New York City should be held in contempt over conditions in Rikers Island jail, federal monitor says
New York City should be held in contempt over conditions in Rikers Island jail, federal monitor says
A court-appointed monitor is urging a federal judge to begin contempt proceedings against New York City to coerce the city to urgently improve its handling of its troubled massive jail complex.
You'd think that having a country with so many prisons would make us pretty good at running them.
Who says they’re not running exactly the way their ownership wants them to run?
I'd say that's exactly what's happening.
Down here in Texas, our prisons don't have A/C for the most part. It makes the place unbearably hot for inmates and guards alike, but there's no will to fix it because people are fine with punishing bad guys in terrible ways. That's on top of the overcrowding, extensive use of solitary confinement, long sentences, questionable convictions, etc. And we keep packing more people for longer sentences into an already overcrowded system.
It's not effective as a system that reforms convicts, but it is effective at providing cheap labor, a mass of people to increase the population count in a district, and political suppression of "undesirable" communities.