Mamdani’s pandering cries for accused killer ignores the real crisis at Rikers Island

After a death on Rikers Island, Mayor Mamdani posted that he was sad about the “death of a New Yorker in city custody,” without mentioning whether he was also sad for the poor guy, Jose Miranda, whom this “New Yorker” had randomly sliced to death on camera.

Mamdani’s selective sadness was a craven pander to his empty-the-jails DSA base.

But it was also a willful misrepresentation of what’s happening at Rikers, and a distraction from his own responsibility.

As a candidate for mayor, Mamdani claimed people who died at Rikers were “killed.” But they weren’t killed. Statistics show most inmates deaths are due to medical episodes, suicides and drug overdoses.

At worst they died of negligence, which Mamdani has done little to combat. He’d rather set criminals free than fix the issues.

Clarence Woodward was the seventh inmate to die this year. If this pace keeps up, we could see 11 deaths this year.

This toll would be just one less than the average of 12 annual Rikers deaths over the six years between 2020 and 2025, an increase from the pre-2020 annual death toll of nine.

Deaths mostly medical

Why are more people dying?

Most deaths — just under half — are medical, and they haven’t increased (even COVID-19 didn’t have a big impact).

The deaths that have soared are suicides (up from one per year pre-2020 to three per year) and drug overdoses (up from fewer than one per year pre-2020 to three per year).

And these deaths point to chronic management failures.

As Rikers’ longstanding federal monitor reports, video in the hours before one of this year’s deaths showed “little to no effective supervision, with incarcerated individuals moving freely throughout the housing area, including during overnight lock-in,” and only “superficial tours by staff and supervisors throughout the night.”

After another 2026 death, the city suspended one corrections officer because “his tours were not meaningful and because he left post without authorization.”

As yet another independent overseer, a federally appointed “remediation management team,” said last month, the department “struggles to perform even the most basic correctional functions” like “staffing posts” and “securing housing units,” and “leadership cannot ensure staff consistently adhere to fundamental security practices.”

Code for: the union is in charge, and nobody will do anything about it. The city also struggles to hire new officers into this system.

Jail pop pipe dream

So Mamdani wasn’t wrong, last year, to criticize Rikers.

But he was wrong in his focus: to “reduce that jail population to less than 4,000.”

Today’s population, at midyear, was 6,607, lower than last year’s 7,412, but the deaths in custody remain high.

And getting below 4,000 inmates is unrealistic.

Though the jail population has fallen over the decades as the city has succeeded in preventing crime, it’s never gone that low. Even during 2021, when Mayor Bill de Blasio had emptied the jails during COVID-19, the average population was 4,912.

And, minor detail: crime soared at such a radical reduction.

Mamdani tweets sympathy to Woodward and his family, but Mamdani’s proposed fixes would have done nothing to prevent his death: even the most lenient criminal-justice laws wouldn’t allow an accused murderer to go free. Sure, he should have received a faster trial, but Mamdani doesn’t control state courts.

Mamdani sticks to that artificial 4,000 number, though, because it happens to be just below the maximum number of people the city’s planned four-borough jails can hold.

So Mamdani, for all his criticism of Eric Adams over violence in the jails, is sticking to the same line that Adams, and, before him, de Blasio, held: there’s nothing much we can do about the old jails until we build new jails.

As Mamdani said in his X post, “our administration is fully committed to the critical work of creating better conditions in our city’s jail system and closing Rikers Island as quickly as possible.”

Workforce reform need

But these two things have nothing to do with each other. The four borough jails are already years overdue past next year’s projected open date, and there’s no indication the city can afford to finish them, as their $20 billion-plus price tag rises, and as interest rates soar (the city borrows to build the jails).

Plus, absent workforce reform, the entrenched culture on Rikers is going to entrench itself in the new jails.

Meanwhile, the deaths that Mamdani once likened to murder on the mayor’s watch, so that he could score a few political points, continue. The difference is that now, he’s that mayor.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.