Fifteen people at Rikers died in 2021. These are their stories.

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New York Magazine
@NYMag
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Dec 27, 2021
Fifteen people at Rikers died in 2021. These are their stories. @blissbroyard and @lriordanseville report https://nym.ag/32m5TC4
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New York Magazine
@NYMag
Over the past two months, @blissbroyard and @lriordanseville talked to family, friends, attorneys, city officials, correctional staff, doctors, and incarcerated men to learn about the lives of those who have died — and how those lives came to an end http://nym.ag/32m5TC4

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rikers-inmates-died-2021.html

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2021 began with Rikers Island in a miserable state, with every indication that conditions would soon get much worse. COVID was spiking. The staff was depleted, and the jail was getting more crowded. In January, its population rose above 5,000 — an increase of more than 25 percent from the spring of 2020. After nearly two years without a suicide at the facility, a man hanged himself before the month was out. A gruesome incident followed in early March, then another suicide, then an overdose. The people incarcerated at Rikers continued to die at such a steady rate that the agency charged with investigating deaths in custody couldn’t keep up.

Rikers is a complex of jails, not a prison. A small number of people are serving short sentences for misdemeanors or parole violations, but the vast majority are waiting for trial. Many are there because they can’t make bail. Ninety percent are Black or brown. Their alleged offenses range from graffiti and shoplifting to rape and murder. They are innocent until proven guilty, though no one treats them that way. The city spends an annual $550,000 per incarcerated person, compared with $28,000 per student in its public schools, for conditions that a court-ordered monitor described as “rife with violence and disorder.”

On March 17, an officer named Timothy Hodges testified to the Board of Correction, the body that oversees Rikers, that the jail was facing a personnel crisis and could not provide a basic standard of care. “We’re trying to point out to upper management and to additional people like you that we’re doing our best and we’re trying to make this work,” said Hodges. But the staff shortages, he predicted, would lead to chaos.

In May, officials were forced to lock down the island’s largest jail, the Anna M. Kross Center, which houses those with mental illness, because too many posts were unmanned. Later that month, the Department of Correction commissioner resigned hours before a federal monitor assigned to oversee Rikers issued a scathing report. Men were sleeping on the floor of intake cells and defecating in plastic bags. Violence was rife, inflicted by inmates and guards alike. Emergency “probe teams,” with officers dressed in riot gear and wielding batons and pepper spray, regularly burst in to suppress disturbances. Banging their heads against walls, slashing their wrists, attempting suicide — detainees were harming themselves at the highest rate in five years.

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