Rikers Island Remains Under City Management, Judge Rules

QUEENS – Rikers Island will continue to operate under the city’s management, halting efforts to hand over the facility to the federal government, a judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Laura Swain rejected the motion to turn New York City jails over to a federal receiver per city officials’ request amid the mismanagement of Rikers Island by the Department of Correction, which some have called a “humanitarian crisis.”

“I believe that the outside monitor as well as the judge is really seeing that we are making real progress,” said Mayor Eric Adams in a WABC radio interview Friday morning. “The judge understood that this was a long time in the making of neglect.”

The nearly 6,000-person facility has been under the oversight of a federal court-appointed monitor after filing Nunez v. City of New York, a class-action lawsuit filed by the city’s Legal Aid Society in 2011.

The group also petitioned to have the federal government take over all operations of Rikers Island instead of the city’s Department of Correction.

Several city council members and Comptroller Brad Lander have supported this motion, with some calling for the facility to shut down.

“A receiver will not be able to magically fix what has been broken at Rikers for decades, and I will continue to work aggressively for its closure by the 2027 deadline,” Lander said in a letter to Swain on Thursday.