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What Rikers' new remediator thinks is broken, and his plan to fix it
By
Ryan Kost
Published Jul 16, 2026
Modified Jul 16, 2026
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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
By
Ryan Kost
Published Jul 16, 2026
Modified Jul 16, 2026
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When they first began inspecting the Rikers Island jails, a team tasked with tracking reforms there found a housing unit filled with smoke from fires detainees had set.
“The effect was disorienting,” remediation manager Nicholas Deml writes. “(T)he smoke had a chemical odor, likely due to burning fibers or synthetic marijuana; a fire alarm rebounded off the concrete floor and walls; incarcerated individuals pounded on their cell doors, calling out to us, while others sat shackled to restraint desks.”
An officer shrugged her shoulders as she took in the scene, suggesting, he writes, that “this was simply another day on Rikers.”
The scene is one of two that open Deml's first major filing since a federal judge appointed him in January to oversee New York City's jail system, giving him authority to direct many of the city’s efforts to get the troubled jail system under some semblance of control.
The 33-page action plan filed Tuesday includes Deml’s initial assessment of the city’s jails and his top priorities over the next year, but it also serves as a declaration of intent for the new remediator. At one point, he orders the Department of Correction to draft a "values statement emphasizing the dignity of all persons in custody and department staff.” He also calls for a dramatic increase in funding for detainee programming.
Deml, a former CIA officer who previously led the Vermont Department of Corrections, also publicly identifies the members of his 11-person remediation team in the filing. The group includes several former colleagues from Vermont, veteran corrections leaders and policy experts whose work has shaped debates over federal intervention at Rikers and prison reform.
Overall, Deml’s verdict on the department he inherited is not gentle.
Deml writes that the Department of Correction struggles to perform even the most basic correctional functions: staffing posts, securing housing units and keeping people safe. Leaders, he says, have failed to make sure staff follow fundamental security practices. And funding priorities are misaligned. He notes the jails are crumbling even as the DOC spent more than $370 million on overtime in the past fiscal year.
None of this is new. Rikers has been a persistent issue for decades. Deml quotes a federal judge who wrote back in 1974 that conditions in the city’s jails “manifestly violate the Constitution and would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them.”
In 2015, the city agreed to federal oversight of Rikers in response to a lawsuit over violence and use of force on the island. In the years since, however, the situation has only grown worse. Ten years later, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain found the city in contempt for violating her court orders to make the jails safer and moved to appoint Deml.
Deml’s appointment comes during a moment of transition for the jail system. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged a different approach to corrections than his predecessor and has appointed Stanley Richards, who himself spent time on Rikers, as the department’s commissioner. Mamdani has also appointed a “Close Rikers Czar” to help the city move toward a borough-based jail system. That transition was supposed to be complete by August 2027, though it seems unlikely the city will meet its deadline.
While Deml cautions that “new facilities alone” will not turn the system around, he adds that with the right reforms “the City can achieve constitutional compliance and ultimately resume full responsibility for its jail system.”
His first plan, which runs through June 2027, focuses on five broad priorities meant to address safety: improving core correctional and security functions, overhauling staffing methods, strengthening investigations and disciplinary systems, modernizing the department's technology and data systems, and improving leadership throughout the agency.
Much of this comes down to nuts-and-bolts efforts. On the first issue, improving security, Deml calls for the Department of Correction to develop a plan that addresses officers abandoning posts, key control, routine tours, searches, escorts with restraints and more.
It’s clear that the reforms will take time. Defective doors, for instance, have been a persistent problem at Rikers. Under Deml’s plan, the department has until Sept. 1, 2026 to present an audit of all the island’s defective doors. It then has another month to submit a procurement and replacement schedule.
The document largely sidesteps questions of funding, but as part of improving core correctional functions, the remediator directs the department to determine an appropriate level of funding for community-based programming in the jails. He gives an estimate of $50 million.
That would mark a substantial increase over the roughly $14 million currently budgeted for programming for people in custody, which itself was only recently restored after former Mayor Eric Adams cut $17 million in classes and re-entry services in 2023.
Deml writes that this investment should “reduce idle time, foster behavioral change, and support rehabilitation and successful return to the community.”
Throughout the filing, Deml repeatedly emphasizes collaboration, describing reform as a joint effort involving Richards, correction officers, advocates and other stakeholders. He praises the new administration's willingness to embrace reform and points to a recent trip he and Richards took to Germany to study the correctional system there, which he writes “places human dignity at the center of incarceration.”
At the same time, Deml makes clear that he is willing to exercise the broad authority granted to him by the court if necessary. Deml has already forced one organizational change, moving the department’s investigative units into a single division and placing them under a senior deputy commissioner who reports to his team. And he warns that if the timelines he set out “are not met, our intervention will deepen.”
So far, the Mamdani administration appears to have taken the remediator's role in stride, repeatedly voicing its willingness to work with Deml and his team, a refrain officials repeated Wednesday.
“The Mamdani administration is reviewing the Remediation Action Plan and remains committed to working in close partnership with the remediation manager to improve safety and conditions in our jail system," spokesperson Sam Raskin said in a statement. “We are focused on making meaningful improvements on Rikers Island today while continuing the work to safely transition to a modern, safer and smaller borough-based jail system.”
Reformers said they were pleased with Deml’s opening salvo.
Legal Aid and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, which represent the plaintiffs in the case that began this process, said the plan sets urgent priorities and singled out the programming expansion for praise. “We call on the City and DOC to meet this moment by embracing the Plan’s call for rapid change,” Mary Lynne Werlwas with the Legal Aid Society and Debbie Greenberger with Emery Celli wrote in a statement.
In a separate statement, Darren Mack, cofounder of the Freedom Agenda, which has long advocated for closing Rikers, also applauded the remediator’s call for “more money for programming in the jails, transparency about DOC’s staffing, (and) fundamental shifts in DOC’s culture.”
Still, the reformers seemed cognizant of the fact this was just a beginning.
Any plans to improve conditions for detainees, Mack said, must go “hand in hand” with reducing the jail population, finishing the transition to borough-based jails and closing Rikers. And Werlwas and Greenberger noted that the jails “remain untenably dangerous and dysfunctional, and nothing but meaningful and swift forward momentum is acceptable.”
As Deml noted in his filing, “The system has reached the point where incrementalism is itself a form of failure.”
Tagged
new york city
public safety
Ryan Kost
Ryan Kost is a reporter on the day-of news desk, where he covers breaking news and writes enterprise stories about jails, courts, prosecutors and government accountability. His work focuses on the public institutions that shape life in New York. Before joining the newsroom, he lead a multi-part investigation with Columbia Journalism Investigations and New York Focus into how New York prosecutors handle wrongful conviction claims. He's also been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, The Associated Press and The Oregonian. Got a tip? Signal: ryankost.20
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