The court-appointed federal oversight official tasked with fixing the failings of New York City’s infamous Rikers Island jail complex issued his first report on Tuesday, detailing a month-by-month plan to resolve the safety and legal issues identified by a landmark 2015 lawsuit.
Nicholas Deml, appointed in January by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain to help restructure Rikers to ensure its conditions comply with the U.S. Constitution, wrote in his first report that a lot still needed to be done to fix the jail: “Despite decades of litigation, reform efforts, and judicial intervention,” he wrote, the city still “confines individuals awaiting trial in dismal conditions that “manifestly violate the Constitution and would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them.”
