Can Zohran Mamdani’s New Commissioner Solve the Problem of Rikers?
To get to Rikers Island, you have to cross a narrow bridge; it has a hump in the middle, which means that, from either end, the other side is invisible. Stanley Richards, the new commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, pointed this out to me before my first visit to the island. “When you get to the bottom,” he said, “the past, the outside, is gone.” This was particularly true on the rainy evening I arrived in March: mist obscured even the air-traffic-control towers at LaGuardia Airport, just to the east of the bridge, where flights take off and land within earshot of the island’s ten jails.
Today, Rikers incarcerates approximately sixty-seven hundred people—most of whom are in pretrial detention, others who are serving terms of less than a year—in facilities that are within New York City while also being out of sight and largely out of reach. At its height, in the eighties and the nineties, the four-hundred-and-thirteen-acre island housed roughly three times as many people as it does now. Yet, even as its population has contracted, the problem Rikers presents has grown. In recent years, the island’s deteriorating infrastructure has been a backdrop for violence, neglect, and death; a federal judge has deemed its conditions unconstitutional. It’s a place that’s often characterized as a “human-rights crisis.” One night early this spring, however, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, on Rikers Island, served as the setting for something else—dinner with the Mayor.
In anticipation of Zohran Mamdani’s appearance, the Otis Bantum gymnasium had been decorated with the makeshift festivity of a school dance. Arches of black and yellow balloons floated over tables set with meals in plastic boxes. Mamdani had spent the preceding weeks observing Ramadan alongside members of the city’s Muslim communities, breaking fast in iftar gatherings with union members or content creators. That night he would do so with the people who lived and worked on Rikers. At the far end of the gym, incarcerated men in tan uniforms knelt to pray. The Mayor, after arriving with his chief of staff and first deputy mayor, zipped off a pair of ankle boots and joined the men on the floor. The new commissioner—a tall, solid man with a neat beard—looked on from the edge of the crowd.
Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to hold the job of commissioner. He was also the first such first deputy commissioner five years ago and, prior to that, the first such member of the city’s Board of Correction. He spent decades as a leader at the Fortune Society, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting people returning from prison and to developing alternatives to incarceration. As Mamdani works out his approach to criminal justice, his appointment of Richards suggests a desire for a political counterweight to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a tough-on-crime scion of the establishment.
Richards takes office at a uniquely challenging moment. Despite the balloons in the gym, Rikers is in an ongoing crisis with a looming deadline. Under a law passed in 2019, the complex of jails must close by 2027, a timeline now widely acknowledged as impossible. Richards’s mandate from Mamdani is not only to move toward shuttering Rikers and opening the (still largely unbuilt) borough-based jails that are supposed to take its place—but to improve conditions in existing facilities, where, already this year, two people have died. “What I really appreciated about Mayor Mamdani, when I interviewed for this, was that the conversation was about City Hall providing the resources and support for us to do the work that’s necessary,” Richards told me. (Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, had questioned the plan to close Rikers and resisted federal efforts to intervene.) The aim is to transition to new jails—the first of which, on Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, is now scheduled for completion in 2029—and also, more broadly, to “create a system that is centered on the humanity of those who are sent to us and those who work here.” Richards will have to do so while sharing his authority with a so-called remediation manager, who, the courts announced last year, will have sweeping power over staffing and operations at Rikers. Early this year, a federal judge appointed a former C.I.A. officer named Nicholas Deml to the role. “We’ve had great conversations,” Richards said, of Deml. “It’s going to be a partnership.” In the gym, the two of them chatted amiably as the Mayor prayed.
Richards is capable of projecting calm even in a dire situation. “I’m a Christian,” Richards had told me a few weeks earlier. “My total experience has prepared me for this moment.” Faith became a central part of his life in the decades since he left prison. “This appointment, I hope, gives others hope and faith that things and life could be different.”
It was a theme he returned to in the Otis Bantum gym, where Richards, the Mayor, and the City Council member Yusef Salaam—one of five young men wrongfully convicted in the Central Park jogger case—all delivered brief remarks as the crowd of corrections officers and incarcerated men ate their meals. “Hold on to your faith,” Richards told the audience. “Hold on to your faith in times of uncertainty.” The Mayor, after making a speech about how incarcerated New Yorkers are also “a part of the fabric of New York,” announced his intention to shake hands with everyone present, and he and Richards began to do just that.
Mamdani, during the past nine months, has moved through the city while surrounded by the parasocial ripples of celebrity, a phenomenon rare in municipal government. Yet, on Rikers, Richards’s presence seemed to inspire an equivalent degree of intensity. It wasn’t the giddiness of proximity to fame; it was a more private sense of urgency and attention, and it matched the commissioner’s pastoral understanding of his role. At the iftar, I overheard a reporter being corrected after using the term “inmate”—the current language, a corrections staffer told him, was “PIC,” for “person in custody.” Richards, going further, prefers to speak of “people in our care.” He progressed slowly through the rows of men seated in the gymnasium, offering advice and assurances. “I’m going to be touring,” he said. “I’m going to be around.”
“I might be going away for twenty-five years,” a man in a gray D.O.C. jumpsuit told Richards, who stopped to talk to him.
“It’s not your life,” Richards told him. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
Selwyn Fergus, who serves as the senior adviser to the commissioner at the D.O.C., met Richards when they were third graders in the Bronx. “Back then, we were both part of the Baby Spades, a division of the Black Spades,” Fergus told me. He said that he’d been drawn to the gang out of a desire for belonging, after arriving as an immigrant from Trinidad. “There was this one guy that used to pick on me,” Fergus said. “One day, Stan beat the guy up. He never came back to school.” Richards’s mother died when he was ten, and he had a chaotic childhood; he became involved in drugs and was first arrested in 1976, at age fifteen. By the late eighties, he was serving time for armed robbery.
Today, Richards speaks about his four and a half years in prison, during which he completed an associate’s degree in social science and ran a pre-release center that helped others get ready for life outside, as a period when he first recognized the kind of work he wanted to do. When he was released, he applied for jobs at nonprofits that focussed on the transition to civilian life, only to be told that he lacked the requisite experience. “Lived experience” did not, at the time, have much currency. “Formerly incarcerated people were pariahs,” Vincent Schiraldi, a corrections commissioner under Bill de Blasio, told me. Schiraldi has been a longtime advocate for criminal-justice reform in his work both for government and at N.G.O.s. For much of his career, he said, people with Richards’s background “were not at the table,” even among reformers. “They were not running nonprofits. They were not a voice that you would want to testify on a bill.”
The Fortune Society was the only place to make Richards an offer. In 1991, the year of his release, he started there as a reëntry counselor. JoAnne Page, the organization’s president and C.E.O., had hired him; she remembers Richards talking about how, while in prison, “he had gone from being Big Stan of the Bronx to being a college student.” At the time, the group had around two dozen employees and was struggling for financial stability. Richards’s role grew as the organization did, and he eventually became Page’s successor as C.E.O. Today, the Fortune Society has about six hundred employees and a budget of more than ninety million dollars.
In the nineties, when someone was released from Rikers, the D.O.C.’s standard practice was to bus them to Queens Plaza, in Long Island City, where they would be dropped off, usually in the middle of the night. “And, at that time, Queens Plaza was a hot mess,” Richards told me. The area was rife with drugs and sex work. He and Page arranged to rent a table at a doughnut shop near the spot where the Rikers bus pulled up; there, starting in the early two-thousands, they greeted new arrivals, gave them food, and offered to help connect them with services. (“Feeding people builds trust,” Page said.)
Today, Richards’s office on Rikers is situated in a small former chapel with a red brick steeple, across a stretch of lawn from the jail where he was once held in solitary. “It’s a reminder of what’s hopeful and what’s possible,” he said, of the view outside his office. “That a man from the South Bronx, who spent time on this island, could walk past this building as a five-star commissioner.”
When Richards began his career in criminal-justice advocacy, the idea of closing Rikers Island would have been a radical fantasy. Its evolution into a mainstream proposition and a legal necessity has been swift and remarkable. “I don’t think data by itself moves the needle,” Richards said. Such a shift in public opinion required storytelling and a human connection. “When you see what happened with the Close Rikers movement,” he went on, “it was the face of Kalief Browder.” A teen-ager who spent three years on the island without a trial, for allegedly stealing a backpack, Browder (whose story Jennifer Gonnerman reported in 2014) became a flash point for outrage over conditions there—omnipresent violence, abuse by guards, interminable court delays. Browder spent almost two years of his time on Rikers in solitary confinement, an ordeal with enduring effects; in 2015, two years after the charges against him were dropped and he returned home to his family, he died by suicide. “When people see Kalief Browder,” Richards told me, “they can see their brother, they can see their family.” That year also brought the resolution of Nunez v. City of New York, a class-action suit originally filed in 2012, alleging excessive force in city jails, after which the city agreed to appoint a federal monitor, impose new rules on guards, and end solitary confinement for prisoners under the age of eighteen, among other reforms.
The following year, the City Council called for an independent commission to advise on overhauling the city’s criminal-justice system; it was chaired by Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, and Richards became a member. “Stanley was probably Lippman’s go-to person,” Michael Jacobson, a former D.O.C. commissioner who was also part of the group, told me. “The commission itself pretty quickly came to a consensus that Rikers should close, it should be shrunk, and there should be these borough-based jails. But, in the real world, there was not a huge political consensus around this.” Richards’s personal experience and his years with the Fortune Society had given him the necessary credibility, with both activists and institutions, to help win commitment for the committee’s vision.
His ability to move between worlds was part of what led Schiraldi to hire Richards as his first deputy, in June, 2021, when Schiraldi was commissioner at the D.O.C. “He’s always understood that you can’t have this advocacy notion that everyone who works in the system is a bad guy,” Schiraldi told me. With corrections officers in particular, “it helped and hurt that he had been incarcerated,” Schiraldi said. He remembers being invited to a golf club in New Jersey to address a gathering of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association; after he spoke, one of the union reps in attendance “angrily raised the issue of me hiring Stanley,” Schiraldi said. Before Schiraldi could respond, a second rep piped up in Richards’s defense. “Oh, no, you gotta meet this guy!” Schiraldi remembers her saying. “He’s O.K.!” Of course, not all officers were readily convinced. “They would say things like ‘We can’t wait to see you leave in handcuffs,’ ” Fergus recalled, of that era. “They said terrible things.”
Schiraldi oversaw a particularly difficult period on Rikers. Although the first months of the pandemic were terrifying—social distancing was impossible in jail—they also inspired a push toward decarceration, and about fifteen hundred people left Rikers in the spring of 2020. But the following year, as the pandemic wore on and crime rates ticked up, the politics of criminal justice in the city shifted toward law-and-order anxiety, even as new waves of COVID infection struck the jails. Courts were backed up, the jail population rose once again, and absenteeism became rampant among corrections officers. Those who did show up found themselves working double, even triple, shifts. The commissioner and his staff tried to boost morale by offering a car service and sandwiches: “Stanley and I were walking around handing out heroes,” Schiraldi told me. Yet such gestures failed to meet the scale of the problem.
That fall, a group of elected officials (including Mamdani, then a State Assembly member) visited Rikers, after which they issued a statement decrying the “illegal, deadly conditions” they had witnessed, which included overcrowding and an intake system “in shambles.” The group reported that people had been locked “in showers amidst their own feces and urine, in suicide watch units without actual professional supervision, and in other forms of de facto solitary confinement.” Fifteen people jailed at Rikers died that year, the beginning of an uptick toward the deadliest annual figures in almost a decade. After de Blasio left office, at the end of 2021, Adams installed his own appointees at the Department of Correction, and Richards returned to the Fortune Society.
Since becoming commissioner himself, Richards has been keen to emphasize his desire to partner with Rikers staff and unions. “The lesson I learned was that you approach the work in a collaborative way that allows space for differences of strategy but alignment of goal,” he told me. The goal, here, was safety. “The health or pathology of the way our officers are treated is going to be reflected in the way they treat the people in our care.” Staff on Rikers tend to come from the same communities as the people incarcerated, Richards pointed out, and inhabit the same environments. “When you look at Rikers and you talk about the isolation, the trauma—it applies to officers,” he said. (At least one study has suggested that the prevalence of P.T.S.D. among prison officers exceeds that among veterans or the police.) Richards imagines a system in which incentives—whether longer visits for incarcerated people or enhanced pay for officers working steady posts—cut down on violence, an approach that, he told me, has seen success in San Francisco. Richards has also said he hopes to fill roughly thirteen hundred vacant jobs.
The new commissioner faces the daunting task of improving the existing jail while planning for a world without it. “We’re at a boiling point,” Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of the think tank Vital City and the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice under de Blasio, told me. “Right now, violence is so high that getting back to the 2015 levels, when the consent decree was put in—that would be a dream.” But she also thought that the circumstances presented an opportunity. “We have a team that’s uniquely suited to trying to get this done.”
The department achieved a small step toward a post-Rikers future this spring, with the announcement that it would open a long-delayed unit at Bellevue Hospital, to house some of the jail’s most medically vulnerable detainees. And, last month, Mamdani appointed a Close Rikers czar, Dana Kaplan, who will oversee the effort from City Hall.
Just as the Mayor himself has become a figure who transcends city politics, Richards sees the task ahead as one that will have wider implications. “Closing Rikers is not just a local or state conversation—it’s a national conversation,” he told me. “New York is where big things happen.” ♦