“My Dad Wasn't Just A Nobody”

Fifteen people at Rikers died in 2021. These are their stories.

- By Bliss Broyard and Lisa Riordan Seville

2021 began with Rikers Island in a miserable state, with every indication that conditions would soon get much worse. covid was spiking. The staff was depleted, and the jail was getting more crowded. In January, its population rose above 5,000—an increase of more than 25 percent from the spring of 2020. After nearly two years without a suicide at the facility, a man hanged himself before the month was out. A gruesome incident followed in early March, then another suicide, then an overdose. The people incarcerated at Rikers continued to die at such a steady rate that the agency charged with investigating deaths in custody couldn’t keep up.

Rikers is a complex of jails, not a prison. A small number of people are serving short sentences for misdemeanors or parole violations, but the vast majority are waiting for trial. Many are there because they can’t make bail. Ninety percent are Black or brown. Their alleged offenses range from graffiti and shoplifting to rape and murder. They are innocent until proven guilty, though no one treats them that way. The city spends an annual $550,000 per incarcerated person, compared with $28,000 per student in its public schools, for conditions that a court-ordered monitor described as “rife with violence and disorder.”

On March 17, an officer named Timothy Hodges testified to the Board of Correction, the body that oversees Rikers, that the jail was facing a personnel crisis and could not provide a basic standard of care. “We’re trying to point out to upper management and to additional people like you that we’re doing our best and we’re trying to make this work,” said Hodges. But the staff shortages, he predicted, would lead to chaos.