Can Zohran Mamdani’s New Correction Commissioner Solve the Problem of Rikers?
Key takeaways
- At its height, in the eighties and the nineties, the four-hundred-and-thirteen-acre island housed roughly three times as many people as it does now.
- In anticipation of Zohran Mamdani’s appearance, the Otis Bantum gymnasium had been decorated with the makeshift festivity of a school dance.
- Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to hold the job of commissioner.
Stanley Richards stands outside his office on Rikers, not far from the building in which he was formerly incarcerated, April, 2026.Photographs by Victor Llorente for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story To get to Rikers Island, you have to cross a narrow bridge; it has a hump in the middle, which means that, from either end, the other side is invisible. Stanley Richards, the new commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, pointed this out to me before my first visit to the island. “When you get to the bottom,” he said, “the past, the outside, is gone.” This was particularly true on the rainy evening I arrived in March: mist obscured even the air-traffic-control towers at LaGuardia Airport, just to the east of the bridge, where flights take off and land within earshot of the island’s ten jails.
Today, Rikers incarcerates approximately sixty-seven hundred people—most of whom are in pretrial detention, others who are serving terms of less than a year—in facilities that are within New York City while also being out of sight and largely out of reach. At its height, in the eighties and the nineties, the four-hundred-and-thirteen-acre island housed roughly three times as many people as it does now. Yet, even as its population has contracted, the problem Rikers presents has grown. In recent years, the island’s deteriorating infrastructure has been a backdrop for violence, neglect, and death; a federal judge has deemed its conditions unconstitutional. It’s a place that’s often characterized as a “human-rights crisis.” One night early this spring, however, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, on Rikers Island, served as the setting for something else—dinner with the Mayor.
In anticipation of Zohran Mamdani’s appearance, the Otis Bantum gymnasium had been decorated with the makeshift festivity of a school dance. Arches of black and yellow balloons floated over tables set with meals in plastic boxes. Mamdani had spent the preceding weeks observing Ramadan alongside members of the city’s Muslim communities, breaking fast in iftar gatherings with union members or content creators. That night he would do so with the people who lived and worked on Rikers. At the far end of the gym, incarcerated men in tan uniforms knelt to pray. The Mayor, after arriving with his chief of staff and first deputy mayor, zipped off a pair of ankle boots and joined the men on the floor. The new commissioner—a tall, solid man with a neat beard—looked on from the edge of the crowd.