Rikers and the Limits of Prison Reform

After a federal investigation discovered a “deep-seated culture of violence” against teenage inmates at Rikers, the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued the City of New York an ultimatum: reform Rikers within 49 days, or face a federal lawsuit. Yet despite pressure from the courts, media, mayor, and public, the pace of reform has been agonizingly slow for the 11,500 inmates at Rikers; this weak response casts major doubts on the possibility of any successful reform in the justice system. While the story of Rikers reveals that a pernicious lack of accountability threatens reforms, the limits of reform can, in large part, be traced back to a single man: Norman Seabrook.
“You push me, I push back,” Seabrook, president of the Correction Officer’s Benevolent Association, stated in an interview with the New York Times. “This jail belongs to us.” While other public figures have coalesced around a consensus to reduce solitary confinement for juveniles, Mr. Seabrook has advocated increasing it. While the corrections commissioner Joseph Ponte successfully worked with unions to create reform at his previous position in Maine, the union there was one-fifteenth the size of New York’s. Mr. Seabrook ranks among the most powerful union leaders in the state.
“There is no question in my mind that Norman Seabrook and the correction officer’s union is a very significant, if not the most significant, factor impeding progress in how the jail is managed,” Mr. Schindler commented. “I’m someone who is very supportive of the labor movement, but unions are often clinging to the status quo and resistant to changes that would take them out of a comfort zone. The union’s leadership may hold views that are not always representative of the majority of the union members. Often what they are more representative of is a vocal and upset minority,” he added.
Although the union continues to obstruct reforms, the government itself has failed to craft effective policies and respond effectively. “The correctional union has been very resistant, but they’ve also been set up to fail,” Mr. Schindler stated. “When you place young people in adult facilities, it’s a recipe for disaster because you’re exacerbating an already challenging situation, and you’re oftentimes—and this is definitely the case in New York City—giving the task of supervising those young people to correctional officers who are not trained to deal with adolescents.”
But perhaps most importantly, the administration has been painfully slow to remove juveniles from Rikers. Although the corrections commissioner Joseph Ponte has publicly stated that he would not oppose moving juveniles from Rikers, he has argued that other juvenile facilities are too small and too disorganized to provide therapeutic programing. However, Mr. Schindler suggested that the commissioner could be acting more decisively. “I understand from talking to other folks in New York that there are places including a number of juvenile facilities that are under capacity where they can move the young people relatively soon,” he stated. This bureaucratic resistance poses a major hurdle for reforms.
A final barrier is that the city has yet to develop meaningful procedures for holding guards accountable. Even after a judge found six correction officers guilty of beating an inmate, the maximum sentence she could issue was recommending that they be fired. “In the era of mass incarceration prison and jails operate in a kind of veil,” Professor Hinton stated. “They have their own trial system. They have their own system of reprimands for the guards. And it creates a very different kind of means through which people maintain authority.” Installing 200 new security cameras at Rikers is a good start, but ultimately the footage will be useless if abuses are not punished reliably, swiftly, and meaningfully.
However, the story of Rikers suggests that reform is limited in a more serious sense. “Rikers is a pretty good example that things have to be so bad and so publicly salient for anything to happen,” Ms. Chang commented. Rikers has periodically surfaced in the news when the abuses become so egregious that they are impossible to ignore. In 2009, for instance, the New York Times condemned Rikers guards for encouraging violence among inmates. Five years later, here we are again. This time around, however, the city has responded with more significant reforms than ever before.
“My hope is that there’s enough sustained attention and commitment, but I’m not openly optimistic,” Mr. Schindler said. “If we as communities, as responsible stakeholders, as people in decision-making positions are only going to respond in such a way that it reduces this horrible situation to a barely acceptable level, shame on us.”
This article is the final in a three-part series on Rikers prison system. You can find the first here and second here.
Image credit: Flickr / Krystian Olszanski