New York
Outside Official Will Take Over Deadly Rikers Island Jail, Judge Orders
A federal judge overseeing New York City’s jails took Rikers Island out of the city’s control on Tuesday, ordering that an outside official be appointed to make major decisions regarding the troubled and violent jail complex.
The judge, Laura Taylor Swain, said in a 77-page ruling that the official would report directly to her and would not be a city employee, turning aside Mayor Eric Adams’s efforts to maintain control of the lockups. The official, called a remediation manager, would work with the New York City correction commissioner, but be “empowered to take all actions necessary” to turn around the city’s jails, she wrote.
“While the necessary changes will take some time, the court expects to see continual progress toward these goals,” Judge Swain wrote.
The order comes nearly a decade after the city’s jails, which include the Rikers Island complex, fell under federal oversight in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit. The agreement focused on curbing the use of force and violence toward both detainees and correction officers. A court-appointed monitor issued regular reports on the persistent mayhem.
New York City has held onto its control of Rikers with white knuckles — struggling to show progress and reaching the brink of losing oversight of the jails as critics of the system have called for a receiver. Conditions have not improved, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs and the federal monitor.
The city’s jail population has grown to more than 7,000 from a low of about 4,000 in 2020. And in the first three months of this year, five people died at Rikers or shortly after being released from city custody, equaling the number of detainees who died in all of 2024.
In a statement, lawyers from the Legal Aid Society and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, which represent detainees, said they commended the court’s “historic decision.”
“For years, the New York City Department of Correction has failed to follow federal court orders to enact meaningful reforms, allowing violence, disorder and systemic dysfunction to persist,” said Mary Lynne Werlwas and Debra Greenberger. “This appointment marks a critical turning point.”
The remediation manager will be a receiver in all but name. The official will be granted “broad powers” as plaintiffs had asked, Judge Swain wrote, but will also develop a plan for improvement in concert with the correction commissioner.
Such arrangements are the last resort for a troubled jail or prison. Since 1974, federal courts have put only nine jail systems in receivership, not counting Tuesday’s Rikers order.
The ruling was another blow for Mr. Adams, who is fighting for his political life after the Trump administration dropped corruption charges against him so that he could assist with its deportation efforts. Many of his confidants have also faced investigations, he is on his fourth police commissioner and his approval ratings have hit historic lows.
Now, the mayor, a former police captain, has lost most control of an institution that employs about 5,000 people represented by the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, a union that has been a bastion of political support.
On Tuesday, even as prisoners rights organizations and some of Mr. Adams’s campaign opponents celebrated, the mayor disputed whether Judge Swain’s order constituted a receivership and painted it as a benefit.
“The problems at Rikers are decades in the making,” he said. “We finally got stability.”
In a statement, Benny Boscio, president of the correction officers’ union, said that Judge Swain’s order had preserved the right to representation and collective bargaining, and he made clear that the guards must be reckoned with.
“The city’s jails cannot operate without us,” he said. “And no matter what the new management of our jails looks like, the path toward a safer jail system begins with supporting the essential men and women who help run the jails every day.”
New York City has spent more than $500,000 per inmate annually in recent years, according to city data, well beyond what other large cities have spent, and yet detainees still sometimes go without food or proper medical care.
A New York Times investigation in 2021 found that guards are often stationed in inefficient ways that fail to protect detainees. And although the jail system has consistently been the most well-staffed in the United States — there is roughly one uniformed officer for each inmate at Rikers, according to city data — an unlimited sick leave policy and other uses of leave have meant that there are too few guards present to keep inmates safe.
The class-action lawsuit that led to the takeover, known as Nunez v. City of New York, was settled in June 2015 and required that the jails be overseen by a court-appointed monitor who would issue regular reports on conditions there but would wield no direct power to effect change.
Through those reports, Judge Swain was given an extensive history of the cyclical nature of the jail system’s problems. Through the administration of two mayors and several correction commissioners, the jails continued to devolve, according to prisoners’ rights advocates and the monitor’s reports. In November, the judge found the city in contempt for failing to stem violence and excessive force at the facility, which is currently run by Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie.
Over the years, the city has argued that the Department of Correction has made progress, even as Judge Swain issued remedial orders and the monitor and prisoners’ advocates pointed to backsliding.
In 2023, Damian Williams, then Manhattan’s top prosecutor, joined calls for the appointment of an outside authority to take control of Rikers, saying that the city had been “unable or unwilling” to make reforms under two mayors and four correction commissioners.
On Tuesday, Jay Clayton, whom President Trump appointed last month as interim U.S. attorney, said Judge Swain’s decision was a “welcomed and much needed milestone.”
In a 65-page opinion last year, Judge Swain said that the city and the Department of Correction had violated the constitutional rights of prisoners and staff members by exposing them to danger, and had intentionally ignored her orders for years. Officials had fallen into an “unfortunate cycle” in which initiatives were abandoned and then restarted under new administrations, she wrote.
An inability to operate independently of politics is what has kept Rikers from turning around, said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City and a former criminal justice adviser under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“Every new administration, there’s a reset,” she said. “Every new crisis, there’s a reset.”
Last year, Judge Swain ordered city leaders to meet with lawyers for prisoners to create a plan for an “outside person,” known as a receiver, who could run the system.
The parties met in recent months to try to reach an agreement, in deliberations overseen by the federal monitor, Steve J. Martin. He told the court that the parties and his team had been “actively engaged” in discussions.
In the end, the sides submitted dueling proposals.
The Legal Aid Society and a private law firm representing incarcerated people argued that the court should strip the city of control and install a receiver who would answer only to the court. The receiver should be given broad power to make changes, they proposed, including with regard to staffing and union contracts that govern it.
The receiver, they said, could “review, investigate and take disciplinary or other corrective or remedial actions with respect to violations of D.O.C. policies, procedures and protocols” related to the court order.
In its plan, the city offered to give Ms. Maginley-Liddie dual roles by adding the title of “compliance director” to her responsibilities. The city proposed that she answer to the court on issues related to the consent decree, such as safety and staffing shortages, while answering to the mayor on everything else.
However, the city has had a “a multitude of opportunities” to improve its management of the jails and has “proven unable or unwilling to take advantage of those opportunities,” said Hernandez D. Stroud, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
“Judge Swain was left no other choice,” he said.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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