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“It’s a pressure cooker”: Rikers Island, New York’s cursed prison, riddled with drugs and violence
The problems reached such a level that federal authorities took control of the notorious prison complex from New York City. Slated for closure, it still holds nearly 7,000 inmates.
“New York’s Boldest.”
In the parking lot of the Rikers Island prison complex, old murals bear the slogan of the Department of Correction (D.O.C.), New York’s prison authority. The faded paint blends perfectly into this backdrop of armored vehicles, barbed wire, and wild grass. To the east, a thin stretch of sea separates the penitentiary from LaGuardia Airport, whose runway ends a hundred meters from the fence. Farther west, the prosperous and slender island of Manhattan seems to avert the gaze of its unfortunate alter ego.
The four nights Dominique Strauss-Kahn spent in the West Facility, a building reserved for celebrity inmates, were enough to imprint Rikers Island on the collective unconscious. During his stay, DSK benefited from special conditions: a cell, an exercise room, and a private shower. Harvey Weinstein now enjoys the same preferential treatment. An old three-lane bridge from Queens is the only barrier connecting New York City to Rikers. Of the 6,800 inmates currently incarcerated, nearly 6,000 are in pretrial detention, meaning they have not yet been sentenced. But the chronic backlog in the criminal justice system prolongs their wait for months, sometimes years. Drug smuggling, violence, and misdemeanors have long been commonplace, to the point of no longer making headlines. But the situation appears to have degenerated so much that on May 13, a federal judge ordered the D.O.C. to relinquish management of the facility. It will be entrusted to an independent monitor, the “remediation manager,” whose identity remains unknown. This is a first step in trying to right a sinking ship, and a serious setback for Mayor Eric Adams, who had made Rikers’ recovery a priority.
In the queue for inmate visits this Saturday morning, there were many women. Some dressed up for the visiting room, wearing high heels and eyelash extensions. The fact that Rikers management is changing hands is the least of their worries. Between two ear-piercing plane takeoffs, we instead ask our unfortunate neighbors, “What’s the line for the EMTC building?”, “Why don’t we give them standby tickets right after getting off the bus, like before Covid?”, or “Why is this group going before us?” » At the first security gate, posters depicting inmates being slashed with knives warn: “This is what can happen to your loved ones if you smuggle drugs and razor blades into the facility.” This year, five people have already died at Rikers, as many as in all of 2024. Since Adams took office in 2021, the total number of deaths has risen to 38. But Rikers has been in decline for much longer. The federal judge’s decision comes in the long wake of the “Nunez affair”: a lawsuit initiated fourteen years ago after several juvenile detainees were beaten by guards in corners, out of view of surveillance cameras.
The D.O.C. has little control over its own officers. Between January and June 2024, only 16% of the approximately 1,000 investigations into possible excessive use of force were completed on time*. Of these, only 37 resulted in disciplinary sanctions. Corruption and drug trafficking scandals involving guards are recurrent: in 2023, a body scanner was even installed at the entrance to monitor officers. Added to this is the scourge of new synthetic drugs, sprayed on letters, postcards, or even children’s drawings addressed to inmates. Cut into thin strips, these fentanyl-scented papers are sold for smoking. An A4 sheet could bring in up to $1,500, according to one inmate. Last year, guards administered more than 227 doses of Narcan, the fentanyl antidote, according to D.O.C. data.
“Rikers is a pressure cooker,” another former inmate explained to Le Figaro. “In other prisons, you do your time, you can follow programs, and get ahead a bit… At Rikers, you wait. You eat shit, except on Thursdays and Sundays, which are chicken days. Cash is forbidden. Everything goes through a plastic card that has to be reloaded. If you have cash on you, the guards beat you up. If you’re rich, you can buy cookies, drugs, a phone. The guards let it happen to keep the peace. What makes Rikers more violent are the young people awaiting trial; they’re on edge.”
While the facility is fraught with problems, a lack of resources or staffing isn’t one of them. With nearly 5,000 officers for 6,800 inmates, or almost one guard for every person, Rikers is by far the best-equipped prison in the United States. Another unbelievable figure: New York City spends more than $500,000 per inmate each year. A national record. The ticket to a more than comfortable lifestyle in Manhattan. Yet, at Rikers, inmates continue to be deprived of adequate food or medical care.
The powerful prison guards’ union has been criticized by various investigative commissions for its opaque management of schedules, its nepotism, and a particularly permissive sick leave system, which allows the least experienced guards to do the dirty work. “It’s also the structure of the building that dictates the distribution of staff. There are too many at Rikers because of the architecture,” says Stanley Richards of the Fortune Society, a non-profit organization that supports former inmates in their reintegration. Mr. Richards doesn’t dispute the deep-seated failings plaguing the institution, but also emphasizes the intractable physical constraints of the facility, which weigh as much on inmates as on their guards: “All visual axes are truncated. The blind spots are such that two or three officers are required to move a single inmate to the visiting room or the infirmary. The cross-shaped architecture of the main buildings, north, south, east, and west, prevents any individual movement. You need an escort officer, a corridor officer…”
Himself a former inmate at Rikers for robbery, Mr. Richards embodies a trajectory of redemption that Netflix would love. After serving his sentence, he found refuge at the Fortune Society, which offered him his first job thirty years ago. He is now its director. He even briefly served as the D.O.C.’s number two at the end of Bill de Blasio’s term, a first for a former inmate. The waste, he continues, is also due to the advanced state of disrepair of the buildings, which makes daily life dangerous for everyone. “Prisoners make weapons by using them directly on the structure. A piece of metal hanging from a window, a bed frame… Anything can be used as a weapon in a ruin; the options are endless.” Plexiglas, ubiquitous because it protects TVs, light bulbs, and windows, poses a huge problem: “A shard can be easily shaved off. You wrap it in an undershirt to make a handle. You get a sharp dagger, without a trace of metal, and therefore undetectable.”
The final nail in Rikers’ coffin is the ever-increasing proportion of mentally ill inmates. They represent 57% of the population, according to the Lippman Commission, an independent group of 40 experts that called for the facility’s closure. This figure reflects a fundamental shift in American society, which, since the 1970s, has been closing psychiatric hospitals in favor of outpatient care. Many of these patients are also homeless, drug users, and regularly arrested for minor offenses. Unable to pay even a single bail, they end up at Rikers. For hundreds of them, the disorders are so severe that they understand neither the charges against them nor how their trial will unfold. In fact, Rikers is less the largest remand center in the United States than its largest substitute psychiatric hospital. “The perfect recipe for disaster,” summarizes Stanley Richards, the guards being trained in law enforcement, not mental health care.
The doomed prison was scheduled to close in 2027, according to a law passed under the de Blasio administration. Four smaller facilities, spread across each borough of the city, were to replace it, along with more beds for the mentally ill scattered across several hospitals. But two years before the deadline, not a single building has been built. The next mayor of New York will clearly find himself in violation of the law. Failure to comply with the schedule could lead to a series of legal proceedings, including fines, transfer orders to other facilities, and even the early release of inmates.
*From the latest report of the Lippman Commission (March 2025)