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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Haleema Shah, filling in for Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Rikers Island has always been famous. It's one of the largest correctional facilities in the world.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): And since it's a jail, 85% of people are there because they're awaiting trial or had a parole violation.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Which means the vast majority of people held there are still presumed innocent.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): But Riker's notoriety doesn't come from its size or the number of people there.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): It comes from its reputation for exceptional violence.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Lately, things have gotten so bad, even by Riker's island standards, that its own staff has said people are not safe there.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): There's been another death of a detainee on Rikers Island.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Department of Correction says a person in custody died just before 7:30 tonight at the North Infirmary Command.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): The commissioner says so far the cause of death appears to be, quote, natural, but there is nothing natural about what's happening in our jail system right now.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Twelve people have died in custody this calendar year, and medical staff on the island have been really raising the alarm.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Nick Pinto has been covering Rikers Island for The Intercept.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): The chief medical officer on Rikers wrote a letter a couple weeks ago to the city council saying, in effect, that the city was no longer able to guarantee the safety of the people it was holding there and basically calling it a humanitarian crisis that needed dramatic action to resolve.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): He told us about one man in particular who lost his life to this humanitarian crisis.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Issa Bill Karim was the 11th person to die in custody this year.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): I spent a certain amount of time talking with Karim's cousin, who described him as a really sweet, gentle person.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): He was a devout Muslim.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): He volunteered at his local mosque.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): And he had an especially close relationship with his cousin's son and taught him verses from the Quran.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): He's a man who grew up in New York.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): His parents were from Senegal, and I think a certain amount of his childhood, he was sort of back and forth between New York and Senegal and Gambia.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): He had a complicated family situation.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): I think he lost touch with his parents fairly early on and, by all accounts, was really on his own for much of his life.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): His first visit to Rikers Island was in 2016, when he was held there while he was awaiting trial on a nonviolent drug charge.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): And that experience was really difficult.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): And it actually led to him filing a lawsuit against some of the guards who were holding him in custody.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Can you tell me a little bit about what happened during that experience, that first stint at Rikers Island?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Karim came in to Rikers with a number of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And as a result, they had recommended that he be held in sort of social housing in a dorm-like situation.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so he was initially.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But according to the lawsuit that he later filed, one of the guards overseeing that dorm unit took a dislike to him and sort of made a point of harassing him and trying to get him out of the unit.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: At a certain point, Karim actually filed an official complaint against the guard for this treatment that he was receiving.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Again, according to his lawsuit, the guard retaliated by having him transferred to a solitary cell.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And while he was there, his mental health really deteriorated, as the psychologists had warned that it might.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And he attempted to kill himself by eating batteries.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: After that attempt, he was sent to a medical clinic in the jail complex.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But because one of the guards working on the medical clinic was friends with the guard who he had crossed by filing this complaint, Kareem experienced retaliation and was held sort of in the intake part of the medical clinic for six days in a cell with no bed, no sink, no toilet, only a metal chair.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He was forced to urinate and defecate into empty milk cartons that other sympathetic incarcerated people left for him.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The guards named in the suit answered it initially by denying the accusations, but the lawsuit remained open at the time of Kareem's death, so it hadn't been adjudicated.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And amid this pending lawsuit against the guards at the jail, is he found guilty of the drug charges that brought him to Rikers in the first place?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So in the end, he was convicted on those charges and he was sent to a prison upstate.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It was a two-and-a-half-year sentence.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He wound up serving 11 months of it, and then he was released onto parole.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And what happens once he's released?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He spent some time living at the Fortune Society, which is a New York organization that provides housing and services for people who've been freshly released from prison.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He complied with the terms of his parole for the most part.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He was working as a cook.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: At a certain point, he did fail to check in with his parole officer.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That's one of the requirements of your parole is regular contact with your parole officer.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And he also spent some time on the street and got into a fight at one point on the street where he was stabbed.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It was actually while he was hospitalized that he was arrested for parole violation for failing to check in with his parole officer.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so he was taken from the hospital in his wheelchair to Rikers a second time.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Is it common for somebody to be sent to jail for a parole violation as small as not checking in with your officer?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: New York has historically been one of the two worst states in terms of locking people up for what are called technical parole violations.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's worth noting that during the current crisis on Rikers, pressure mounted on the state to change this.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Governor Kathy Hochul did, a couple weeks ago, sign into law a change in that called the Less is More Act, which limits the degree to which people can be locked up for technical parole violations.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So Issa Abdul-Karim has this parole violation.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: What happens to him?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: He's taken to Rikers and he's put into intake where he spends 10 days in the intake pens.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: These are large cages with lots of people in them moving in and out.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: A really chaotic situation.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: You know, in each of these cells, there's a single toilet.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: They're often not working.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And very few people, guards included, are wearing masks.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: As a number of people pointed out to me, these are difficult environments in which a lot of stressed people are forced to interact with each other and where hierarchies are sort of quick to develop.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And Issa Abdelkarim was a man in a wheelchair in that environment, and so was particularly vulnerable.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But in addition to all of that, he contracted COVID while he was in intake.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So he was taken out of intake and brought to a medical clinic for treatment where he appeared to recover fairly well from COVID and was placed into a more permanent housing unit.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And it was there that he suffered an acute breathing attack.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And even though he received CPR from people who were nearby, he died before the ambulance arrived.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Precisely what precipitated the attack that killed him is unclear.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Talking to medical staff on Rikers Island, I think their sense is that it's entirely possible that his death was a result of the COVID infection that he'd contracted on the island and had been living with.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But they also say that, look, even if it wasn't a result of the COVID he got at Rikers, his body had been extremely stressed by the 10 days that he spent on the intake wards and that for an older person, you know, with underlying conditions, that in itself can precipitate something like this.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Is Issa Abdul-Karim's death raising questions about how Rikers is handling the pandemic?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The way that Rikers is handling the pandemic has been an ongoing topic since the pandemic first appeared in New York.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's certainly not the only cause of the crisis that Rikers is in right now.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: There is a staffing problem at Rikers.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Rikers actually has the highest staff to incarcerated person ratio of virtually any jail in the country.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So it's not that there aren't enough people on staff to safely run Rikers.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's that an enormous number of them are calling in sick or not calling in sick, but just being absent without leave.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: 25 plus hours working straight.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: No meal breaks.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And any wonder why we're not coming to work?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Why offices are AWOL?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Assaults on my members are through the roof.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I think some of that may have had its origin in the problem of COVID in jail and guards not feeling like they want to be in that environment.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But it certainly snowballed because as guards stick out, their colleagues find themselves having to work double shifts, triple shifts.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I've heard of quadruple shifts.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And they're doing that on housing units where usually there are maybe two or three guards and now they're the only one.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: This has become modern day slavery for us.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And it's unfortunate for me to say that.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And we're the largest law enforcement minority union in the city of New York.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Is that why we're getting treated this way?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The systems of accountability for guards who call in sick that do exist have not been working.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The federal monitor who oversees the way Rikers is run has been really critical of the way the Department of Corrections has been managing that problem.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: In recent weeks, one of the steps that the mayor and the city government have pledged to take is to tighten up the policies that govern under what conditions guards can call in sick.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The workers who are doing the right thing, that's the vast majority who are standing by each other.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: They are getting additional help, additional incentives.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The ones who are not showing up are being suspended.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): What about some of the other factors behind the crisis at Rikers right now?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Combine this with the physical deterioration of the plant at Rikers, there were something like 1,000 doors, cell doors, unit doors, which don't close properly.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: In recent days, about half of those have been repaired, but they're still working on that.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So it's an unsafe place.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Stabbings and slashings have gone up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: A lot of that is directed by inmates against other inmates.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: A lot of it is also directed against guards.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so guards are fearful of their safety.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Another factor is that after years of steady decline, the population of Rikers has actually been going up quite considerably over the last year and a half.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's nearly doubled in the last year.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: At the same time that you have fewer and fewer people actually staffing the jail, you have the population really zooming up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: You know, you mentioned when Issa Abdul Karim was in Rikers the first time, He didn't have anywhere to go to the bathroom, and he was also somebody who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and also placed in solitary confinement.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That seems to suggest that there's a pretty dire lack of medical care or even just like basic resources if that's happening.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Guards control access to medical care because medical professionals don't come to the units to provide care for the most part.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Incarcerated people are brought from wherever they're being held to medical clinics.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so to do that, you need a guard to accompany you.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That means that incarcerated people are vulnerable on a couple of fronts.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: First of all, it means that if the guards don't want to take you to your medical appointment, they can choose not to as a form of retaliation.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That's what's alleged in Kareem's lawsuit.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It also means that when there aren't enough guards to adequately staff a facility, they can legitimately be shorthanded and just not have the person power to take you to your medical appointment.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Does Issa Abdul Karim's family blame Rikers Island for his death?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: His cousin was really still in shock when I talked to him about Karim's death and was saying that he still hasn't had the heart to tell his son what happened, that his son is sort of asking for Issa and he said that Issa can't talk right now and that he's sick.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And in response, his son has been reciting the prayers that Issa taught him.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: His family is devastated.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: You know, they're really clear that Issa had a difficult life in many respects, but that he bore it with a tremendous amount of strength.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: They feel that he was not served by everything that happened to him in his contacts with the criminal justice system.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): We reached out to New York City's Department of Correction for comment on this story.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): They shared this statement from the commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Quote, Providing for the safety of incarcerated people is our core mission, and I am heartbroken that we have seen yet another death of a human being entrusted to our care.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): The causes of this death, so far, appear to be natural.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): But that doesn't change the fact that we have serious issues in our jails.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): End quote.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): The department went on to say that the staffing shortage at Rikers Island is a nationwide issue that is also playing out in jails across the country.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Coming up, how Rikers Island became the problem to its own solution.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Nick, how did a place like Rikers Island even come to be?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Rikers is an island that sits off of the edge of Queens in the East River.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It was a small farm holding for a while.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Then it sort of served as a city dump.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And then in the 30s, it was the new home for New York City jails.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And at the time, it was sort of heralded as the sparkling new forward-thinking progressive detention center that was going to make things much better than the conditions under which people had been being held, which at the time was on what's now called Roosevelt Island.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The collection of jails that sit there take up land, most of which is either landfill of actual garbage or other kinds of fill.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So the stability of the buildings is not everything you'd want it to be.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's prone to flooding.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: In general, the condition of the buildings has only gotten worse over time.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And when does it go from the answer to the problems in New York City's jails to a problem in and of itself?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: If you track Rikers through sort of the era of mass incarceration, beginning in the back half of the last century, and especially the crack epidemic and the drug wars, Rikers became quite crowded and developed a reputation for extreme violence.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: New York City's Rikers Island has long had a reputation as one of the roughest, toughest, meanest jails in America.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: More than 2,000 inmate slashings and stabbings and eight inmate holocides.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: One of the tactics that guards used to try to keep control over the situations was sort of delegating certain inmates to serve as physical enforcers to fight people and hurt them and cut them up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Their suicide was such a problem that jail officials took to hiring inmates to sort of keep an eye on their units and make sure nobody was trying to hang themselves or do something like that.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It got to a point in 2014 where Preet Bharara, who was then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued a really scathing report that described Rikers as a place more inspired by Lord of the Flies than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The level of violence, of inmate-on-inmate violence, and the level of use of force that we saw at Rikers, in the words of our consultant, our expert, was more than he had ever seen at any other place.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That report especially gave momentum to this sort of nascent movement that called for closing Rikers.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: How is that supposed to happen?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I mean, we've talked on this show about what an international embarrassment and moral stain Guantanamo Bay has been for the U.S.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And U.S. presidents still haven't been able to shut it down.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So did the effort to shut down something like Rikers get any real traction?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The germ of this movement came out of a sort of a blue ribbon commission that was chaired by Jonathan Lipman, who's the former chief judge for New York.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Rikers Island is a blot on the soul of our city.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And what the Lipman Commission put together was they said part of the problem with Rikers is that it's on an island, right?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Nobody can see what's going on there.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's out of sight and out of mind.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And it's the hole that we throw, you know, the human manifestations of our social problems into so we don't have to look at them.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It was nice when I couldn't go to sleep because all I thought about was when I go home, what would be the first thing I would do?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: There was times when I had cried myself to sleep.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: This was also right after the death of Kalief Browder.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: This is a kid who was held in Rikers for years on the accusation that he stole a backpack and really helped launch a conversation about the ways that money bail contributes to people being locked up pretrial and in ways that really punishes people who don't have money, that ties criminal outcomes to poverty.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And it's also really hard to get from Rikers to your court appearances because it's a long drive through the middle of Queens.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So they said, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller number of people locked up in neighborhood jails that are right next to the courthouses in each borough of New York City?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The City Planning Commission of New York voting overwhelmingly to open four replacement jails for the Rikers Island Jail Complex.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So if we could, you know, rehab those or build new jails in the boroughs near the courthouses so that it's easy to get to your court appearances, so that these people are in their communities where it's easy for them to maintain contact with their families, so that the stresses of incarceration that, you know, that are often so damaging to people when they're locked up can be mitigated, wouldn't that be better?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That vision involved reducing the number of people locked up at any given time in New York City jails.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But they set that target and they said, look, this is achievable.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The Lipman Commission said, look, if we're holding fewer people on bail, we can close Rikers, put people in these smaller, better-maintained, newer, better-staffed, more humane local jails.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So that was the plan.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And how does that plan go?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Well, it's interesting.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It met resistance from a number of quarters.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: On the one hand, it met resistance from a newly ascendant abolitionist movement that said, wait a minute, you're closing one jail to open other jails?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: No new jails!
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--:-- Nick Pinto: No new jails!
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The problem here is that jails are bad for people and they don't actually solve the problems that they purport to solve.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: If they build new jails, they'll just move the culture of violence to a new location.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So that was sort of a challenge from the left.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The real problem, I think, that the plan faced was that it never really had particular buy-in from the mayor of New York.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And we're talking about the progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That's right.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So de Blasio signed on to this plan, but I think it's fair to say that his enthusiasm for it was never overwhelming.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And the time frame for the closure of Rikers has always sort of stayed just over the horizon.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It will take many years.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It will take many tough decisions along the way.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But it will happen.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And certainly long after Mayor de Blasio's term is going to be over.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So the result is that whenever concerns about conditions on Rikers have arisen over the last years, the de Blasio administration's response has been, yeah, it's bad.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That's why we've got to close Rikers in the future when I'm not mayor.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: The plan also has been hampered by nimbyism from people in the boroughs who are saying, don't build a new jail next to my property.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's going to mess up my property values and diminish my quality of life.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So that also has been a challenge that people are still working to overcome.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But I think the most alarming thing to people who are watching right now is that the plan to close Rikers was always dependent on reducing the population of people locked up in jail at any given time in New York City.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So in just three years overall crime is down 9%.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: If we can continue on that trajectory it will allow us to get off of Rikers Island.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Job one is to continue the work of reducing crime.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Due in part to declining crime rates and due also to some criminal justice reforms that have been enacted in recent years, the population of Rikers has been declining pretty steadily and declined even further two years ago after the state legislature enacted a series of reforms to the bail law, basically making it harder for judges to lock people up pre-trial based on how much money they have.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But then they hit a wall.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Assembly Republicans, they called for complete removal of the law this morning, speaking alongside two women who police say lost loved ones to people who were released without bail.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: That legislation generated an enormous and coordinated backlash, advanced by this alliance between, on the one hand, state Republican politicians who saw an opportunity to sort of hang this around Democrats' necks and paint them as soft on crime.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: What kind of response do we see from police unions, correctional officers, and just the broader law enforcement community?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So very quickly, even before the laws go into effect, you started to see police unions, police departments, senior police officials, raising red flags and saying, this is a terrible idea.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: If you make it harder for us to lock people up, it's going to take us back to the battle days of crime-ridden New York City in the 70s and 80s.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: You know, one of the loudest voices in all of this was Dermot Shea, the commissioner of the NYPD.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: We cannot be just chasing our tail, catch and release, catch and release.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: This message sort of worked in concert with state Republicans who saw an opportunity to land a blow against the Democratic Party going into the 2020 election.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so this lasted for several months.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so the state Democrats actually folded and they said, yeah, you're right, maybe we were a little too hasty there.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: We're going to roll back some of these reforms that we've enacted and we're going to carve out a number of areas where we're actually going to make it easier for judges to lock people up pretrial.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So was what the NYPD was saying about bail reform, that it would basically cause a spike in crime, was that actually in the data?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: No, in fact, there's really solid data saying that there's no relationship there.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: What did happen, you know, crime went down in 2020 overall in New York City.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Some varieties of violent crime went up, including shootings.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But that's true for cities across the country.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: It's a trend that a lot of people attribute to social consequences of the pandemic.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: There's no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with bail reform.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Part of the messaging that's been coming out of the NYPD in all of this has been crime is going up, and it's going up because judges won't lock people up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Judges are always susceptible to the sort of one-way ratchet of political pressure where when a judge is considering whether or not to release someone before their trial or to send them to jail they have to weigh the risk that if they let this person out on the street if they kill a white lady the next day that judge is going to be on the cover of the new york post you know blamed for for being soft on crime and for letting this happen and there there really isn't any sort of corresponding risk or political pressure nudging them in the other direction.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: So it's always safer for a judge to just lock someone up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Then they don't have to worry about that outcome.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And so the result is that the population of Rikers has nearly doubled in the last year.
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--:-- Host (Haleema Shah): If reports of a crime increase made lawmakers backtrack on reforms, could these headlines about basically a humanitarian crisis at Rikers Island reinvigorate the effort to close it?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Fear of crime and disorder has been a much more powerful political force than the desire for actual justice or the humane treatment of the people we're locking up.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: Politicians do things because there is a voting constituency that they need to be afraid of or whose votes they need to stay in office.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And it's not clear to me that the constituency of people who are incarcerated, their families, people who care about how they're actually treated, represents a large enough constituency that it's actually something that politicians are going to commit themselves to responding to.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: But we also saw one of the longest protest movements in history over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I mean, does that give you any indication that there's a large enough force on the ground right now that will push lawmakers to follow through on this promise to close Rikers?
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I spent last summer in the streets reporting on those protests in New York and got knocked around a certain amount in the course of it.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: And then I watched the city government respond with some really empty gestures.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I think it is significant.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I think it's always significant when that many people get together in the streets.
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--:-- Nick Pinto: I think what people are still figuring out is how to harness that energy into something that actually compels political action, because there are enormous entrenched interests that are opposed to changing anything about this.
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