Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his first full week in office, issued two executive orders aimed at regulating conditions in New York City’s homeless shelters and jails and said he was directing the city to develop a plan to comply with a local law ending solitary confinement.
The first order extends a years-old state of emergency that suspended some rules regulating conditions in city jails, including the Rikers Island complex, but it instructs the city to develop a plan within 45 days to comply with those rules.
“The previous administration’s refusal to meet their legal obligations on Rikers has left us with troubling conditions that will take time to resolve,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement on Monday.
The second order appears to undo steps taken by Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, in response to the migrant crisis that overwhelmed New York’s shelter system in recent years and has since ebbed.
It instructs officials to develop a plan within 45 days to bring city-operated shelters into compliance with health and safety codes, building codes and land use rules that had been suspended to accommodate the influx of migrants, including rules placing capacity limits on adult shelters and requiring cooking facilities in shelters for families with children. By Feb. 19, city officials must submit a plan to the mayor detailing how they plan to phase out shelters that relied on the suspension of the rules in order to operate.
Mr. Adams, starting in late 2022, had issued a series of emergency orders that suspended certain shelter laws as the city struggled to abide by a decades-old legal obligation to provide a bed to anyone who asks.
Mr. Mamdani’s order rolling back those moves received swift support from the Legal Aid Society, which filed the initial lawsuit that led to the right-to-shelter agreement, and from the Coalition for the Homeless. Because the city is no longer receiving so many new arrivals, the groups said in a joint statement, the “crisis framework is no longer appropriate or necessary.”
The orders signaled Mr. Mamdani’s continued departure from the policies of his predecessor, which he has put into action through a series of executive orders and appointments that appeared to be aimed at undoing Mr. Adams’s work. In his first day as mayor, Mr. Mamdani signed an executive order that revoked all orders issued by Mr. Adams after his indictment on federal corruption charges.
Mr. Mamdani did not put his plans for Rikers Island at the forefront of his campaign, but has said he supports closing the jail. The city is required by law to close Rikers by August 2027 and replace it with four smaller borough-based jails, but it is unlikely to meet that deadline. Mr. Mamdani has not made public any plans to close the complex and has not announced his pick to run the Department of Correction.
The Mamdani administration’s goal is to “stop conditions on Rikers from deteriorating any further,” said Steven Banks, the mayor’s nominee to be the city’s chief lawyer. (Mr. Banks, a former head of Legal Aid, was also at the forefront of the fight for the right-to-shelter guarantee.)
As of the beginning of December, Rikers housed about 7,000 detainees, according to city data. Last year, 14 people died while in custody or shortly after being released, an increase from five in 2024, according to the city comptroller.
In 2015, the city’s jails fell under federal oversight after 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 has issued regular reports on the persistent mayhem.
In 2024, the judge overseeing the jails, Laura Taylor Swain, 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, an Adams appointee. Last year, Judge Swain took Rikers Island out of the city’s control.
The current state of emergency governing the jails, which first took effect in 2021 under Mayor Bill de Blasio and was repeatedly extended by him and by Mr. Adams, suspends some of the minimum guidelines set by the city’s Board of Correction. The guidelines governed inmates’ rights related to hygiene, overcrowding and limits on the time spent confined to their cells.
In a news release announcing the two orders on Monday, Mr. Mamdani also said he was directing the Correction Department and Law Department to work with the federal monitor to carry out a local law passed in 2023 that banned solitary confinement in city jails. Mr. Adams had tried to veto the law, and when that failed, declared a state of emergency that blocked key parts of it.
Advocates and lawyers representing incarcerated people have long fought to end solitary confinement. Prolonged isolation, which United Nations officials have called torture, has been linked to brain damage, increased risk of self-harm and suicide.
Corrections officers and their unions — joined by Mr. Adams in recent years — have fiercely opposed measures banning the practice, arguing that their ability to isolate violent inmates is essential to keep staff members and other detainees safe.
“I urge Mayor Mamdani to tour the jails with me, speak to our officers and see firsthand the dangers my members face every day before allowing the emergency order to expire,” Benny Boscio, president of the correction officers’ union, said.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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