Prison Reform Is Undermining Public Health and Safety

For a few months in the fall of 2021, reports of unchecked violence, abuse, and neglect at the jail on New York City’s Rikers Island were plastered across national news before receding back into the routinized cruelty that constitutes the underbelly of American life. This exceptional coverage of the brutality behind bars provoked universal condemnation. But in its short-lived ascent to the forefront of political discussions and popular media, this media “event” failed to account for the most unsettling reality at play: Rikers is everywhere. Last week, while acknowledging that “people are dying” as a result of neglect at the jail, a federal judge nonetheless granted New York City Mayor Eric Adams more time to avoid Rikers being put into federal receivership—a threatened slap on the wrist for the city’s repeatedly fatal refusals to respect the constitutional rights of those it cages. As Rikers continues to be scrutinized, both national news media and federal authorities are largely ignoring that the conditions noted at Rikers are far closer to the norm than exception across U.S. carceral facilities. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Abysmal conditions at Houston’s Harris County Jail, for example, drove even more deaths last year than at Rikers, and parallel sustained crises continue across the country. Over what has been by far the deadliest two years in their history, a large proportion of U.S. jails and prisons have d...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance healthscienceclimate justice Source Type: news