It’s Not Impossible

On Sept. 24, 2024, Vital City convened a panel of experts to discuss whether there is any way out of the brutal and deteriorating conditions in New York City’s jails. Jan Ransom from The New York Times, who has written some of the most searing and insightful investigative pieces on conditions at Rikers, moderated. Stanley Richards, the CEO of the Fortune Society and the first formerly incarcerated person to hold the rank of first deputy commissioner at the jails, offered brief welcoming remarks. The panelists included: 

• Stan Brezenoff, a legendary public figure who has held a number of important roles in the City and the state, from first deputy mayor to executive director of the Port Authority; 
• Michael Jacobson, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction; 
• Nneka Jones Tapia, a psychologist who ran the Chicago jails while they were under a federal consent decree; and 
• Jordan Hyatt, a professor at Drexel University who is currently evaluating the implementation of “Little Scandinavia,” an effort to test Scandinavian prison reforms in Pennsylvania.

 This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. A video of the full panel is available here.

Jan Ransom: Michael, how did we get here?

Michael Jacobson: The jails have been very problematic for decades. But if you look at the last 20 or 25 years, you’ll see that in the late 1990s, violence, overcrowding and use of force were at an apex. All the metrics were as bad as you can imagine. What happened over the next few years, for a variety of reasons, is that violence declined significantly along with use of force. Into the early and mid-2000s, violence was pretty low in the City jails, but then, in about 2010, things started to trend back in the wrong direction. 

There are, I think, a variety of reasons for that. That’s when the system started to lose some incredibly experienced upper-level uniform management. That really hit the capacity of the agency to run the jails. In the last 10 or 15 years, all those metrics — violence, missed medical appointments, use of force, people incarcerated dying — started to get worse and worse. And in the last five or six years, they really trended up at exceptional levels that we really haven’t seen for decades. And though the department has made some gains in the last few months, when you compare the numbers we have now, historically, we have huge, huge problems.

Jan Ransom: You’ve been very vocal about the implementation of a federal receiver being perhaps the best answer to fixing Rikers. Can you tell us about the powers a receiver would have to get things done and why implementing change within Rikers is difficult under the department’s current configuration?

Michael Jacobson: I support a receiver for a number of reasons. It’s less about the specific powers a receiver might have to get around the City’s contracting process or to abrogate certain parts of a union contract. For me, it’s more about there being someone with integrity and moral authority who’s going to be there for a while. What happens now is that commissioners more or less come and go. Two years is not an unusual amount of time for a commissioner to be there. The problems in the department now are so deep-seated that it is imperative to do organizational and culture change really to shift the entire paradigm of how a jail works. And you just can’t do that when different people come in and out every two years. 

You need someone who has some independence, because that kind of organizational culture change is tough to do. You bump into all sorts of politics. It’s a long process to change the way a jail operates from top to bottom. And that, for me, is the power of a receiver. You can have the best commissioner in the world, but if he or she is there for 18 months and then a new one comes in, that’s just not a recipe for how you’re going to get to the deep-seated problems we have.

Jan Ransom: But, of course, the implementation of a receiver is reliant on a federal judge deciding one is necessary. This is a rare occurrence nationwide. In the meantime, we have a growing jail population with people spending far longer on Rikers awaiting trial, and violence against detainees and staff remains incredibly high. And so in lieu of a receiver, how can City and state officials work together to improve the conditions there?

Michael Jacobson: In the absence of a receiver, you need a few things. One is you need a commitment at the highest levels of government: the mayor, the governor, the judiciary. Lengths of stay now are just insanely long in the jails. About a quarter of the people are there for more than a year, and about a third of them are there for two years or more. You cannot hold people in a jail that long, even the best jail on earth. And this is far from the best jail on earth.

A mayor and a governor would have to work with the Office of Court Administration to drive down those times. The chief judge must make this a priority for his administration. If you didn’t do anything else, cutting those times down so that people’s mental health doesn’t deteriorate over months and months, that alone would be a huge step forward.

Jan Ransom: The City is expected to spend billions of dollars to build four new borough-based jails, but it will blow through its 2027 deadline to complete this project. One of the four buildings will reportedly be complete by 2029. Stanley, can you tell us what are some creative ways that the City could push for reform through the use of the borough-based jails? 

Stan Brezenoff: We have completely failed, over many, many years, to fulfill our responsibilities at Rikers. All of it is intolerable. I have become, while still a supporter of the notion of a receiver, dubious about the ability to find and empower the individual in a way that that individual can make a difference. But I wouldn’t recommend reducing our efforts to achieve that. 

Of the four borough jails, Brooklyn is the one that seems to have the best chance of opening in a realistic time frame. I believe that Brooklyn should be seen as an opportunity to create the kind of jail that demonstrates what a jail has to be in New York City. We could create in Brooklyn the model to address the issues that have been identified over the years, starting with the architecture of the place. 

First, we need to press to have this project completed. What also needs to be done is the creation of a separate institution with a master plan for dealing with issues of culture, of training, of staffing, of inculcating the management with the responsibilities that it’s going to have. I think it’s desirable to think about this as a parallel or subcorporation within the corrections domain. In other arenas, the City and the state have established separate entities as subcorporations. Think of the Brooklyn Navy Yard or other economic development projects. 

The notion would be to give enough independence and support to an effort that we hope will not be characterized by what grips Rikers on a daily basis. It’s full of complications and difficulties, including how to engage the workforce and the union leadership so that they don’t see this as a threat. But it starts with a political decision — everything else that we’ve tried to do suggests that you can’t get there from here. We have to try and figure out a way to get there from here. And I think treating this in some form as a separate supported entity is the only way to go.

Jan Ransom: How would you make it not simply a Rikers 2.0?

Stan Brezenoff: We need fundamental cultural change in the Department of Correction. It took years for us to get to this sorry place and no single step at Rikers is going to change it. The oversight efforts and monitoring efforts have not delivered on the promise of cultural change. God knows the police department is not a model in every respect, but it does have a sense of a paramilitary structure where individuals are held accountable, where they understand their jobs, where their training is in a police academy setting. Those things matter. The combination of recruitment, of examining individuals for their suitability for the job, of giving managers a sense of duty as officers of the law — that’s all really important. 

We also need to look at how exactly the construction of the Brooklyn facility is proceeding. Who has laid out what the physical structure of this new jail should be? Are they the best minds in the corrections field? Is anyone thinking creatively about how to better assure the safety of the population and of the correctional staff? The new facility is an opportunity to address those things.

Jan Ransom: For nearly a decade, Rikers Island has been under federal monitoring to address a culture of brutality and neglect. Cook County Jail in Chicago was under similar monitoring by the Department of Justice. And Nneka, as warden, you were able to make improvements leading to an end to the consent decree. How did you do it? How did you get correction staff on board with the changes that you were seeking to implement?

Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia: Hopefully I’ll offer a little ray of sunshine here. At the time when the Cook County Jail met and exceeded the expectations of the federal consent decree, it had been monitored for about 40 years. And that last federal consent decree spanned about seven years and covered almost every area of the jail from food safety and sanitation to health care and security issues. I had a unique lens into that because I was appointed the chief psychologist of the jail just a few months into that last consent decree and was in charge of overhauling the jail’s mental health system. And then I was appointed warden of the jail for what would end up becoming the final two years of the consent decree.

And what I can tell you from those experiences is that, in order to overhaul a correctional system short of a receivership, it really requires an unwavering focus from everyone in the justice system. It can’t just be the responsibility of the leadership of that actual jail system. That lesson was critical for me and my team in seeing the jail through that last consent decree. And it’s really the foundation of our work at Chicago Beyond with our jail and prison partner systems now using our holistic safety framework. 

Centering the voices of staff and people incarcerated is crucial to that framework. This means actually having solution-focused discussions with both groups where the problems that exist are laid out and collectively solutions are developed. When people see themselves in the answer and when people feel like they are a part of creating something, they are more likely to protect it.

This democratic style of leadership allows for changes to take root even when there is a different leader who is put in place, because the staff are going to outlast the person who is in charge. Sadly, many incarcerated people will also outlast the people who are in charge. 

There’s this phenomenon called nose blindness, where you lose your ability to smell when you’ve been in an environment for too long. And then to regain it, you have to step outside of the environment, expose your nose to other scents. You have to do that as a correctional leader. You have to step out, see what other system leaders are doing. And you have to be willing to invite others in who will tell you how it really smells.

Jan Ransom: My colleague and I reported last year that Rikers Island has essentially become the state’s largest de facto mental institution. More than half the people held there have a diagnosed mental illness and one in five have a serious mental illness. As a psychologist running a jail, you are in a unique position to understand how to care for a population that has grown to include more people with a mental illness. How did you use programming to drive down violence and improve the conditions in Cook County?

Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia: I have seen the impact of jails and prisons on the mental health of people who come into contact with them. And the reality is that more and more people with mental illness and serious mental illness are being funneled into jails and prisons. That should never be the case. Jails and prisons are traumatizing in and of themselves. It creates a very difficult pathway for them to get healthy. It’s almost impossible. We are setting that person up for failure and we’re really setting the system as a whole up for failure. I would encourage jail leaders to move more people with serious mental illness into the community where they can get the treatment that they need. We did that during my tenure at the Cook County Jail. 

While we talk a lot about mental illness, we rarely talk about the impact of trauma on the people who are incarcerated and on the staff. Ninety-eight percent of men and 99% of women who are incarcerated have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetimes. Research shows that about two-thirds of people who are incarcerated actually meet criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. So that tells you the level of the seriousness that these traumatic events are causing in people’s lives. 

Staff are also overexposed to trauma. One study looked at correctional staff in a large state system and found that about 75% of them had seen someone seriously injured or killed on the job. Their prevalence of PTSD exceeds what you find in veterans and it exceeds what you find in police. Correctional staff live 20 years less than people in the general public. The average life expectancy of a correction officer is 59.

So people are not acting out just to act out. People are acting out because they are really hurting and they’re hurting because of this system. So it’s really the responsibility of all of us to create healthier and safer environments so that people can actually heal. 

Jan Ransom: Correction officials in the U.S. have turned to Scandinavia for guidance. Jordan, can you tell us about the prison and jail systems there? What makes them different from the correction systems here in the U.S.?

Jordan Hyatt: When we talk about the Scandinavian prison systems, we tend to focus on the differences in culture, geography and population that define the two places. The social welfare system in the Scandinavian countries is distinctly different from what we have here in the United States. But prison is prison. The deprivation of people’s liberty feels pretty much the same no matter where you are. 

In Norway, recidivism rates are reported somewhere between 20% and 30%. Prison sentences as a whole are shorter, with most people serving less than one year in custody. And prison conditions are reported widely as being more like a hotel and less like what we would expect to see a prison cell look like in an American context. 

When we talk about the Scandinavian systems, we too often focus, I think, on those very visible things. What do the cells look like? What do the common areas look like? But the most fundamental difference is the role of the prison officer. And in the Nordic countries, those staff are trained differently, they’re treated differently, and they have very different roles and responsibilities.

In Norway, for many officers, getting an education is part of a multiyear college-level program that ensures training not only in the fundamentals of safety and security but also things like social work, psychology and conflict resolution — the kinds of things that make it easier for them to act not just as a guard but to take on the role of a social worker, which is baked into their job description. The role of those officers becomes the foundation for everything else that you see when you look inside of a Norwegian or Swedish or Danish prison. 

The principle of normality is important in Norway, which is the goal of creating an environment inside of the prison that’s not only not dehumanizing or damaging, but pretty similar to what they might experience on the outside. Even in the Scandinavian countries, there have been changes over recent years and they’re starting to see some of the same issues that we’ve faced here in the U.S. for quite some time. Recruitment and retention of high-quality prison officers and the overuse of isolation challenge the Norwegian system. And the Swedish prison system is projecting a 20% increase in the total number of incarcerated people over the next five years. So we need to remember that these are not perfect systems.

If you were to go back in time and look at the Norwegian or Swedish prison systems in the 1980s or the 1990s, they would look pretty similar to Rikers, in fact. An intentional, concentrated and sustained culture change campaign redefined what their prison system was like.

Jan Ransom: There’s a pilot project in Pennsylvania now. Tell us about it. What are some of the takeaways from the pilot? And is this something that officials in New York City could consider doing here to improve conditions at Rikers?

Jordan Hyatt: The Scandinavian Prison Project is one of several pilot projects across the country that are looking for unique ways to implement principles of dignity and humanity for people who live and work in prison. And in this case, it’s looking to the Nordic countries. The project itself focuses on culture change in a single housing unit in a prison just outside of Philadelphia.

Beginning in 2017, the planning process brought frontline correction officers to Norway and Sweden and Denmark to better understand exactly how those systems work. And then the frontline officers spent weeks working in Norwegian prisons side by side with mentor officers. They’ve returned back to Sweden several times over the past few years, again, to develop cultural competencies and identify the policies and practices that might be possible to adapt, not copy, but adapt for the uniquely American or Pennsylvanian environment. 

The unit opened in May 2022, and it is really designed by those correction officers. They proposed fundamental changes in the built environment and the way they did their job to bridge that gap between Scandinavia and Pennsylvania. So if you were to step onto the unit today, you’d notice that there are single cells, very uncommon in the general population in Pennsylvania. There are green plants throughout, sound-dampening panels, intentionally chosen muted colors, soft furniture designed more like a living room and less like the plastic or fixed furniture we’re used to seeing in prisons. There’s a full commercial kitchen that the residents on the unit have the ability to use, and they order their groceries from the community grocery store, like Instacart for prison. 

They relaxed the fraternization policy, which previously would have subjected officers to discipline if they spoke with an incarcerated person for more than a few minutes. Now they’re almost required to do that, getting to know the residents on the unit. All of that is facilitated by a ratio of staff to incarcerating people that’s pretty unheard of in American corrections. This unit previously would’ve had one staff member for 128 incarcerated people. Now there are 64 men at any given time, usually with three specially trained staff working on that housing unit. So really it’s dramatically different from the standard conditions of confinement. 

The unit has been running for over two years now. It shows us we can implement these kinds of changes in a high-security environment without devolving into chaos. The use of restricted housing is almost nonexistent on the unit. Grievances and sanctions have been reduced meaningfully. 

It took a significant amount of work to adapt these principles from Sweden to Pennsylvania. Other jurisdictions would need to go through a similar process. Culture change is complicated and difficult, but this project shows that it’s feasible. 

Jan Ransom is an investigative reporter for The New York Times focusing on criminal justice issues, law enforcement and incarceration in New York.

Michael Jacobson is the director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance and a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Stanley Brezenoff is a longtime leading civil servant, formerly serving as chair of the Board of Corrections and president and CEO of Continuum Health Partners. Brezenoff previously served as executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and as first deputy mayor under Mayor Ed Koch.

Nneka Jones Tapia is the managing director of justice initiatives at Chicago Beyond, a national philanthropic organization committed to addressing systemic inequity by backing solutions led by people closest to the issues. 

Jordan M. Hyatt is an associate professor of criminology and justice studies, the director of the Center for Public Policy and the Justice Collaborative at Drexel University and an affiliated researcher at the University of Oslo. He is the co-principal investigator of the Scandinavian Prison Project.