Jan. 13, 2026 – Just days into his new mayoralty, Zohran Mamdani observed that, “[t]he previous Administration’s refusal to meet its legal obligations on Rikers has left us with troubling conditions that will take time to resolve.” He signed Emergency Executive Order 1, which directs the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the Law Department “to develop a plan within 45 days to come into compliance with the Board of Corrections’ standards,” and directed the Law Department to work with the federal monitor and all parties to the Rikers Consent Decree “to develop a plan to implement Local Law 42, which bans solitary confinement.”
What Mamdani didn’t speak to was the broader issue of the need for a true Receiver to enforce the Rikers Consent Decree, not the current prospect of a weak tea “Remediation Manager,” the measure that the judge presiding over the case intends to pursue.
A brief history
It was all the way back in 2015 that, as a result of litigation filed four years earlier concerning brutality suffered by detainees, the Rikers Consent Decree was entered. Tragically, the herculean efforts of plaintiffs’ counsel – the Legal Aid Society and Emery Celli Brinkerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel – to enforce the decree in the face of resistance from New York City have been stymied for a decade.
It didn’t have to be this way. City resistance could have been overcome if the Court-appointed Monitor, Steve J. Martin, had recognized sooner that the necessary scope of change could not be achieved without the greater powers that come with a Receiver as compared to a Monitor. (Martin did repeatedly and in detail criticize the City’s non-compliance, but too often over the years fell into the trap of believing that “this time” would be different from the previous times in terms of promised City cooperation.)
In the end (or, rather, at the end of a very long beginning), it was unwillingness of the presiding judge – Laura Taylor Swain, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the ultimate safeguard against non-compliance – to act quickly enough, decisively enough, or broadly enough. Simply put, when, after 10 years of judicial oversight, conditions remain as terrible as they are, that oversight can only be described as a dismal failure.
Halfway measures, even now
In May of last year, the Court finally acted on the plaintiffs’ long-sought remedy of the appointment of a Receiver (the motion was filed in November 2023).The Court rejected plaintiffs’ proposal, instead signaling its intention to appoint a “Remediation Manager” with less sweeping powers. (Seven months later, in mid-December, the Court reported that it was “now actively engaged in the process of evaluating applicants and conducting any necessary interviews” for the Remediation Manager position.
In rejecting the plaintiffs’ proposal, the Court reasoned that the proposal (which had been joined by the U.S. Attorney) was too robust, not narrowly tailored to the contempt findings the Court had previously made, and paid insufficient on getting control back to the City:
Instead, the Receivership Proposal would vest the receiver with a “Mandate” “to take all necessary steps to promptly achieve Substantial Compliance with this Court’s orders in this action” and would only terminate after “the Court determines that Substantial Compliance … with the [Rikers] Orders has been achieved.”
It is true that the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act requires that relief with respect to prison conditions cannot be ordered unless the court finds that “such relief is narrowly drawn, extends no further than necessary to correct the violation of the Federal right, and is the least intrusive means necessary to correct the violation of the Federal right,” but there couldn’t be a better example than the Rikers case for the proposition that, at least in these extreme circumstances, you need first of all to focus on giving a Receiver all the powers necessary to achieve transformative change. As plaintiffs wrote:
That is exactly the scenario the Court faces here, where the Monitor has described a “depth of dysfunction, created over decades of mismanagement, that permeates the entire system,” which has led to “a number of interrelated ‘problem centers’ for which the solution to each is dependent upon finding the solution to some, if not at all, of the others.” FOF ¶ 1175. The interrelated problems which subject incarcerated people to an imminent risk of serious harm range from inadequate supervision structures, to poor security practices, to inefficient staffing systems, to compromised investigations, to a slow and inadequate disciplinary system, and more, so the solution must be broad enough to remedy all of these issues.
Instead, what will come into existence – presumably in the first half of this year – is a three-headed monster, with the Monitor remaining in place, the Remediation Manager charged with cooperating as much as possible with the head of DOC (instead of supplanting the head of DOC in relation to the orders with which there has not been compliance), and the Remediation Manager not having the authority to execute directives swiftly without further order from the Court.
Worries about getting control back to the City should properly take a back seat for now.
What could the new administration do?
The strong temptation for the Mamdani administration is surely to leave things as they are: “We fully intend to cooperate with the Receiver and the plaintiffs, so why would we change anything?” Moreover, while the Court is imagining that full compliance and return of control will occur over a period of seven years, the new administration may well be indulging the idea that Rikers will close much sooner, as the City Council has legislated.
But the City has not actually made ready to close Rikers any time soon, good intentions (as in the de Blasio administration) can run into the totally dysfunctional culture of DOC (dysfunctional not only at the supervisory and managerial level, but at the frontline level as well), the current mayor won’t be in office forever, and there is an often underappreciated utility in empowering an independent authority to tackle a difficult problem when you’re already trying to juggle many others.
The administration and the plaintiffs could come together to fashion an agreed-upon, stronger, Receiver framework for the judge to approve. It might wind up being opposed by the current U.S. Attorney’s Office (a difficult sell in light of that office’s previous advocacy for a Receiver), and the Court might use the new administration’s cooperative attitude to assert that a Receiver now isn’t the “only” effective remedy (although how that believes that work rules, discipline, and other personnel matters will promptly be corrected with the anticipated framework is entirely unclear to me).
One need not romanticize detainees or inmates to believe that an essential requisite of a functioning, civilized society is having a jail system where detainees and inmates are free of violence from each other and from guards. One need not romanticize corrections personnel to insist that they, too, must not be the targets of violence. We are nowhere close to that now. If having a strong Receiver can help us move towards that goal faster and more effectively, the Mamdani administration should take advantage of any possibility to help create that structure.