Welcome To Hell Island
Newsweek|July 07, 2017

Attempts to fix the brutal and corrupt Rikers Island jail have failed. Should New York City throw away the key?

Josh Saul
Welcome To Hell Island

WHEN THE MAYOR of New York City chose a new correction commissioner in 2014, the city’s largest jail—Rikers Island—was notoriously inhumane and violent. Mayor Bill de Blasio selected as his new jails chief Joseph Ponte, a man with a progressive record of transforming jails in Maine and Tennessee. The New York Times welcomed Ponte with the front-page headline, “De Blasio Setting Up a Test: Prison Reformer vs. Rikers Island.”

Three years later, conditions at Rikers are still horrific, and the commissioner was scheduled to step down on June 28 after a city probe revealed he had repeatedly driven his municipal vehicle back to Maine and spent three months there last year, even as conditions at Rikers worsened. So with Ponte’s stint as correction head coming to an end, the answer to de Blasio’s test is clear: Rikers won in a rout. And to cap off Ponte’s time in New York, less than a week before his last day, de Blasio released a plan to close the facility in 10 years.

This story is from the July 07, 2017 edition of Newsweek.

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This story is from the July 07, 2017 edition of Newsweek.

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