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I’ve Seen It First-Hand Over Decades and Know: Rikers Cannot Be Redeemed


Rikers jails de Blasio

On Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


The narrow bridge to Rikers Island still puts a knot in my stomach. In the late 1980s, I spent two years behind bars in one of the eight active jails on Rikers. Back then, crossing that bridge meant disappearing from society and entering a world defined by violence and inhumanity.

Little has changed. These days, I visit Rikers regularly as vice chair of the Board of Correction, the independent oversight body for New York City jails, and as executive vice president of the Fortune Society, an organization that helps people succeed when they come home from jail and prison.

Rikers still sends one message to everyone who crosses that bridge, no matter if you’re a correction officer, incarcerated person, or visitor: you are worthless. People feel like animals, caged and mistreated. They react accordingly.

During my first year at Rikers, this combustible mix exploded into a riot led by people brought down from upstate prisons for legal proceedings in the city. In theory, these men should have been happy to be closer to their families. But to visit Rikers, their loved ones still had to spend all day traveling to the island for just an hour together—as my father once did when I was jailed on Rikers. I hated to see the effect on him so much that I asked him not to come back.

The men from the state prisons experienced the same pain. The anger they felt from mistreatment by correction officers and the brutal physical conditions of Rikers drove them to barricade themselves in their housing unit and erupt in the mess hall.

Thirty years later, violence still permeates Rikers, where hints of disrespect are met with force. The jails remain inaccessible to families, lawyers, and other much-needed connections to the outside world. The conditions are still dehumanizing. During the July heatwave, I toured the jail where I was held so many years ago. The cinder blocks and metal worked like an oven. Officers patrolled in shirts drenched with sweat. A few cheap fans pushed around hot air, never reaching the people sweltering in their cells or stationed at their posts.

The vast majority of people at Rikers are awaiting trial, as I was. Almost all of them are people of color. Every day, nearly 800 people must be bussed to and from courts in the boroughs at cost of $41 million a year.

Moving around inside the poorly-designed jails is also difficult, requiring an officer escort down hallways that can stretch hundreds of yards. Too often, incarcerated people do not make it to medical appointments, family visits, recreation, commissary, and court. Cases are delayed, anger rises, and health suffers.

We can change this. In April 2017, after years of pressure, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to shutting down the Rikers jails, reducing the number of people locked up by half or more, and holding this smaller jail population in facilities near the borough courthouses.

Since then, the number of people in jail has dropped by thousands. Our city remains as safe as ever, demonstrating we do not need mass incarceration to achieve safety.

This week, the City Council will vote whether to authorize four redesigned borough jails that will enable the permanent closure of the eight jails on Rikers and the jail barge moored to Hunts Point.

This plan is a once-in-a-generation chance to close Rikers and replace it with something far better, and far smaller. But no one should underestimate how hard it is to close an institution like Rikers.

It will require more changes to police and district attorney practices. It will take continued reforms in Albany, like passing the Less Is More Act to fix New York State’s broken parole system.

It will also require approval of the smaller borough system under consideration by the City Council. The initial designs for these facilities would promote safety and facilitate re-entry. Located much closer to courthouses and public transit, they would speed up cases and increase access for attorneys, family members, and others. They would be more accountable to oversight, leading to better conditions.

In final negotiations, the Council can improve the current plan by securing major community investments, so people never end up in jail in the first place. But this plan has to pass or we will be stuck with the horrors of Rikers for decades to come. We cannot allow the quest for the perfect to stop us from doing what is right.

Since I came home to the Bronx, I have dedicated myself to helping others succeed. The sprawling, unmanageable, and violent jails on Rikers undermine that goal and our communities. Let’s end this disgraceful chapter in our history.

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Stanley Richards is Executive Vice President at The Fortune Society, a member of the Independent Commission on Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, and a member of the Justice Implementation Task Force. On Twitter @Stan_Fortune of @thefortunesoc & @MoreJustNYC

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The Governor's Signature is Next Step in Protecting New York Children from Toxic Toys


children toys

(Dreamstime: Photo 3882847 © Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz - Dreamstime.com)


Perhaps few items in society hold the same universal delight as children’s products. They are an important part of children’s wellbeing and development and can remind all of us of simple joys of childhood. We expect products designed specifically for children to be safe and free from chemicals that could cause harm.

Nobody wants their child to play with a toy containing alarmingly high levels of lead, cadmium, or mercury. However, there are many toys and products on the market today that do indeed contain chemicals that are hazardous to children’s health. Media reports of product recalls of children’s jewelry tainted with lead and arsenic, colored chalk contaminated with mercury, and baby soaps containing a chemical called 1,4 dioxane raise serious questions as to how manufacturers have been able to get these products into the market in the first place.

These products have been able to enter our state because of gaps in our regulation. Our regulations in New York have struggled to keep pace with the thousands of new combinations of materials and manufacturing processes involved in making children’s toys and products.

The good news is that New York has taken significant steps to remedy the issue through the state Legislature, with the new Child Safe Products Act, which passed in April 2019. By signing it into law on or around National Children’s Environmental Health Day, Friday October 11, Governor Andrew Cuomo could prevent further unnecessary harm to children on his watch.

The Child Safe Products Act, once signed, is poised to provide protections to keep toxic products out of the marketplace for all children. It would prevent the sale or resale of items containing the most dangerous chemicals — particularly important where consumers have less money for costlier toxic-free alternatives.

Low price and discount retailers that are commonplace in New York’s less affluent communities have been found to sell items containing very high levels of so-called “chemicals of concern.”

For example, a 2015 study by the Campaign for Healthier Solutions and HealthyStuff.org tested products commonly sold at dollar stores, like toys and jewelry for children, and found alarmingly high levels of lead, mercury, and cadmium. The new law would take a measured approach to regulating chemicals in products developed for children and includes a comprehensive list of chemicals that are currently known to have adverse effects on human health.

The Child Safe Products Act would also provide clear directives for each member of the supply chain – from the manufacturer to the seller. Manufacturers would be required to report to the state the chemicals included on the list that are found in their products. The state would in turn provide this information to an interstate chemical clearinghouse. Retailers would be notified which items they are forbidden to sell, due to their toxicity, and they would be held accountable for selling such items, prompting greater scrutiny in their buying processes and supply-chain management.

Intergenerational principles urge us to be mindful of our responsibility to ensure the health and safety of the next generation. This applies to all aspects of a child’s environment – where they live, learn and play. Governor Cuomo has lent his support to several environmental causes. Signing this act would demonstrate our joint commitment to future generations of New Yorkers and solidify our place as leaders in protecting children’s environmental health. Other states like Maine, California and Washington have similar policy mandates.

Let’s ensure that the next generation of New York’s children comes to associate products designed for them with happiness. Governor Cuomo, please sign the Child Safe Products Act into law and affirm New York’s commitment to a greener, more sustainable future for everyone.

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Christine Appah, Senior Staff Attorney for Environmental Justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a member of the JustGreen Partnership that supported passage of the Child Safe Products Act. On Twitter @NYLPI.

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Surveillance and the City: Facing Up to Facial Recognition


alb cah fox op ed

(photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


Sometimes City Hall politics can be surreal; too much spin can give you a case of political vertigo. But this week was remarkable even by the standards of the de Blasio administration, with talking points that felt like messages from a parallel universe. Time and again, we heard lofty statements about a city committed to protecting its residents’ privacy, a city sadly bearing no resemblance to our own.

It started when the national facial recognition debate came to the City Council chambers. Months after cities like San Francisco fully banned facial recognition, New York City lawmakers introduced a trio of modest proposals that just scratch the surface of our municipal black mirror, and held a hearing on them.

One bill requires notices in stores when they use biometric surveillance like facial recognition. A second bill would require all buildings to register any biometric surveillance with the city. And a third bill guarantees New Yorkers the right to a metal key, even when their building uses key fobs or biometrics. These bills are not perfect, and they’re certainly not the full facial recognition ban that more and more cities are passing, but they’re a start.

Predictably, the Mayor’s Office claimed to “support the bills’ intent,” before pivoting to the litany of reasons why as laws they would be too much of an “operational challenge” or better suited to another agency. The metal key requirement was the only item to receive support.

This back and forth would have been utterly unremarkable if not for the constant proclamations of how New York City protects privacy. Countless empty phrases like we “value the privacy and livelihood of all New Yorkers” or “protecting the privacy of New Yorkers is something both the Council and Administration care a lot about.” Sadly, these platitudes hide the reality of New York City today.

The New York I know deployed automated license plate readers, perpetually logging almost every car in the city. It worked with the MTA to deploy the OMNY fare payment system, even as organizations denounced it as a privacy threat to every passenger. And then there are the biometric programs.

Programs like the NYPD’s DNA dragnet, which captures thousands of New Yorkers’ genetic information, including young children. And, of course, the most controversial program of all: the NYPD facial recognition database. This error-prone digital dragnet is used to arrest thousands of New Yorkers, many of them wrongly.

Of course, the administration’s tone shifted as soon as these troubling biometric programs came into the discussion. How many city agencies use facial recognition? “We don’t know.” How long can biometric data be kept? “We don’t know.” When city officials were asked point-blank if the NYPD uses facial recognition, something already reported around the world, the representatives suddenly were at a loss for words.

One program that administration officials were surprisingly eager to talk about was LinkNYC, the Frankenstein creation that’s part billboard, part phone charger, part wi-fi hotspot, and part tracking device. One NYC DoITT official proudly claimed that the LinkNYC privacy policy wouldn’t let the system “collect or store any identifying information.”  She went on to assert that the city “specifically prohibited the use of facial recognition,” and included “some of the strongest safeguards in the country.” The privacy advocates in the room were bewildered.

In reality, LinkNYC kiosks—which combine the aesthetics of a 2001 monolith and the Las Vegas strip—have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, following investigations by the InterceptGothamist, and others. Despite the administration’s claims, LinkNYC does provide photos to the NYPD facial recognition program in some cases (Link claims to do so only when subpoenaed). Even worse, activists highlighted LinkNYC’s potential power to track New Yorkers by transforming our wi-fi and bluetooth-enabled devices into veritable homing beacons (Link says only when users have opt-ed in via an app). The revelations sparked guerrilla privacy campaigns and widespread calls for LinkNYC’s elimination

Sadly, the City Hall spin didn’t end with LinkNYC, or at the hearing. This week also saw a remarkable statement on NYPD facial recognition from Commissioner O’Neill himself. When asked about a facial recognition ban, he plunged us back into the mirror universe, claiming “No one is being arrested solely on a facial recognition hit” and calling it an essential tool.  

Thanks to researchers at Georgetown and the NYPD’s own data, we know just how misleading a claim that is. At least one NYPD employee openly boasted about facial recognition’s role in arresting more than 2,700 New Yorkers. The commissioner often responds that no one is arrested solely based on facial recognition, but let’s look a little closer.

NYPD officers have included suspects in lineups solely because of facial recognition. In one case, officers texted a witness asking, “Is this the guy…?” and attaching a single photo. In both cases, the NYPD claims that the eyewitness is the reason for the arrest, but decades of false convictions demonstrate that these sorts of suggestive practices can warp witnesses' memories and lead to wrongful convictions.

The reality is thousands of predominantly black and Latinx New Yorkers would never have been arrested without the unreliable and deeply-biased facial recognition system, and I’m terrified to think just how many are innocent.

Part of why New York lags so far behind the rest of the country in reforming biometric surveillance is that the de Blasio administration won’t face the facts. It insists on spinning platitudes about New York being a privacy leader. We’re not. It’s long past time we let this fantasy fade and wake up to the sobering reality of what these Orwellian technologies are already doing to our communities.

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Albert Fox Cahn is the executive director of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and privacy organization. He writes the monthly "Surveillance and the City" column for Gotham Gazette. On Twitter @FoxCahn

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