On Tuesday, Federal District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who has been overseeing a long-running lawsuit over conditions at Rikers Island, appointed a remediation manager with sweeping powers to stamp out the violations of constitutional rights that have plagued the jail complex.
Swain announced her decision to create the post last May. It’s a step that falls short of putting the complex into federal receivership – putting the federal government in complete control. But the new position comes with concrete executive powers, something a court-appointed monitor, Steve Martin, never had. Swain spent the rest of last year both contending with the never-ending back-and-forth in the litigation, known as Núñez v. the City of New York, while trying to find the right candidate for a monumentally complex job.
The tasks facing the remediation manager include, among other things, reshaping the culture of the city’s Department of Corrections, which Martin found was rooted in apathy, mismanagement and lack of accountability. In his reports to Swain, Martin described that culture as the source of Rikers’ state of constant violence — between detainees, by and against guards, everywhere. Beyond the violence, Martin and journalists like Graham Rayman have documented a lack of proper screening and treatment of inmates for medical and psychological conditions, as well as other dangers, including some stemming from the decayed physical infrastructure of the complex itself. To that end, Swain is giving the remediation manager broad powers to reform policies, staffing practices, contracts with city vendors and even bargaining agreements with corrections unions.
Swain ultimately settled on Nicholas Deml, a onetime CIA clandestine officer and recent Vermont corrections commissioner, for the job. She directed city officials to meet with Deml and work out the details of his role, including staffing and logistics, and submit an agreement to the court within three weeks.
Per THE CITY’s write-up, Deml had a reputation for transparency in Vermont, which has a much smaller corrections system than New York City’s. That would be a welcome shift from the frustrating, reflexive obscurity of the DOC in recent years, particularly under former commissioner Louis Molina (an Eric Adams pal who clearly understood his mission as protecting the administration). Deml was described as unafraid to make big decisions and go head-to-head with the corrections unions – something that probably factored into his appointment, as in New York City, the corrections unions have been a huge obstacle to reform.
All this now leaves quite a litany of people with some authority over the Rikers system, ranging from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, a holdover from the Adams administration, to Deml to Swain herself. But while Swain stopped short of a full federal takeover via receivership, the idea is clearly that the buck now basically stops with Deml when it comes to major decisions. And where successive administrations and their correction commissioners have failed, Deml could succeed at least in part because of his lack of connections to the political centers of power in NYC.
He’s not positioning himself to run for anything, he doesn’t really have a career ladder to climb in our municipal government or local politics, he hasn’t been chosen by a mayor whose interests he has to consider and he’s not likely to leave his job and go work for the union or for a well-connected consultancy. He answers only to Swain, a federal judge with a lifetime appointment, and has been given only one goal – to bring the Rikers situation under control, meaning to make it at least minimally safe for both detainees and staff.
My take on Swain’s reticence to go the extra step of a full-blown receivership is that she is acutely aware of the optics and implications of taking a local department completely out of the hands of elected leaders and vesting it in the court, sidelining the city entirely. I have personally attended one Rikers hearing with Swain and read transcripts of several others along with her orders. What comes across in all of it is that Swain is committed to the idea that any effort to address the issues at Rikers must incorporate city government as a partner, despite its history of recalcitrance and failures. I think there’s probably some tactical thinking here, insofar as the reality of any receivership is that it must eventually end, and that it would be up to the city to maintain its progress in its aftermath.
This new arrangement will present its own challenges, beginning with the question of the DOC commissioner — it’s unclear if Mamdani intends to keep Maginley-Liddie (my sense is he’ll pick someone else). While the commissioner and Deml will in theory be working as partners, it’s obvious that they will have different sets of incentives. I’ll be curious to see if this collaborative gambit really turns out the way that Swain intends, or if it will end up being a situation of constant clashes that will be resolved only when the manager invokes his judicially mandated authority, a scenario that would of course be a waste of time and resources.
The other thing I’m really looking forward to seeing in the relative short term is the exact timelines and remediation plans that the manager will lay out. The history of the Nuñez litigation has been Martin identifying deficiencies, the city rolling out plans to address those deficiencies – and then not really following through. Will Deml turn to some of the same solutions, and push them with the increased executive focus and heft his position gives him? When will this new manager realistically expect some of the violence and dysfunction to start to diminish?
There’s an even bigger eventuality floating over all this, which is that Rikers is slated to close. In 2019, the City Council passed a law calling for that to happen by next summer. That’s clearly not going to happen. It now doesn’t seem like the set of smaller jails based in the four largest boroughs that are slated to replace the complex will be completed for years. The jail in Brooklyn, the one that’s farthest along, isn’t scheduled to open until 2029. But it will happen eventually. Whatever specific facility or facilities people are incarcerated in won’t shift the broader culture of the DOC or necessarily address any of the issues long identified, but it is the case that Rikers as a physical place has had some bearing on what goes on there.
Lawyers and advocates have long complained that the island’s isolation makes it easier to ignore the suffering there, and as I mentioned, the facilities themselves are both sprawling and decrepit, which can serve to exacerbate and to hide their problems. Attempting to address these issues even while shutting it down might be a bit like remodeling a kitchen that you’re still cooking in, even if it must be done.
