Today, Explained - The humanitarian crisis at Rikers Island

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Twelve people at Rikers Island have died in custody so far this year. The pandemic is only part of the problem, explains Nick Pinto, who is covering the string of deaths for the Intercept. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Haleema Shah. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Rikers Island has always been famous. It's one of the largest correctional facilities in the world.

And since it's a jail, 85% of people are there because they're awaiting trial or had a parole violation. Which means the vast majority of people held there are still presumed innocent. But Riker's notoriety doesn't come from its size or the number of people there. It comes from its reputation for exceptional violence. Lately, things have gotten so bad, even by Rikers Island standards, that its own staff has said people are not safe there. There's been another death of a detainee on Rikers Island. The Department of Corrections says a person in custody died just before 7.30 tonight at the North Infirmary Command.

The commissioner says so far the cause of death appears to be, quote, natural, but there is nothing natural about what's happening in our jail system right now. Twelve people have died in custody this calendar year, and medical staff on the island have been really raising the alarm. Nick Pinto has been covering Rikers Island for The Intercept. The chief medical officer on Rikers Island for The Intercept. He told us about one man in particular who lost his life to this humanitarian crisis. Isa Abdul-Karim was the 11th person to die in custody this year.

I spent a certain amount of time talking with Karim's cousin, who described him as a really sweet, gentle person. He was a devout Muslim. He volunteered at his local mosque. And he had an especially close relationship with his cousin's son and taught him verses from the Quran. He's a man who grew up in New York. His parents were from Senegal. And I think a certain amount of his childhood, he was sort of back and forth between New York and Senegal and Gambia. He had a complicated family situation. I think he lost touch with his parents fairly early on

and by all accounts was really on his own for much of his life. His first visit to Rikers Island was in 2016 when he was held there while he was awaiting trial on a nonviolent drug charge. And that experience was really difficult. And it actually led to him filing a lawsuit against some of the guards who were holding him in custody. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened during that experience, that first stint at Rikers Island? Kareem came in to Rikers with a number of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia.

And as a result, they had recommended that he be held in sort of social housing, in a dorm-like situation. And so he was, initially. But according to the lawsuit that he later filed, one of the guards overseeing that dorm unit took a dislike to him and sort of made a point of harassing him and trying to get him out of the unit. At a certain point, Kareem actually filed an official complaint against the guard for this treatment that he was receiving. Again, according to his lawsuit, the guard retaliated by having him transferred to a solitary cell. And while he was there, his mental health really deteriorated, as the psychologists had warned that it might, and he attempted to kill himself by eating batteries.

After that attempt, he was sent to a medical clinic in the jail complex. But because one of the guards working on the medical clinic was friends with the guard who he had crossed by filing this complaint, Karim experienced retaliation and was held sort of in the intake part of the medical clinic for six days in a cell with no bed, no sink, no toilet, only a metal chair. He was forced to urinate and defecate into empty milk cartons that other sympathetic incarcerated people left for him. The guards named in the suit answered it initially by denying the accusations, but the lawsuit remained open at the time of Kareem's death, so it hadn't been adjudicated. And amid this pending lawsuit against the guards at the jail, is he found guilty of the drug charges

that brought him to Rikers in the first place? So in the end, he was convicted on those charges and he was sent to a prison upstate. It was a two-and-a-half-year sentence. He wound up serving 11 months of it, and then he was sent to a prison upstate. It was a two-and-a-half-year sentence. He wound up serving 11 months of it, and then he was released onto parole. And what happens once he's released? He spent some time living at the Fortune Society,

which is a New York organization that provides housing and services for people who've been freshly released from prison. He complied with the terms of his parole for the most part. He was working as a cook. At a certain point, he did fail to check in with his parole officer. That's one of the requirements of your parole is regular contact with your parole officer. And he also spent some time on the street and got into a fight at one point on the street where he was stabbed. It was actually while he was hospitalized that he was arrested for parole violation, for failing to check in with his parole officer.

And so he was taken from the hospital in his wheelchair to Rikers a second time. Is it common for somebody to be sent to jail for a parole violation as small as not checking in with your officer? New York has historically been one of the two worst states in terms of locking people up for what are called technical parole violations. It's worth noting that during the current crisis on Rikers, pressure mounted on the state to change this. Governor Kathy Hochul did, a couple weeks ago, sign into law a change in that called the Less is More Act, which limits the degree to which people can be locked up for technical parole violations. So Issa Abdul-Karim has this parole violation. What happens to him?

He's taken to Rikers, and he's put into intake, where he spends 10 days in the intake pens. These are large cages with lots of people in them, moving in and out. A really chaotic situation. You know, in each of these cells, there's a single toilet. They're often not working, and very few people, guards included, are wearing masks. As a number of people pointed out to me, these are difficult environments in which a lot of stressed people are forced to interact with each other and where hierarchies are sort of quick to develop. And Isa Abdelkarim was a man in a wheelchair in that environment and so was particularly vulnerable. But in addition

to all of that, he contracted COVID while he was in intake. So he was taken out of intake and brought to a medical clinic for treatment where he appeared to recover fairly well from COVID and was placed into a more permanent housing unit. And it was there that he suffered an acute breathing attack. And even though he received CPR from people who were nearby, he died before the ambulance arrived. Precisely what precipitated the attack that killed him is unclear. Talking to medical staff on Rikers Island, I think their sense is that it's entirely possible that his death was a result of the COVID infection that he'd contracted on the island and had been living with. But they also say that, look, even if it wasn't a result of

the COVID he got at Rikers, his body had been extremely stressed by the 10 days that he spent on the intake wards. And that for an older person, you know, with underlying conditions, that in itself can precipitate something like this. Is Isa Abdul-Karim's death raising questions about how Rikers is handling the pandemic? The way that Rikers is handling the pandemic has been an ongoing topic since the pandemic first appeared in New York. It's certainly not the only cause of the crisis that Rikers is in right now. There is a staffing problem at Rikers.

Rikers actually has the highest staff-to-incarcerated-person ratio of virtually any jail in the country. So it's not that there aren't enough people on staff to safely run Rikers, it's that an enormous number of them are calling in sick or not calling in sick, but just being absent without leave. 25 plus hours working straight, no meal breaks, no. And then they wonder why we're not coming to work, why offices are AWOL, assaults on my members are through the roof. I think some of that may have had its origin in the problem of COVID in jail and guards not feeling like they want to be in that environment. But it certainly snowballed because as guards sick out, their colleagues find themselves having to work double shifts, triple shifts. I've heard of quadruple shifts. And they're doing that on housing units where usually there are maybe two

or three guards and now they're the only one. This has become modern day slavery for us. And it's unfortunate for me to say that. And we're the largest law enforcement minority union in the city of New York. Is that why we're getting treated this way? Is there accountability for guards who aren't showing up to work or are they abusing a sick leave policy? The systems of accountability for guards who call in sick that do exist have not been working. The federal monitor who oversees the way Rikers is run has been really critical of the way the Department of Corrections has been managing that problem. In recent weeks, one of the steps that

the mayor and the city government have pledged to take is to tighten up the policies that govern under what conditions guards can call in sick. The workers who are doing the right thing, that's the vast majority who are standing by each other, they are getting additional help, additional incentives. The ones who are not showing up are being suspended. What about some of the other factors behind the crisis at Rikers right now? You know, combine this with the physical deterioration of the plant at Rikers. There were something like 1,000 doors, cell doors, unit doors, which don't close properly. In recent days, about half of those have been repaired.

But they're still working on that. So it's an unsafe place. Stabbings and slashings have gone up. A lot of that is directed by inmates against other inmates. A lot of it is also directed against guards, and so guards are fearful of their safety. Another factor is that after years of steady decline, the population of Rikers has actually been going up quite considerably over the last year and a half. It's nearly doubled in the last year.

At the same time that you have fewer and fewer people actually staffing the jail, you have the population really zooming up. You know, you mentioned when Isa Abdul-Karim was in Rikers the first time, he didn't have anywhere to go to the bathroom. And he was also somebody who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and also placed in solitary confinement. That seems to suggest that there's a pretty dire lack of medical care or even just like basic resources if that's happening? Guards control access to medical care because medical professionals don't come to the units to provide care for the most part. Incarcerated people are brought from wherever they're being held to medical clinics. And so to do that, you need a guard to accompany

you. That means that incarcerated people are vulnerable on a couple of fronts. First of all, it means that if the guards don't want to take you to your medical appointment, they can choose not to as a form of retaliation. That's what's alleged in Karim's lawsuit. It also means that when there aren't enough guards to adequately staff a facility, they can legitimately be shorthanded and just not have the person power to take you to your medical appointment. Does Isa Abdul-Karim's family blame Rikers Island for his death? His cousin was really still in shock when I talked to him about Karim's death

and was saying that he still hasn't had the heart to tell his son what happened, that his son is sort of asking for Isa, and he said that Isa, you know, Isa can't talk right now, and that he's sick. And in response, his son has been reciting the prayers that Isa taught him. His family is devastated. You know, they're really clear that Isa had a difficult life in many respects, but that he bore it with a tremendous amount of strength. They feel that he was not served by everything that happened to him in his contacts with the criminal justice system.

We reached out to New York City's Department of Correction for comment on this story. They shared this statement from the commissioner, Vincent Chiraldi. Quote, Providing for the safety of incarcerated people is our core mission, and I am heartbroken that we have seen yet another death of a human being entrusted to our care. The causes of this death, so far, appear to be natural, End quote. The department went on to say that the staffing shortage at Rikers Island is a nationwide issue that is also playing out in jails across the country.

Coming up, how Rikers Island became the problem to its own solution. To be continued... and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. Thank you. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Nick, how did a place like Rikers Island even come to be? Rikers is an island that sits off of the edge of Queens in the East River. It was a small farm holding for a while.

Then it sort of served as a city dump. And then in the 30s, it was the new home for New York City jails. And at the time, it was sort of heralded as the sparkling new forward-thinking progressive detention center that was going to make things much better than the conditions under which people had been being held, which at the landfill of actual garbage or other kinds of fill. So the stability of the buildings is not everything you'd want it to be. It's prone to flooding. In general, the condition of the buildings has only gotten worse over time. And when does it go from the answer to the problems in New York City's jails to a problem in and of itself? If you track Rikers through sort of the era of mass incarceration, beginning in the back half of the last century, and especially the crack epidemic and the drug wars, Rikers became quite crowded and developed a reputation for extreme violence.

New York City's Rikers Island has long had a reputation as one of the roughest, toughest, meanest jails in America. More than 2,000 inmate slashings and stabbings and eight inmate homicides. One of the tactics that guards used to try to keep control over the situations was sort of delegating certain inmates to serve as physical enforcers to fight people and hurt them and cut them up. Suicide was such a problem that jail officials took to hiring inmates to sort of keep an eye on their units and make sure nobody was trying to hang themselves

or do something like that. It got to a point in 2014 where Preet Bharara, who was then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued a really scathing report that described Rikers as a place more inspired by Lord of the Flies than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention. The level of violence, of inmate-on-inmate violence, and the level of use of force that

we saw at Rikers, in the words of our consultant, our expert, was more than he had ever seen at any other place. That report especially gave momentum to this sort of nascent movement that called for closing Rikers. How is that supposed to happen? I mean, we've talked on this show about what an international embarrassment and moral stain Guantanamo Bay has been for the U.S., and U.S. presidents still haven't been able to shut it down. So did the effort to shut down something like Rikers get any real traction?

The germ of this movement came out of a sort of a blue-ribbon commission that was chaired by Jonathan Lipman, who's the former chief judge for New York. Rikers Island is a blot on the soul of our city. And what the Lipman commission put together was they said part of the problem with Rikers is that it's on an island, right? Nobody can see what's going on there. It's out of sight and out of mind. It's the hole that we throw, you know, the human manifestations of our social problems into so we don't have to look at them. It was nice when I couldn't go to sleep because all I thought about was when I go home, what would be the first thing I would do?

There was times when I had cried myself to sleep. This was also right after the death of Kalief Browder. This is a kid who was held in Rikers for years on the accusation that he stole a backpack and really helped launch a conversation about the ways that money bail contributes to people being locked up pre-trial and in ways that really punishes people who don't have money, that ties criminal outcomes to poverty. And it's also really hard

to get from Rikers to your court appearances because it's a long drive through the middle of Queens. So they said, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller number of people locked up in neighborhood jails that are right next to the courthouses in each borough of New York City. The City Planning Commission of New York voting overwhelmingly to open four replacement jails for the Rikers Island Jail Complex. So if we could rehab those or build new jails in the boroughs, near the courthouses, so that it's easy to get to your court appearances, so that these people are in their communities,

where it's easy for them to maintain contact with their families, so that the stresses of incarceration that are often so damaging to people when they're locked up can be mitigated, wouldn't that be better? That vision involved reducing the number of people locked up at any given time in New York City jails. But they set that target and they said, look, this is achievable. The Lipman Commission said, look, if we're holding fewer people on bail, we can close Rikers, put people in these smaller,

better maintained, newer, better staffed, more humane local jails. So that was the plan. And how does that plan go? Well, it's interesting. It met resistance from a number of quarters. On the one hand, it met resistance from a newly ascendant abolitionist movement that said, wait a minute, you're closing one jail to open other jails? No new jails! No new jails! The problem here is that jails are bad for people, and they don't actually solve the problems that they purport to solve.

If they build new jails, they'll just move the culture of violence to a new location. So that was sort of a challenge from the left. The real problem, I think, that the plan faced was that it never really had particular buy-in from the mayor of New York. And we're talking about the progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio. That's right. So de Blasio signed on to this plan, but I think it's fair to say that his enthusiasm for it was never, like, overwhelming. And the time frame for the closure of Rikers

has always sort of stayed just over the horizon. It will take many years. It will take many tough decisions along the way. But it will happen. And certainly long after Mayor de Blasio's term is going to be over. So the result is that whenever concerns about conditions on Rikers have arisen over the last years, the de Blasio administration's response has been, yeah, it's bad. That's why we've got to close Rikers in the future when I'm not mayor. The plan also has been hampered by nimbyism from people in the boroughs who are saying, don't build a new jail next to my property. It's going to mess up my property values and

diminish my quality of life. So that also has been a challenge that people are still working to overcome. I think the most alarming thing to people who are watching right now is that the plan to close Rikers was always dependent on reducing the population of people locked up in jail at any given time in New York City. So in just three years, overall crime is down 9%. If we can continue on that trajectory, it will allow us to get off of Rikers Island. So job one is to continue the work of reducing crime. Due in part to declining crime rates, and due also to some criminal justice reforms that have been enacted in recent years,

the population of Rikers has been declining pretty steadily and declined even further two years ago after the state legislature enacted a series of reforms to the bail law, basically making it harder for judges to lock people up pre-trial based on how much money they have. But then they hit a wall. Assembly Republicans, they called for complete removal of the law this morning, speaking alongside two women who police say lost loved ones to people who were released without bail. That legislation generated an enormous and coordinated backlash, advanced by this alliance between, on the one hand, state Republican politicians who saw an opportunity to sort of hang this around Democrats' necks and paint them as soft on crime.

What kind of response do we see from police unions, correctional officers, and just the broader law enforcement community? So very quickly, even before the laws go into effect, you started to see police unions, police departments, senior police officials raising red flags and saying, this is a terrible idea. If you make it harder for us to lock people up, it's going to take us back to the battle days of crime ridden New York City in the 70s and 80s.

You know, one of the loudest voices in all of this was Dermot Shea, the commissioner of the NYPD. We cannot be just chasing our tail, catch and release, catch and release. This message sort of worked in concert with state Republicans who saw an opportunity to land a blow against the Democratic Party going into the 2020 election. And so this lasted for several months. And so the state Democrats actually folded and they said, yeah, you're right, maybe we were a little too hasty there. We're going to roll back some of these reforms that we've enacted and we're going to carve out a number of areas where we're actually

going to make it easier for judges to lock people up pretrial. So was what the NYPD was saying about bail reform, that it would basically cause a spike in crime, was that actually in the data? No, in fact, there's really solid data saying that there's no relationship there. What did happen, you know, crime went down in 2020 overall in New York City. Some varieties of violent crime went up, including shootings, but that's true for cities across the country. It's a trend that a lot of people attribute to social consequences of the pandemic. There's no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with bail reform. Part of the messaging that's been coming out of the NYPD in all of this has been, crime is going up, and it's going up because judges won't lock people up. Judges are always susceptible to

this sort of one-way ratchet of political pressure where, when a judge is considering whether or not to release someone before their trial or to send them to jail, they have to weigh the risk that if they let this person out on the street, if they kill a white lady the next day, that judge is going to be on the cover of the New York Post, you know, blamed for being soft on crime and for letting this happen. And there really isn't any sort of corresponding risk or political pressure nudging them in the other direction. So it's always safer for a judge to just lock someone up. Then they don't have to worry about that outcome. And so the result is that the population of Rikers has nearly doubled in the last year. If reports of a crime increase made lawmakers backtrack on reforms. Could these headlines about basically a humanitarian crisis at Rikers Island reinvigorate the effort to close it?

Fear of crime and disorder has been a much more powerful political force than the desire for actual justice or the humane treatment of the people we're locking up. Politicians do things because there is a voting constituency that they need to be afraid of, or whose votes they need to stay in office. And it's not clear to me that the constituency of people who are incarcerated, their families, people who care about how they're actually treated, represents a large enough constituency that it's actually something that politicians are going to commit themselves to responding to. But we also saw one of the longest protest movements in history over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I mean, does that give you any indication that there's a large enough force on the ground right now that will push lawmakers to follow through on this promise to close Rikers? I spent last summer in the streets reporting on those

protests in New York and got knocked around a certain amount in the course of it. And then I watched the city government respond with some really empty gestures. I think it is significant. I think it's always significant when that many people get together in the streets. I think what people are still figuring out is how to harness that energy into something that actually compels political action, because there are enormous entrenched interests that are opposed to changing anything about this. I think a lot of minds were changed in the protests of last summer, and I think a lot of people woke up to some of the realities of how policing and incarceration work in this country.

But I think that hasn't been translated yet into the kind of mass movement that commands political responsiveness. Nick Pinto is a journalist living in Brooklyn. You can find his reporting on Issa Abdul-Garim and Rikers Island at TheIntercept.com. Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain. I'm Halima Shah, filling in for Sean Ramosfirm. It's Today Explained. you