What is Eric Adams’s Plan for the Rikers Island Crisis?

The New Yorker, January 23, 2022: What is Eric Adams’s Plan for the Rikers Island Crisis?

“A few weeks before Eric Adams took office as mayor of New York, two of his advisers, Philip Banks and Timothy Pearson, who both, like Adams, once served in the N.Y.P.D., sat down for a meal at a Queens diner with the commissioner of the Department of Correction, Vincent Schiraldi. ‘I think there’s a way out of this,’ Schiraldi told them. ‘But you gotta throw down.’ Schiraldi, a reformer whom Bill de Blasio plucked from a research job at Columbia University, had been commissioner for about six months. During that time, conditions on Rikers Island—the city’s notorious jail complex in the East River, where people facing local criminal charges are sent if they can’t afford bail—had unravelled to previously unthinkable levels. Schiraldi had been digging in for battle against the correction-employee unions, whose members were calling out sick from their shifts at Rikers by the hundreds, fueling the crisis. He wanted to stay on in the new administration—with one condition. ‘I’m willing to get ninety-five per cent of the blood on me,’ Schiraldi told Banks and Pearson. ‘But five per cent is going to get on the mayor. And when that happens he’s got to say, “Vinny’s my guy, there’s no daylight between us.” And if he can’t say that he shouldn’t hire me.’”

Additional reading:

The New York Times, January 14, 2022: Jail Unions Gain a Powerful Supporter: The New Mayor

The City, December 16, 2021: Adams Vows to Bring Solitary Confinement Back to Rikers Island, Scrapping Reforms

Politico, December 15, 2021: Eric Adams straddles the line on Rikers closure plan