effects solitary has on those forced to endure it. He has also promised to address critical physical-plant issues on Rikers, such as broken doors and locks. Molina said that his first order of business would be a \u201cthorough assessment\u201d of the department\u2019s operations. \u201cWe\u2019ve done too many quick fly-by-night solutions to get things done,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not how I\u2019m going to operate.\u201d<\/p>\n A particularly bedevilling aspect of the Rikers crisis, in terms of a public-policy debate, is that the problems in New York\u2019s jails have compounded at a time when the system\u2019s population is down to about a quarter of what it was at its height, in the nineteen-nineties. The city has a jails crisis even as it\u2019s decarcerating. This is partly explained by the pandemic<\/a>, which exposed and exacerbated long-standing problems on Rikers, as it did everywhere else. But reformers also point to an uptick in the prison population that preceded this summer\u2019s chaos, when judges began to set more bail amid a political backlash against the state\u2019s new, progressive bail reforms. The unions say that they\u2019ve been dealing with a smaller but more \u201chardened\u201d jail population. Last month, a comprehensive report<\/a> in the Times<\/em> attempted to cut through the debate, showing how mismanagement and political neglect for decades weakened correctional staff\u2019s authority in the jail system. \u201cAs a result, guards have been posted throughout the system in wasteful and capricious ways, generous benefits like sick leave have been abused and detainees have had the run of entire housing areas,\u201d the reporters Jan Ransom and Bianca Pallaro wrote.<\/p>\n In 2017, de Blasio put his support behind a plan to close Rikers by 2027 and replace it with a network of smaller jails around the city. Adams says that he supports the broad strokes of that plan. But he has also noted that even a successful rollout would keep Rikers in operation for another five years. Can it be fixed in the meantime? No one can say for sure. Boscio told me, \u201cWe believe it is salvageable with the right policies and the right people in charge,\u201d which is as optimistic an assessment as you\u2019ll hear from anyone. In a statement, Molina, who worked as an official for the Westchester County Department of Correction when it came out from under a federal monitorship, told me, \u201cI have led successful transformations of jail systems before and know that together, we can build a department that keeps officers and those in our care safe.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview, Boscio blamed the mass absences that have plagued the Department of Correction this year on the pandemic, overwork, injuries, and mismanagement. \u201cThis notion that we\u2019re against reform is just untrue,\u201d he said. \u201cBut reform can\u2019t be one-sided.\u201d When I asked him what measures his union believed would improve conditions on the island, he rattled off a list that pretty much matched what Adams has proposed: the use of solitary confinement, fixing physical-plant issues, and abandoning the practice of housing gang members by affiliation. He also said that the department needed to hire more staff, raised suspicions about the deal to close Rikers\u2014\u201cit\u2019s four hundred acres of waterfront property that they want\u201d\u2014and lamented the way that his union had been portrayed in the media. \u201cThe reality is eighty-five per cent of us are minority,\u201d he said. \u201cSixty-five per cent of us still live in New York, and come from the same neighborhoods the inmates are from.\u201d<\/p>\n This month, in another move cheered by the unions, Molina fired a Department of Correction official who had been trying to clear a mountain of backlogged internal disciplinary cases. The official, Sarena Townsend, told<\/a> the Times<\/em> that she\u2019d been fired after Molina asked her to \u201cget rid of\u201d two thousand cases. When asked about Townsend\u2019s dismissal at a recent oversight hearing, Molina said, \u201cAccountability through fair and appropriate discipline is essential in this department. Improving staff morale is also essential.\u201d When I brought up Townsend\u2019s dismissal, and the reports that it had been done at the union\u2019s behest, Boscio didn\u2019t argue. \u201cWe understand that we\u2019re a paramilitary organization and discipline exists,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s the amount of discipline that\u2019s the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n