Horrors at Rikers

The Horrors Keep Coming at Rikers

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 23, 2015 NYT

Nearly a year has passed since Mayor Bill de Blasio installed Joseph Ponte as his correction commissioner and charged him with reforming the house-of-horrors city jail system at Rikers Island, where guards have routinely beaten inmates bloody as a matter of course. The mayor has since shaken up the jail system’s management team, committed new resources to the reform project and pledged to make cleaning up the jails a top priority.

It is thus deeply disturbing to learn that savage acts of violence against inmates have continued mostly unchecked since the de Blasio administration took office.

An investigation by Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz of The Times, published on Sunday, identified 62 cases in which inmates were seriously injured by corrections officers between August and January, even as city and federal officials focused on reducing violence against inmates at Rikers.

This is clear evidence that the climate at Rikers has not changed and is unlikely to get better until disciplinary practices are radically improved and bad actors among the correction officers are driven out from the system.
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