New York City

Rikers Island’s troubled history leads to call for receivership

Part 1: A century of chaos, violence and death

January 16, 2025 Jacob Kaye
For nearly 100 years, violence, chaos and death have defined the jails on Rikers Island. Some say that could change with the appointment of a federal receiver, but anyone running the jail complex will have a lot of history to contend with. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
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As a federal judge considers taking Rikers Island out of the city’s control and handing it to a court-appointed receiver, the Brooklyn Eagle is looking back at the history of the city’s troubled jail complex — which we have covered extensively since our founding in 2018 — in an effort to understand how the city arrived at this critical moment. While this story mostly covers the lead up to the call for receivership, part two of the story, which will appear tomorrow, will look at what the future of the jails on Rikers may look like. 

For nearly 100 years, New York City has been housing its detainees in jail cells on Rikers Island. And for all of that time, the jail complex has been known almost exclusively as a place of violence, chaos and death. Conditions in the jails have been under the watch of a judge who will soon decide if the city should be allowed to remain in control of Rikers or if the federal government should take it over. 

In 2023, the Legal Aid Society, which represents the class of detainees in the case, officially asked federal Judge Laura Swain to hold the city in contempt for failing to meet the requirements of the judgment. The levels of violence, disorder and, crucially, use of force incidents were higher in recent years than they were the year the judgment was entered, the Legal Aid Society claimed. 

In 2024, Swain agreed, ruling the day before Thanksgiving that “the current rates of use of force, stabbings and slashings, fights, assaults on staff, and in-custody deaths remain extraordinarily high, and there has been no substantial reduction in the risk of harm currently facing those who live and work in the Rikers Island jails.”

As a result, the judge said that she was “inclined” to take control of the jail complex away from the city and hand it over to a court-appointed third party, known as a federal receiver. 

Read part one of the deep dive into Rikers Island.

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