Managing Rikers Island continues to be challenging for city authorities, as THE CITY reports that the officials from the Department of Corrections (DOC) were denied a request for more beds by the Board of Correction. The nine-member Board – which “regulates, monitors, and inspects the correctional facilities of the City” according to a city webpage – was unable to reach the five-member majority to grant the DOC’s request to expand capacity from 50 beds to 60 in certain dormitories, voting 4-1 with one abstention in a meeting with top officials from the Department on Tuesday.
DOC officials were frustrated with the move, particularly as the measure had reportedly been approved in February. Senior Deputy Commissioner Fritz Fragé explained in testimony before the Board on Tuesday that the request was not made cavalierly and came from dire need, stating that “if we don’t get the variance, we will have 130 people without beds.” Hours after the vote, a spokesperson for DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie released a statement on the matter, which said that “It is unfortunate that the Board fails to grasp the severity of the crisis faced by our jails due to the issues impacting the State system.”
A confluence of factors is bearing down on Rikers Island’s ability to manage the number of inmates it has been taking in. The city-run facility is currently holding just over a thousand “state-ready” inmates who should be transferred to the state’s care. Part of why that number is so high has to do with the state prison strike earlier this year, which forced the transfer of inmates into Rikers. Another 177 inmates are people who have failed psychiatric evaluations and are therefore unfit to stand trial, and so are awaiting transfer to beds managed by the State Office of Mental Health.
The “no” vote from the Board of Correction came from Dr. Robert Cohen, who has long held an oppositional stance to the city’s carceral system, and criticized the lack of planning to resolve Rikers Island’s well-publicized issues. Last fall, a social worker at the facility told the Daily News that inmates with mental illness were being held in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. On Wednesday, Manhattan federal court judge Laura Taylor Swain issued a temporary restraining order on a City Council ban on the practice that passed in 2024. Swain had previously ruled to remove the jail from city control and put it in the hands of an independent “remediation manager.”
After his vote against granting more beds to Rikers Island, Cohen announced that he was leaving the Board, where he had served for 16 years.
