A federal judge has given New York City up to seven years to fix Rikers Island, appointing a former Vermont prisons chief to lead what could be the most sweeping outside intervention in the jail system’s troubled history.
Manhattan federal court Judge Laura Swain formalized the selection of Nicholas Deml as remediation manager in a 28-page order, setting a deadline of late May for Deml to submit his initial reform plan. Deml, who also previously served in the CIA, takes on a role with authority that far exceeds anything a traditional Department of Correction commissioner has ever held. He can hire, fire, promote and transfer staff, create or eliminate positions, and rewrite policies and procedures across 18 areas of the jail system that city officials have failed to address despite a decade of court orders.
The seven-year timeline reflects the sheer scale of the failure. A 2015 consent decree was supposed to fix conditions at Rikers. It didn’t. Violence worsened. Deaths mounted. Dysfunction persisted. Sixty-three detainees have died behind bars on Rikers over the past five years.
Swain made clear the timeline is not a rigid all-or-nothing proposition. As the city demonstrates it can meet court-ordered benchmarks in specific areas, including use of force and de-escalation policies, control over those functions returns to the Department of Correction. The judge did not explain publicly how she arrived at the seven-year figure.
For advocates who have watched people die inside Rikers while waiting months and sometimes years for their day in court, the timeline is cold comfort.
“New York City jails remain in crisis, with people suffering extreme harm on a daily basis and languishing for months and years while awaiting their day in court,” said Anisah Sabur of the HALT Solitary Campaign. “The longer we take, the more lives we’re going to lose. We urgently need different pathways, resource allocations and programs to create true public safety.”
Dean Williams, a leading national jail reformer who formerly ran lockup systems in Alaska and Colorado and was among the candidates considered for the remediation manager position, also pushed back on framing the problem as one of time.
“Time is needed, sure, but the real currency to fix the mess is courage to make painful decisions and then follow through on those decisions,” Williams said.
That kind of plain talk cuts to something advocates have argued for years: that past commissioners at the Department of Correction were never given the structural authority or political backing to force real change. Deml has both, at least on paper. His authority runs across 18 areas where the city has already failed to comply with years of court orders, and he answers to a federal judge, not a mayor.
Whether that matters depends on execution. The historical record on court-supervised jail and prison interventions is not encouraging for anyone hoping for speed. A federal receiver overseeing medical care in California’s prison system has been in place since 2006. A receivership covering the District of Columbia Jail ran five years before a federal judge ended it in 2000. The range is wide, and the outcomes have varied.
Rikers currently holds thousands of people across 10 detention facilities, the majority of them awaiting trial, not yet convicted of anything. The city has been under a federal consent decree for more than a decade. The Board of Correction has flagged crisis conditions repeatedly. A previous push to close Rikers entirely in favor of smaller borough-based jails has moved slowly, with construction delays and cost overruns stretching that timeline as well.
Deml now steps into a system that has resisted reform through multiple mayoral administrations, multiple correction commissioners, and millions of dollars in court monitoring costs. His first real test comes in late May, when he must lay out how he intends to spend whatever time this judge has given him.
Seven years is a long time for the people inside those facilities.
