Death in Darkness: Why Oversight Matters

Errol Louis: Thanks very much, Jan, and thanks to everybody who participated. That was a great first panel. We're going to start the next conversation now. Along the way, I'll urge people to tell people to join us for this conversation through whatever social media you have access to. Both the Q&A and the chat will be available to you for questions. I urge you to use the Q&A. We'll probably delve into them more towards the end, but we'll perhaps sprinkle some in along the way. I'll just run through the biographies of our participants quickly, and then we'll start.

Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown University Law School. She previously led the section of the Federal Department of Justice responsible for police department consent decrees. Martha King is a senior program officer at the Charles H. Revson Foundation, and the former Executive Director of the City's Board of Correction. Graham Rayman is a reporter at the New York Daily News who specializes in criminal justice matters and is the co-author of a book about Rikers Island. Stanley Richards is the deputy CEO of the Fortune Society and recently served as the first deputy commissioner of the Department of Correction. Sarena Townsend, who is now a partner at Townsend, Mottola & Uris Law, is a former deputy commissioner of investigation and trials at the Department of Correction.

Now, we are talking because the city government has taken very severe, even brazen steps to suppress information about what is happening in the jails. That includes limiting the access of the Board of Correction and refusing to release information to the press or the public about whether deaths are occurring. We're going to talk about transparency, and how to make that part of this equation. We'll explore what we can learn about the value of transparency, and we'll look at some other contexts, like police department consent decrees, to get some clues about how the city ought to best move forward.

Clearly, something has not worked properly, or as intended, when it comes to the safeguards that are supposed to incentivize good professional behavior and prevent bad behavior at Rikers. We use phrases like watchdog, oversight and guardrails, which imply that something bad will almost certainly happen if there are not guard dogs. Dogs, so to speak, are overseers doing oversight, watching the people in the institutions.

We're going to talk about ways that government institutions and private institutions like the news media can enhance public safety and improve the situation in the Department of Corrections. Stanley, I want to start with you. To what extent were oversight considerations part of daily decision making when you were there as first deputy? Was it more like a set of limits that you could walk up to and try not to step out of bounds? Or was it baked into the way you made decisions?

Stanley Richards: When Commissioner Schiraldi and I were there, we often talked about bringing light into a place that felt very, very dark. Oversight and bringing in elected officials and community members to see what was going on was part of our strategy to bring light to it, to generate enough energy and concern about the way in which the facilities were operating and the conditions that people were confined in. We thought they could generate enough energy to begin close down Rikers, and transform the system.

We specifically targeted elected officials and had them come out, and we brought community members in. We partnered with the Board of Corrections around some of the policies around how to safely house transgender and LBGTQ populations and ensure their rights. Oversight, light and transparency were a significant part of our strategy for changing Rikers, closing it and transforming the system. We thought if people actually saw what was happening there, saw the number of people that the system was reduced to, that they could begin to hope and see something better, and want to see some changes.

Errol Louis: Stanley, did outside reporting help with that? Because there's taking council members on a tour or otherwise trying to get the attention of City Hall, but of course, some of that is outside of your control once we in the news media get ahold of the story.

Stanley Richards: Absolutely. It was the media, it was elected officials, it was community members, the Board of Corrections. All of those parties really helped shed light on what was going on. It's a horrible thing that's happening. Why is this happening? We felt it was really important for people to see it. So yes, media played a part in it, and our elected officials played a part in it. It was part of our strategy to try to close Rikers and transform the system.

Errol Louis: Sarena, you were the watchdog. To what extent, beyond the four corners of a disciplinary proceeding, were you able to not just limit abuses, but try to transform the culture, or at least instruct officials about best practices? Was there a role for outside transparency, an outside look into Rikers, that was a part of what you were doing?

Sarena Townsend: Absolutely, and thank you, Errol, for the question. People sometimes forget that part of the consent decree was a focus on transparency itself. In fact, it required the department to put cameras everywhere. It required the department to do self-reporting on use of force, which had not been done much before. The federal monitor even gave my division, the Internal Affairs Investigation division, the role of investigating every single use of force, no matter what, no matter whether the use of force looked good or looked bad. There was a huge focus on transparency.

As for communications about what was going on there, we had an excellent partnership at the time with the New York City Department of Investigations, for example. Dana Roth was the IG there. We worked hand in hand. We spoke all the time. I saw that in a recent monitor's report, the current commissioner said that it was rare, or uncommon, to brief the monitor on certain internal investigations. That was not my experience. That's not true of how things were run previously. I was communicating with the federal monitor and his team on probably a daily basis with respect to what I was seeing internally and on specific cases, and general oversight.

We were very transparent with the Board of Correction as well. I myself testified in front of City Council and the Board of Correction, whereas under this administration, I've never seen the Investigation Division deputy commissioner anywhere publicly. It was a huge priority under Commissioner Ponte, Commissioner Brann and Commissioner Schiraldi for the right people to know. When we talk about oversight, a lot of times, with media, we talk about the public's right to know.

Well, people could agree or disagree with respect to how much the public needs to know certain things. But what I will tell you is that the actual people and agencies that are charged with oversight, like the Board of Correction, DOI, the Bronx DA's office, all of the DA's offices, the federal monitor and Internal Affairs, all of those entities must know. The unfortunate situation is whether or not the public knows what's going on under this administration. This administration is also hampering the agencies and the entities who are charged with knowing from knowing.

Errol Louis: Martha, we recently got word that the Board of Correction was informed it will no longer have unrestricted real time access to the video feed from cameras on Rikers Island. From your experience, will that create a substantive problem in and of itself, as far as the Board's work? Or is it more a matter of what a lack of access would symbolize?

Martha King: Definitely not just in symbol alone. It's been eight months at least that the Board has not had access to video. The department and the City have also cut off the Board's access to staffing data. The City sought to reduce the number of public meetings that the Board was able to hold. They sought to reduce the number of public comments that the Board could receive. The video access is only one part of an intentional, coordinated strategy to incapacitate the Board of Correction.

The use of video plays into all of the investigations that the Board conducts, so we wouldn't be able to have identified underreporting of serious injuries by 80% in 2019. We wouldn't have been able to identify the fact that supervisors were not making their rounds 40% of the time if we hadn't been able to look at video. Obviously, the video is also crucial to the death investigations that the Board is carrying out.

Errol Louis: Wow, that's extraordinary. Graham, the access to cameras came after my colleague, Courtney Gross, reported on the death of a young man, a suicide. We used video because we could get it, and because TV is a visual medium. You have developed a lot of contacts, though you do your work a little bit differently. You know a lot of insiders at Correction. Do you have adequate access to your sources? I don't want to focus too much on the technology cutoff to the exclusion of what you're able to find out about what's going on there.

Graham Rayman: Well, certainly, the DOC isn't a monolithic entity. In fact, there are a range of factions inside the department that have different issues with what's happening in jails. There's a whole range of different ideas about how things should be run. Just one example is that Commissioner Molina bringing in outside assistant commissioners has rankled a lot of people in middle management, because they're seeing their career paths to chief getting short-circuited.

There's some discontent there. There's discontent among the rank and file who work double and triple tours in the jails while other officers have cushy assignments. Obviously, it takes building up trust and relationships, but it’s certainly possible to get information. But what we've seen from the Adams administration goes beyond video. It's basically a systematic attempt to shut down the more official avenues to get information.

I've done a couple of stories recently where, literally, the effort seems to be to scare people into not talking, to intimidate people. There's the case of Dr. James Uhrig, who made a series of critical social media commentaries over the past year and was barred from Rikers. This is a man with 44 years of medical experience. He speaks multiple languages. He's worked all over the world. This is somebody you want to have in your medical system.

A second example is Captain Awais Ghauri, who sent an internal email in which he complained about security provisions with respect to a detainee who had assaulted 32 officers. He was suspended. Instead of his comments being embraced, he's facing disciplinary proceedings. To me, these are unforced errors by the administration. It wasn't necessary to do these things. All it does is make people trust what's coming out of the DOC less.

Errol Louis: Okay. Now, Professor Lopez, consent decrees are a pretty strong form of oversight that, ideally, are supposed to get an institution and its leaders to adopt new policies and inaugurate a new culture. As we've heard, the Department of Correction has had five consent decrees across eight mayoralties. In general, what's the process by which the institutional culture is supposed to change? What are we getting wrong here?

Christy Lopez: Thank you for that question, and for having me here today. One thing to keep in mind is that every place is a little bit different. One of the most fundamental mistakes you can make is assuming that the problems you're seeing here are the same as the problems you saw at another place. You really do have to dig in and figure out what exactly the issue is here. I've been following Rikers from afar, but don't have the level of expertise that all of you do about what's been happening there. I just want to put that caveat to what I'm about to say because people have already raised a lot of the factors that come into play when you're really trying to change the culture and the functioning of an institution. And that’s why consent decrees over several years may not have been enough here.

I do think that what Sara Norman said earlier about the idea of having the willingness to make the change, but also the capacity to make the change, is a big issue. There have been dozens of consent decrees in the policing arena, and there's only been one receivership. I happened to have been the monitor of that department, the Oakland Police Department, before it was under receivership, when it was at a consent decree.

In most of those cases, I can tell you that, even with a consent decree, nothing changed until there was a willingness to make change among the leadership. A mayor came in who appointed a police chief who wanted to make change. In my view, it's really hard to brute force change through just a consent decree. You're going to need that willingness from leadership. However, even with that willingness, the capacity to do so may not be there, and not necessarily because of some incompetence on the part of the individuals involved. It can be that entrenched bureaucracy that Sara was describing, that limited thinking, which is a learned helplessness. It's almost a defense mechanism from feeling that futility and inability to get anything done, even though you want to.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for the plenty of people working in these systems who don't care or who are actually hostile, but there are often a lot of people who would like to make a change, but have just given up, and that can create these capacity issues. That's where something like a receivership can be so important. As Sara pointed out, they're not an immediate fix, and I think that's incredibly important to keep in mind. What they bring to the situation, in my view, more than the willingness to make change or the capacity to make change, is the real power to make change institutionally, rather than in an individual capacity.

The bottom line answer to your question is that when the receiver is selected here, there's going to be a real need to figure out exactly what the obstacles to change have been and ensure that this receiver has the precise power necessary to overcome those particular challenges. That's something that all of you can answer much better than I can. I do just want to put a plug in for the transparency component, for a couple of reasons.

One is that what I've been hearing about Rikers recently — like not being open, and not reporting deaths — is striking me a lot more as a willingness problem than a capacity problem. That's not a capacity issue; you've just decided you're not going to play ball anymore. You're going to need to make sure that the receiver has the ability to break through and call that out, to hold people accountable for those sorts of shenanigans, I'll say very kindly.

The other issue to keep in mind is that this receiver is going to need a lot of power. That is important, and perhaps essential, but also dangerous. To counter that, the judge and the plaintiffs are going to need to work on that issue, as well as the defendants. But transparency is going to be really key here.

Transparency is always really important, as a few people have said, because you really want to put that information in the hands of the public so they can assess for themselves what's going on. I think it's particularly important when you have something like a receiver and you really want the public, not just the parties and the judge, to have a very clear sense about what that receiver is doing.

Errol Louis: It’s interesting because there are a lot of differences here between Correction and some of the police departments that you've dealt with. One of them is that this is an institution that doesn't really have a strong political constituency behind it, as Stan Brezenoff pointed out. I've heard from Michael Jacobson and others that it's not unusual for a mayor to go two, three or four years without ever even talking to their Correction commissioner. That might be part of how we got to the point that we're at right now.

It's certainly not seen as mission-critical for any given administration when it comes to public safety. Everybody thinks about the cops; nobody thinks about what happens after the cops put on the handcuffs. In your experience, though, Professor, the political leadership point that you made was really well taken. Have you encountered situations where the political leadership was basically dragged kicking and screaming into the consent decree and didn't want to play ball? Because much of what we're seeing here, with the shutdown of communications, appears to be coming from City Hall.

Christy Lopez: Yeah, absolutely. We dealt with that when I was at the Department of Justice. I also worked a lot in prisons and jails. I actually did more of that work before I went into policing, realizing that you weren't going to fix these places and that we need to keep people out of them. I do have some experience there, and I agree with you that there's not as much political support for people who are imprisoned. I will say that you get a little more of that for people imprisoned in Rikers than in most of the jails and prisons I was working at, in places like Mississippi. But still, point taken; it's really important.

That does increase the likelihood that people will be dragged kicking and screaming into these agreements, and we certainly saw the spectrum of that. We had chiefs and mayors who asked us, openly or not so openly, to come in and conduct an investigation, and to make sure that there was a consent decree at the end of the day. We had other people who were quietly kicking and screaming, but made the political calculus that, publicly, they would cooperate and support the investigation and consent decree. We had people who were kicking and screaming from day one — Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in Maricopa County, for example.

And there were those where, over time, the leadership in the jurisdiction changed, where the leadership may initially have been supportive, but now is not. New Orleans, La. is an example of that, in the New Orleans Police Department. You can actually see that dynamic I started out talking about, how there was really significant change happening. After a long time under that consent decree, they should be out by now, but it's in danger of falling apart because that willingness at the political level is no longer there. It's really hard, as I said, to make that change happen, where you don't have that [inaudible 01:22:56].

Errol Louis: Stanley Richards, we're getting into the thick of the political situation here. Something I have certainly noticed with this administration, especially when it comes to Correction, is that Mayor Adams, who's a former member of the NYPD, and his correction commissioner, who is also a former member of the NYPD, are reacting in a very particular way where they are politicizing, to a certain extent, the very fact of oversight.

We often hear the mayor say, "Well, you didn't do this with all of these other prior mayors. You're doing this only to the second Black mayor," or, "I'm the mayor who’s gone to Rikers more than any other, and all of the people on both sides of the bars look like me." It is a very hot button, very specific way of amping up the stakes there, in a way that makes it that much harder, at least for some of my colleagues in the media. I'll say whatever I think, whenever I think it, but for some people, it's making the whole issue very touchy. I was wondering what you make of all of that?

Stanley Richards: The problem we have right now with Rikers Island wasn't created by Mayor Adams, and it wasn't created by Commissioner Molina. I think that the dialogue that has brought us to this point has resembled a prize fight. The bell rings, and everybody goes to their corner. I would say — and I think Sara said this earlier — that this is a moment where Mayor Adams and Commissioner Molina could lean in and say that this isn't a failure of their leadership or a failure of their stewardship of the Department of Corrections, City of New York. This is a moment where they can embrace transparency, oversight and real transformation, and be the stewards of that transformation.

Right now, it's feeling like it's a personal attack on Mayor Adams or on Commissioner Molina. This isn't about a situation that they created, but they are in leadership roles right now where they can begin to change it. We collectively need to shift the way we use language as we talk about this and get out of this "somebody has to win and someone has to lose" mindset. I firmly believe that we can have a situation where we can have the City win, we can have the men and women who work in the Department of Correction win, and we can have those who need to be detained win. This doesn't have to be a win-lose situation.

Errol Louis: Sarena, the reality is that there's a factor here that we simply cannot ignore, and that's the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association (COBA), the main union, which is incredibly powerful. It always was, for a number of different reasons, some of it having to do with the ability to control access to Rikers Island, as well as the political smarts of some of their past leadership and the fact that they go fairly high up the food chain and you're still a union member. Whereas in other systems, it might be a little bit different. Sarena, talk a little bit about the role, as far as you know, that they are, or could be, playing in all of this.

Sarena Townsend: Sure. They're always going to be very influential one way or another, and it's up to the commissioner and possibly even the mayor to determine just how far they themselves are willing to go to accommodate COBA's requests and demands. We've seen COBA make demands for many, many different things. For example, wanting to bring back cargo pants after the New York City Department of Investigation heavily advised DOC that they should not be allowed to wear cargo pants because that was a main avenue for contraband introduction. It seems like such a little issue; it's just an article of clothing. But there was a very good reason for DOI to take that position. And here you have an administration who, for seemingly no real reason other than to potentially make the union happy, are allowing cargo pants to come back. I don't think it was a fashion decision.

You have big requests and you have little requests, and you have big demands and little demands. When I was in charge of the investigation and trials division, COBA wanted to have certain members of ESU who I had removed because it violated the consent decree to have them there put back into ESU. They wanted me to change my policy on how to conduct investigations. They wanted their members to be able to view video of an incident before I brought them in to interrogate them.

Interestingly, nobody is suggesting that the police do that, just that the correction officers benefit from that. There are a lot of demands that are made, and one of the reasons why receivership is so attractive is because you have somebody come in until the problem is fixed rather than this staccato rhythm of somebody coming in and leaving. In the latter situation, COBA is able to ask for a lot of favors from an incoming commissioner. And when they don't get that favor from this commissioner, they'll get it from the next commissioner. And so, COBA and the Corrections Captain's Association and above have a lot of power depending on just how amenable the commissioner is to giving them that leeway.

Errol Louis: Graham, what's your sense of where the union is? I've talked with some members and their various presidents over the years, and as Sarena suggests, there is very much a kind of wait and see attitude that I have picked up on where mayors come and go, commissioners come and go, and the union stays.

Graham Rayman: Yeah, there's certainly that feeling of “we're going to be around here long after you're gone.” Toward the end of the pandemic and afterwards, the sick leave crisis was an interesting challenge. The message was basically that you need the rank and file. So, if the rank and file are resisting, then the administration, at the time, there was a lot of stuff that happened as a result of all those sick outs. My sense of where they are is that they're probably planning to file legal challenges to receivership. And if the receivership becomes more real, I think that they're going to fight it tooth and nail. To Stanley's point, I've always been a little unclear as to why the Adams administration hasn't been more open to some kind of outside control.

It seems to me that if they were more willing or interested in talking about it, then they would have more control over what the shape of that receiver would be, so it doesn't have to be, as Stanley said, a prize fight all the time. But I feel like the message from COBA often turns it into a prize fight. I think the COBA president, Benny Bosio, is very aggressive in supporting his members and I don't see a lot of compromise coming from what he says. Maybe that will change, but we'll wait and see.

Errol Louis: It's interesting. My answer to that would be that the core of the mayor's political base are black civil service uniform workers like himself, and COBA endorsed him and he stands with those folks. He says, "I am them. They are me. This is where I come from. This is who I am. If I can't keep these people happy politically speaking, what good am I?" He seems to have kind of thrown in with them.

There's also a question that was addressed in the prior panel. I've talked with some of the union leadership and some rank and file who seem to believe that even if a receiver comes in, all of their negotiated benefits would stay the same, that all of their rules would have to be negotiated. And I was telling them, “I don't know about that, guys. I think that, yes, you'll still have some collective bargaining rights, but those rights are going to be very, very limited compared to what you're used to. It's not like you're going to sit down with a federal receiver who's taking complete control of Rikers and you're going to start talking about cargo pants. It's just not going to happen.”

Let me bring Martha into this. To the extent that there is a receiver or serious talk about a receiver, we don't know what Judge Swain will do. She's been very patient, but if you read between the lines that patience appears to be wearing thin. The receiver doesn't just show up with a list of what he or she could do — the process would be negotiated. From your point of view, Martha, what should we make sure is included in any receivership arrangement? What are some tricks or traps or requirements around transparency or anything else that we should make sure are included?

Martha King: I'll answer your question briefly, because I want to return to something that you also implied, Errol, which is the nature of the fundamental reform that needs to take place here. It's not going to be about cargo pants; it will be about the contract and it will be about the job descriptions. But I think it’s certainly for a receiver to come in and to recreate administrative systems that are accurate and functioning, and we know that the administrative systems of the department are totally deficient right now. A great example of that is the City's largest settlement related to the city's jails most recently, which is a $300 million payout to up to 80,000 people who were kept in jail after they posted their bail. That is because their paper records and their management of the regular day-to-day function of the department was not working.

A receiver needs to come in and deal with the administrative messes inside of the department. I also just want to step back and say, speaking to Christy's point in terms of capacity versus willingness, that I think that where we are is not an accident. The fact that the administration is being so obstructive to so many different parts of the oversight world for the jails is not by accident, because we've seen three phases of what's happened. One, we saw that the department was unable to comply with the terms of the consent judgment set up in 2015. And so then the federal monitor said, “Okay, you know what? We're not even going to pay attention to the consent judgment.” That's what was said in 2021. Instead, you need to fix the basic management of this department. You need to fix how you manage staff, create some basic security practices and fix how you are managing the people in your custody.

And then we've seen, through the monitor's report, that the department is still unable to make basic changes around improving the management. That is compounded by this unwillingness to cooperate with the monitor or any other oversight entity. This isn't random, because one of the points of oversight is you see a divergent reality. When we look at the most recent Nunez monitor’s report, we see that the risk and the danger to people in custody is actually acute right now. The monitor pointed out that the frequency of use of force misconduct by staff was unprecedented this year. And that misconduct is not happening because the department is responding to a fight in the heat of the moment. 67% of that misconduct happens when they are simply conducting searches or escorting people from place to place. All this is to say that the obstruction suggests that there are real reasons that this administration wants to keep facts under wraps right now.

Errol Louis: Professor Lopez, can this question of transparency be written fully and firmly into consent decrees and/or a receivership arrangement?

Christy Lopez: Perhaps not as fully as some people would like. As several people have mentioned, the court has broad equitable powers that they can invest or give to the receiver, but these powers are not unlimited. So, for example, if there are state laws that say this information can't be revealed, they can't reveal it. It's also my understanding that with a lot of the terms of the collective bargaining agreements in these state laws related to unions, the judge can't just grant the receiver the opportunity to work around them.

But the judge can make clear and grant the receiver a lot of power, both to communicate with and receive communications from the public, and to obtain information, analyze it and make it public. The judge can give whatever the law would allow to the receiver, and it can be much greater than what is currently present. If I were an advocate of openness and transparency here, I would be focusing much of my effort on making sure that the court grants the receiver the full possible power to obtain and share information from all the relevant bureaucracies and sub-bureaucracies. And also that they require that the receiver talk to, hear from and communicate back to the public more broadly.

Errol Louis: Okay, I'm going to urge folks. If you have questions, you can type them in the Q&A; there's a button on the lower right part of your screen. You can also throw them in the chat if you're not able to find the Q&A button. I see a question here from Jacqueline that I’m going to direct to Stanley. Her question is: How much does the unlimited medical leave which reduces staff in the jails contribute to the problems?

Stanley Richards: I think that's a major contributor. We ended up with about 30% of the staff unavailable that were sick or on modified duty, which was massive in terms of being able to cover posts, being able to provide basic services and being able to get people to court. Unlimited sick time was one of the challenges. Sarena and her team had rules around that, about how many days people could be out and about where people are supposed to be during that sick time. Sarena and her team would go out and do investigations, and they did an amazing job of identifying people who were falsely documenting that they were sick when they weren't sick, following them on social media when they were supposed to be sick. Yeah, unlimited sick time was a major, major challenge. Sarena could speak to the investigative part of how we handled the sick time.

Sarena Townsend: Thank you, Stanley, I appreciate the compliment. We did try very hard to combat that, alongside DOI as well. It’s very interesting to me because NYPD has unlimited sick leave. Corrections is not the only agency that has unlimited sick leave, but you see more abuse of that sick leave than in any other agency. It's not even measurable; it's not even comparable. It's very interesting. And it's hard, because correction officers really do get injured and sick and should be entitled to have the ability to take the time that they need to recuperate. It's just very unfortunate. And those officers who don't abuse the sick leave don't look kindly upon their colleagues who abuse that sick leave. If I may, I want to address one thing that the current administration is talking about with respect to unlimited sick leave.

They say that they have very few people compared to the past who are out sick. The only issue is you still have tons of unstaffed posts. So you have to question, well, if they're not out sick, where are they? It's my understanding that a lot of them have been terminated. There's nothing wrong with terminating people who abuse sick leave — I myself sought to do that as well. But you can't just tout fewer people out sick and use that to claim that you have more people staffing the jails when the people who were out sick have been terminated and not replaced. We have to remember that when the agency touts fewer people out sick, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the posts are staffed.

Errol Louis: I've got a question directed to Stanley. You said the Rikers problem wasn't created by the Adams and Molina administration. My question is, who or which administration was the problem created by?

Stanley Richards: This is a problem that is the decades in the making. The mere structure of Rikers Island is out of sight, out mind. As a formerly incarcerated person, I remember that when you went over the bridge, it was the bridge of no return. It always was a place that was not in public view, that was managed. There was a subculture of survival of the fittest on that island. So, this is decades and generations in the making. This isn't something that happened under the de Blasio administration or the Adams administration. One of the things we did at the Lippman Commission to recommend closing Rikers, and one of the things the advocates were doing about closing Rikers is highlight that notion that it has always been out of sight, out of mind. There hasn't been accountability, there hasn't been transparency.

Over the decades, terrible things have happened to both people in custody and people who work there. And that trauma doesn't end when your sentence ends or when you leave. That trauma is transferred into the community. New York has been living with a system that has been horrible to people who are incarcerated there and the communities that they come from, because they end up coming back to the community worse off than they did before they left.

Errol Louis: And Graham, you were one of the editors behind a wonderful oral history of Rikers. If we're going to assume that this was decades in the making, where would you urge people to take a look to see where problems started to reach a critical level?

Graham Rayman: That's such a tough question to answer. The population swelled at the end of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. One of the key decisions made in the ‘80s was to continue to build jails on Rikers. That was the deal with the population. It vastly expanded the facilities on Rikers.

One of the interesting things that my co-author Reuven Blau and I found was that after the excesses of the nineties and the broken windows policing that put so many people in jail, as Michael Jacobson mentioned in the earlier panel, there were people within the criminal justice system — lawyers, social workers, etcetera — who felt that this was crazy. And so they were working from within the system to get the population down while other people were working from outside the system. The population started to slowly descend through this century, and we got all the way down to under 4,000 during the pandemic, but then it goes back up. You have to take the pandemic into account when you're talking about the issues the jails are facing. Also, the jails or the facilities are incredibly old; they're falling apart. Pieces of the jails are used as weapons.

It's a very difficult question to answer. The fact that the population is so low and yet violence is so high is just an extraordinary double take. Anybody who was working for DOC in the ‘90s has to be befuddled and confused by that strange dichotomy. I don't understand it.

Errol Louis: I urge everybody to take a look at “Rikers: An Oral History,” the book that Graham Rayman was the co-author of. That brings us to the end of our times. I want to thank Stanley, Sarena, Martha, Graham and Christy for joining me. I'm going to turn it over now to Michael Jacobson, former corrections commissioner and wise man on all of these issues.