NYC jail reform seemed on track. Then the monitor accused officials of dodging oversight.

For the first time in years, New York City's jails looked like they might be on the verge of real change.

A federal judge appointed a remediation manager with broad authority over the Department of Correction in late January. A reform-minded correction commissioner took office weeks later. Mayor Zohran Mamdani made clear that closing Rikers Island was, once again, a top priority at City Hall. And the federal monitor who has tracked the jails for more than a decade noted “a positive shift” in the new administration’s approach to working with his team.

Then, earlier this month, the monitor, Steve Martin, wrote to U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, accusing the Department of Correction of “actively engaging in efforts to evade transparency and impede cooperation and collaboration.”

The letter came as a surprise to those who follow Rikers closely, calling into question whether even this well-aligned group could finally reverse the long-standing pattern of human rights violations at the city’s notorious jails.

In his letter, Martin said his monitoring team had grown increasingly concerned over the summer about “poor management strategies” that were leading the department to repeat the same sort of conduct that had gotten past administrations into trouble.

In other court filings, Martin and his deputy monitor were more specific. They said correction leadership wasn’t coordinating with one another, some plans were rushed out while other initiatives stalled and that the department was struggling to explain how it would address urgent safety issues. They pointed to the two most recent deaths in custody as examples of what these sorts of failures can cost.

The final straw came on the evening of Sept. 1, when Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards’ chief of staff sent a list of directives to department leadership that the commissioner wanted implemented “right away.” One said that no “idea, strategy, or work” should be shared with the remediation manager, the monitor, or City Hall unless Richards had been briefed first. Another directed staff to send minutes of every conversation with the federal oversight teams to a deputy commissioner.

The monitor only found out about the new policies through an anonymous tip. In his letter to judge Swain, Martin called the directives “extraordinary” and “among the most specific, direct, and consequential actions … to undermine the Court’s Orders and obstruct the flow of information” he had seen in more than 10 years.

The impact of the discord doesn’t seem to have been lost on Richards. He moved to smooth things over, promising to quickly address the monitor’s concerns. The department hasn’t responded to a message seeking comment on the exchanges through the courts.

Michele Deitch, a University of Texas law professor who has served as a court-appointed monitor herself, said she’d understood the new group of leaders overseeing Rikers Island to be a collaborative one.

“Of course, it's going to work better when it's more collaborative, which is why this one so surprised me,” she said.

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The experts Gothamist spoke to for this story all pointed to the complicated power structure at the top of the Department of Correction, noting it was ripe for confusion.

More than 10 years ago, following a class action lawsuit over civil rights violations on Rikers Island, Swain, the federal judge, issued a consent decree, ordering the city to overhaul conditions in its jails. As part of that decree she appointed a monitor to act as her eyes and ears inside the facilities and to determine whether the city was making adequate progress.

By many measures, the situation has only gotten worse. Swain has held the city in contempt of her orders twice in recent years. Finally, earlier this year, she named Nicholas Deml, a former CIA officer who previously led the Vermont Department of Corrections, as “remediation manager,” vesting him with broad authority to finally enforce reforms.

Both monitorships and receiverships are fairly rare, experts said; having both at the same time is nearly unprecedented. Add to that the city’s push to close Rikers Island altogether — Mamdani named a “Close Rikers Czar” for that express purpose earlier this year — and the situation becomes even more complicated.

“The monitor has nothing to do with whether or not Rikers closes or stays open, or the borough-based facilities open up, none of that,” Deitch said. “The monitor's job is to make sure that the judge's orders with respect to people who are incarcerated, you know, that their rights are not being violated.”

Meanwhile, she said, the correction department commissioner is “kind of caught between those worlds.”

“They may want to close down these facilities as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, they still have to make sure they are meeting the needs of the people who are there,” Deitch said. “I don't think there is an easy role for any of these people. It is a nightmare.”

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A week after she received the monitor’s letter, Swain issued her own order, a warning shot to correction department leadership.

The judge noted two issues in particular. First, the department was required to consult the monitor at least three weeks before implementing any new policies. This hadn’t happened. Perhaps more consequentially, the directives themselves appeared to run against orders the judge had issued years earlier. Specifically, the monitoring team is supposed to have “unencumbered, direct access” to every department employee, including the right to talk with them confidentially, outside the presence of supervisors. Deml's remediation team was granted “unlimited access” when the court appointed him.

This sort of access, Swain wrote, was "indispensable to the critical work” of reforming the jails.

Margo Schlanger, a University of Michigan law professor who has also served as a court-appointed monitor, said the rules around access are important because a monitor and remediation manager, unlike a judge, are working on the ground to get things faster and in a more “interactive way.”

“If everything runs through the commissioner, then the monitor is getting a tilted, packaged, edited view of what’s going on,” she said. The job requires checking to make sure that what command staff describe matches what line staff actually experience. “If a monitor can't do that, he can't do his job.”

Martin made a similar point in his letter, noting that had the directive been followed, it likely “would have precluded the staff from confidentially reporting” the directive to him in the first place.

The requirement that staff take notes of every interaction with the court’s teams and report them up the chain never took effect. A day after it went out, the chief of staff told leadership to hold off on implementation until the cabinet could discuss. According to Martin, that pause followed a warning from another department leader who worried that if Martin’s team found out that the DOC was tracking conversations, “it will be bad.”

Swain closed her order with a stern warning. The department's obligations to work with the monitor and the remediation manager, she wrote, “are just that: Obligations, not suggestions.”

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Deml, the remediation manager, took action almost immediately. He ordered the new directives rescinded and told the city to issue written guidance, subject to his approval, to all staff on how to comply with the standing court orders. He also moved the staff responsible for making sure the department was complying with the consent decree to the purview of the department’s general counsel.

Richards, the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the Department of Correction, addressed the monitor’s concerns head on. In a letter that became public in court filings this week, but was sent even before the judge had issued her own order, the commissioner acknowledged "missteps in recent weeks.” He promised to develop a comprehensive communication plan for the monitor’s review that would make sure staff were clear on their roles and responsibilities for responding to the court’s orders.

The city’s Law Department also sent a letter to the judge underscoring it had not been the correction department’s “intention to impede the free flow of communication.”

Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the policy journal Vital City and a former director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, read the whole ordeal as “sort of a bump in the road.”

“I think it's unfortunate,” she said. “I think it's gonna work out.”

The monitor’s reaction has to be understood, at least in part, as stemming from what came before, Glazer said. “I think the court and the monitor — and the public frankly — felt very badly used by the Adams administration.” Under that administration, the department had withheld information about a death and serious injuries in custody.

“Sometimes things are malicious and sometimes they're mistaken,” Glazer said. “I would very much put this down to unartfully phrased bureaucratic communications, not an intent to obscure.”

Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who has been heavily involved in Rikers oversight and previously served as chair of the council’s criminal justice committee, agreed. The commissioner “comes from the perspective of being someone who has gone through the system, has spent and dedicated his life to helping people through the system,” she said. “I cannot imagine that he is in any way working to undermine the goals of closing Rikers and improving the conditions of detention for people who are there.”

Reform, she added, is going to take cooperation. “All parties are gonna need to work together in a good faith fashion in order to achieve the goals that we need to achieve here.”

During a press conference earlier this month, Mamdani said he had “complete confidence” in Richards and reiterated his administration’s commitment to working with the court’s oversight teams.

Whether the various parties are back on the same page should be clear soon enough. Swain asked Martin to report back to her on the situation by the end of the month.