A federal judge overseeing New York City’s violent and dangerous jails on Wednesday ordered Department of Correction leaders to meet with lawyers for prisoners to create a plan for an “outside person” who could run the system.
The judge, Laura Taylor Swain, said that she had not decided whether to install such an official, but wanted their vision of how such an arrangement might work. She gave them 45 days.
“It is clear that court orders alone have not effectively accomplished improvements on safety,” she said at a session during which she heard arguments about whether the city should be held in contempt for failing to stem violence and excessive force by correction officers.
The hearing came nearly a decade after the jails fell under federal oversight in the landmark settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society and prisoners. The deal mandated a court-appointed monitor and regular reports on violence, which continues to plague the system. In the past two years, at least 33 people have died in jails or shortly after being released.
Rikers Island complex is one of the city’s largest institutions, and housed nearly 6,400 people last month. The Correction Department employs about 6,300 uniformed officers, who are represented by the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, a powerful union. The jails have been notorious incubators of mayhem, and thousands of New Yorkers — many of them not convicted of any crime — have passed through them.
The monitor has repeatedly pointed to New York’s failure to improve dangerous conditions there.
Last year, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, formally joined calls for the appointment of an outside authority, known as a receiver, to oversee Rikers Island.
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