A federal judge overseeing New York City’s jails on Tuesday named Nicholas Deml, a former C.I.A. officer, to take control of Rikers Island, replacing the mayor as the main person who will make major decisions about the troubled and violent jail complex.
The judge, Laura Taylor Swain, said Mr. Deml and the city should meet promptly to discuss the logistics of the role.
Judge Swain ordered the city and Mr. Deml to confidentially submit a report to her with the agreement they’ve reached within 21 days.
According to an appendix submitted with the order, Mr. Deml served as commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, “leading reforms to stabilize the work force, improve health care for those in custody, and foster culture change across Vermont’s prisons.” He also was an aide to Senator Richard J. Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In May, Judge Swain ordered control of the jails be handed over to a new official who would report directly to her and would not be a city employee, turning aside then-Mayor Eric Adams’s efforts to maintain control of the lockups.
She wrote that 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.
The change will be a test of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ability to work with federal officials to turn the jail around after decades of violence and dysfunction, and with a deadline to build four new facilities by next year. Mr. Mamdani has not named a person to replace Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, an Adams appointee, as head of the Department of Correction.
Mr. Mamdani issued an executive order in his first full week in office extending a years-old state of emergency that suspended some rules regulating conditions in city jails, including the Rikers Island complex. The order 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 at the time.
But the complex had been in turmoil years before Mr. Adams’s governance.
In 2015, the city agreed to federal oversight of Rikers to settle a class-action lawsuit focused on curbing the use of force and violence toward both detainees and correction officers. A court-appointed monitor who has issued regular reports on the persistent mayhem, Steve J. Martin, released his 20th report on Jan. 13.
In the latest report, Mr. Martin and his team wrote that “the reform effort continues to progress at a glacial pace.”
Since 2022, at least 48 people have died either while being held at New York City jails or shortly after being released, according to city data. Last year, the city recorded 15 deaths, an increase from five in 2024.
For years, advocates for incarcerated people, detainees’ lawyers and city leaders have pushed for the closure of Rikers Island and for a federal judge to install an outside authority to oversee the city’s jails.
Federal takeovers of jails are rare. When Judge Swain issued her order, there had been only nine in the nation since the late 1970s, according to the federal monitor.
Because of a law the City Council passed in 2019, the city is required to close Rikers by August 2027 and replace it with four smaller borough-based jails. It is unlikely to meet that deadline. Last year, a commission on closing Rikers urged the city to appoint two senior officials to focus solely on shuttering the complex.
When the law was passed, the city’s jail population was about 7,000, dropping to under 4,000 during the Covid pandemic. Today, the jail population has returned to nearly 7,000.
Mr. Mamdani has not made public any plans to close the complex, but he said during his campaign that he supported closing the jail. Over the years, the estimated costs for the four new jails rose to $15.5 billion from an estimated $8.7 billion. In recent weeks, the city’s new comptroller has said the city faces a budget deficit of about $12.6 billion.
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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