Death at Rikers

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The death Sunday of an inmate at Rikers Island after he was assaulted by six other inmates is another in a troubling series of problems at New York City’s Department of Correction. Last year, an assistant deputy warden, Mitchell Hochhauser, pleaded guilty to stealing a Salvador Dali sketch from the jail. Also last year, a three-star chief in the correction department, Anthony Serra, was indicted for using correction officers to conduct his personal business. In 2002, the city’s correction commissioner, William Fraser, resigned after news reports that he paid city employees to help put a liner in an above-ground pool at his home. The department is spending millions to renovate an empty jail in Brooklyn. There was a homicide a year at Rikers in both 2002 and 2003, a correction department spokesman, Thomas Antenen, said yesterday. And as these columns noted in a November 2002 editorial headlined, “Correcting Corrections,” New York’s correction system spends three times more money to house an inmate for a day than does Los Angeles County or Chicago’s Cook County.


The Chicago and Los Angeles systems are not without their own problems. As for the death here in New York on Sunday, details of what happened were still murky. Mr. Antenen says that the correction officer who was on duty did “a tremendous job” breaking up the assault. Most of New York’s Boldest are honest civil servants who do their best at a difficult job each day, and our sense is that conditions at Rikers overall are better than they were decades ago. The system admits more than 100,000 inmates a year and houses 14,500 on an average day. But as Sunday’s victim found, in a prison setting even a momentary loss of control can be deadly. The incident is under investigation by the Bronx district attorney. We hope he will pursue the investigation vigorously wherever it leads. The only death sentences in New York’s prison system should be the ones handed out by juries.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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