The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

by Eleanor Randolph

  When the Scheindlin decision came out, a furious Mike Bloomberg responded—nowhere did she mention the number of lives saved, he said indignantly. The decision was based on the flimsiest of evidence, he argued, and it was “pretty clear from the start” that she was going to deny the city a fair trial.47

  Judge Scheindlin’s ruling helped limit a policy that had gone haywire. Even Kelly recognized that it was a tool, “not a panacea.”48 But the Bloomberg lawyers were ready to appeal, and a few months later Scheindlin was removed from the case by a federal appeals panel for a lack of impartiality—mainly for her encouragement to lawyers to file the lawsuit and to the media.49 But when the court failed to throw out her actual ruling, the Bloomberg attorneys continued their appeal. That was in the last months of Bloomberg’s last term, and when his Democratic successor, Bill de Blasio, arrived, he quickly abandoned efforts to overturn the Scheindlin ruling on stop-and-frisk and promised to end Kelly’s version during his time in city hall.

  Kelly’s response was curt: “People will lose their lives as a result.”50 In short, maybe they were humiliated, but they were still breathing. Their argument would lose much of its force as data provided by Kelly’s successors listed far fewer Terry Stops, and the crime rate still kept going down in New York City anyway.

  There were other excesses by Kelly’s police force. When Bloomberg held the Republican convention in 2004, Kelly’s troops rounded up more than 1,800 protestors. Many were demonstrating against the Iraq War, but some of those arrested were just watching or failing to move out of the way. The city faced more than six hundred claims of abuse by those arrested and eventually paid out about $18 million to settle those cases as Bloomberg left office.51

  Far more serious were what some civil rights advocates called the “manufactured misdemeanors” mostly of black and Hispanic youths. The law allowed possession of a small amount of marijuana as long as it was not out in public. Some officers would stop youths and order them to empty their pockets. If marijuana came out, many were then arrested for having their weed “in public.” Many of these charges were dismissed by the courts, but they could also bring a $500 fine and three months in jail. For too many people caught in this unfair practice, it meant loss of job prospects, going to the military, even for a cab license.52 More than fifty thousand people were arrested in 2010 alone for possession of small amounts of marijuana before Commissioner Kelly issued an explicit order not to use such tricks. Displaying the drug must be an “activity undertaken of the subject’s own volition,” he decreed. The mandate almost halved the number of arrests overnight.53

  Overall, Kelly fulfilled Bloomberg’s mandate: the city was indeed safer after Kelly’s twelve years as his commissioner. Crime kept going down, eventually by a record 32 percent from 2001 to 2013, according to the city’s official crime statistics. And Bloomberg noted that the crime drop did not come because more people were imprisoned; the incarceration rate also dropped by 36 percent.

  Bloomberg would continue to face criticism for allowing policies like Kelly’s version of stop-and-frisk to continue for so long, but even years later he would defend those efforts as a way to save lives, especially black and Hispanic lives. During his time, the murder rates did go down. There were 587 homicides the year he took over in 2002, and 332 as he left in 2013. It was still too many, but the drop in crime allowed Bloomberg to brag that, under his watch, New York was “the safest big city in the nation.”54

  17

  THE FORGOTTEN ISLAND

  “You send a young kid to jail, you don’t ‘correct’ them. You teach them how to be a worse person.”

  —Michael Bloomberg, 2015

  As Manhattan shimmered in the distance, the tiny island once overrun with horse manure and garbage from New York City festered in the East River. Just a few hundred yards offshore between the Bronx and Queens, Rikers Island housed one of the most notorious jails in America. With room for fifteen thousand prisoners, the inmates on Rikers spent their days trying to survive the guards, the gangs, and a blatantly unfair judicial system that kept many behind bars because they did not have enough money to post bail while they waited for a judge to hear their case.

  The very name Rikers provoked nightmares for many New Yorkers who knew anything about the place. If there are some spots that retain the ghastly fetor after years of grief and iniquity, Rikers is one of them. The island itself was named for the Rycken, or Riker, family. Richard Riker, a prominent nineteenth-century lawyer, state attorney general, and city politician, became known as a supporter of the “Kidnapping Club.” The club was a group of brigands who encouraged the capturing of free blacks on the streets of New York City, including children taken from their schoolrooms, to be sold in the South as slaves.1

  After the Rikers sold the island to the city for $180,000 in 1884 (around $4.6 million in 2019 dollars),2 it became the dumping ground for city refuse that was eventually used as a landfill. As a result, the island expanded over the years from just under 90 acres to 415 by the 1930s, when it eventually became a jail, then a series of jails.3 It became the place to put away the unwanted, the criminal, and too often the mentally ill. The dreaded complex housed those who were lost for months and sometimes years waiting to go to trial. And those torturous hours on Rikers convinced too many inmates to confess to almost anything in order to get out or to serve a longer term at a prison upstate or go home with a new criminal record.

  As mayor, Bloomberg talked about how the jails did not “correct” anyone, even though his department was labeled Correction. “You send a young kid to jail, you don’t ‘correct’ them,” he said after he left office. “You teach them how to be a worse person.”4

  He could boast that the city’s incarceration rate during his time had hit an all-time low—declining by 36 percent between 2001 and 2012, or by almost 20,000 people, while the national rate grew by 3 percent.5 Bloomberg favored programs that reduced the prison population, replacing Rikers with sentences to community service, day custody for misdemeanors, and treatment for non-felony drug abusers. The emphasis was on crime prevention, not incarceration, and on giving judges greater latitude to grant pretrial release.

  But for those sent to Rikers, it was another story.6

  When Bloomberg took over as mayor, the city’s sixteen jails, including Rikers, seemed under control. His first commissioner of correction, William J. Fraser, a rare holdover from the Giuliani years, was considered a reasonable choice, but within a year Fraser was out after reports of corruption within his administration.7

  Bloomberg then passed the job to his parole commissioner, Martin Horn, who had been chief operating officer for New York State’s parole division and later served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of corrections. Horn would add the jail network to his other job overseeing parolees in early 2003. And by tradition, Bloomberg announced the news to the media and then whispered to Horn, “Don’t fuck it up.” Horn managed the jails from up close. He stayed around. As he once put it, “Managing a prison or jail is like tending a garden. If you don’t weed it every day, the weeds take over.8

  “The mayor never told me to back down. He never interfered,” Horn said years later. That could have been Bloomberg’s well-advertised management system—you hire good people, then you let them do their jobs. But in this case, Bloomberg was also focused elsewhere—banning tobacco, righting the economy, and instituting such reforms as 311. “I never got the sense that this was really an area he wanted to delve into. It was not on his list of priorities,” Horn said.9 Rikers was, once again, the forgotten island.

  * * *

  Fortunately, Mayor Giuliani had appointed his criminologist and budget expert, Michael Jacobson, as the city’s correction commissioner in 1995 when Rikers was known as “a hoodlum counter-city within the city.”10 To identify inmates and guards causing trouble, Jacobson used data much like the CompStat system used by police. He also ramped up activities in the jails to keep inmates occupied. When he began, there were more than one thousand slas
hings or stabbings a year—a crucial number because inmates can usually hide a fight or even a rape, but it’s a lot harder to keep an open wound from the authorities. By the time Giuliani’s team left,11 “the jailhouses were as under control as the nature of the beast allowed,” as city historian Chris McNickle wrote in 2017, and the number of slashings and stabbings stayed down for Bloomberg’s first term.

  Horn felt Rikers had been “stabilized”12 in those early years, but soon the number of attacks began growing again.13 While the drop in the number of prisoners at Rikers and other city jails was good news, across the river in city hall, officials felt they could reduce the budget and staff on the island. For overworked correction officers facing gang members or the mentally ill, it was an almost perfect recipe for trouble at the massive complex.14

  Bloomberg left Horn to deal with the problems at Rikers during his six years as correction commissioner. Horn appeared at press conferences, but he said that Bloomberg only called him personally about Rikers on two occasions. The first time was not about problems at the jails. It was about Canadian geese.

  Rikers is in the flight patterns of LaGuardia Airport, and the geese grazing on the island were always viewed as a potential hazard. (A skein of geese would later bring down a US Airways flight on a cold January day in 2009. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger would become a national hero for landing on the Hudson and managing to save all of his passengers.)15

  On the phone to Horn one day early in his new job at correction, Bloomberg explained that he was going to an event where the animal rights groups had planned to protest the killing of Canadian geese. Are we killing the geese on Rikers Island, he asked? Horn said his staff was trapping the geese for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “When we turn them over to the feds, they’re alive.” Horn remembered telling the mayor that “You can say we’re not killing any geese. Whether the feds kill ’em, I can’t say.”16

  The second call from the mayor was in 2009 when a sudden outbreak of the flu appeared to be so dangerous that Norman Seabrook, then the arrogant, bullying leader of the correction workers’ union, wanted to close the jails to avoid spreading the flu to his workers. Seabrook,17 who had endorsed Bloomberg in his first two elections in 2001 and 2005, had already made a name for himself by repeatedly threatening to disrupt the jails and the court system if he did not get his way.18 He boasted to commissioners about his access to the mayor—that he, not they, could get Bloomberg on his personal cell phone.

  Seabrook saw another opportunity to throw his weight around over the flu, and Horn was furious. No way are you closing the jails, Horn stressed as he called the city health commissioner and asked him to talk Seabrook down. When that didn’t work, Horn called his top city deputy to warn her that Seabrook was “on a rip.”

  That night, he got that second call from Bloomberg. According to Horn, the mayor simply said, “Marty, Norman Seabrook is the easiest guy in the world to manage. You just gotta kiss his ass.”19 Horn managed to keep the jails open during the flu, but he would resign a short time later. It was not just the call, he said, it was that he was tired and the mayor was running for a third term. Horn had also lost too many budget battles with city hall, and some of the guards had organized inmate gangs to help maintain order. “The Program,” the guards called it.20 When an eighteen-year-old inmate named Christopher Robinson refused to cooperate, the gangs run by the guards beat him to death.21 (Two guards would eventually go to prison, and the city would pay $2 million to the Robinson family.)22, 23 Horn quit to join the criminal justice faculty at John Jay College in New York City. “I was spent,” he said later.

  Horn’s replacement, Dora Schriro, an experienced correction officer, had run the correction facilities in Missouri and Arizona and spent a year as an administrator at the Department of Homeland Security. During her four years as commissioner—in Bloomberg’s last term—Rikers, once again, began to seethe with violence. The numbers of stabbings and slashings in city jails went up even as the inmate population went down. In 2009, there were twenty-five such incidents; forty-eight in 2010; thirty-five in 2011; seventy-three in 2012; seventy-three in 2013 (and ninety the year after Bloomberg left, in 2014).24

  * * *

  It took a U.S. prosecutor to catalog some of the ugliest ways that Rikers guards were treating prisoners—especially the younger ones. As Bloomberg left office, Preet Bharara, then the powerful U.S. attorney found that there was such a “culture of violence” against teenage inmates that Rikers had become like something out of Lord of the Flies.25

  The details of Bharara’s report on the years 2011 to 2013 are horrifying. One young man fell asleep in a class and was then dragged into the hallway and beaten so viciously he was crying for his mother. For these younger inmates, aged sixteen to eighteen, guards were rarely punished for pulling them into some corner, out of range of the prison’s video cameras. The guards would often yell “Stop resisting,” even if the inmate was subdued or had never resisted at all. That way the guard could argue self-protection as part of a flimsy reporting process that seldom resulted in any discipline or loss of status. In one year (FY 2012), guards used violence 517 times to subdue youthful inmates in two facilities that housed a total of 791 adolescents. There were 1,059 injuries reported during that period.26

  The most famous case involved a sixteen-year-old African American named Kalief Browder, who was charged with being one of a group that stole a backpack. Browder denied he was involved, but because he had a previous record for taking a truck on a joyride, the judge set his bail at $3,000. That was far too much for his family to pay which meant the youth was automatically sent to Rikers to await trial. Browder stayed in pretrial detention at Rikers for three agonizing years. He repeatedly protested his innocence and refused to plead guilty to get out of Rikers. He was savagely beaten by guards and other inmates and spent much of his time in solitary confinement—a teenager alone in a cell twenty-three hours a day. Eventually, charges were dropped, but Browder was thoroughly broken.27 He had tried several times in Rikers to commit suicide. In 2015, at home, he succeeded.28 His story in the New Yorker magazine finally prodded the city to do away with solitary confinement for the youngest inmates. And it helped expand some efforts to deal with the widespread mental problems that plagued as many as half of those caught in the hell of Rikers Island. As for the arbitrary and often unfair system of requiring cash bail that punishes the poor, that was like a lot of reforms for New Yorkers—it would be stuck in the state legislature in Albany for another four years.29

  * * *

  Norman Seabrook continued to protect guards, even when they brutally abused prisoners. One particular incident toward the end of the mayor’s third term finally ignited the full Bloomberg outrage. An inmate had charged guards with assaulting him and a rare court date was finally set. On the day when the inmate was scheduled to appear in court, Seabrook’s guards suddenly declared all prison buses unsafe, and they refused to transport more than seven hundred prisoners anywhere,30 even for medical care. When Bloomberg heard about it, he was furious and called for legal action against the guards. When an aide worried about what Seabrook would think, Bloomberg reportedly pounded the table and shouted, “I don’t give a shit. Take him to court. File charges. Do it.”31 The outcome was less than helpful. The guards accused of attacking the prisoner were found not guilty. And the city’s effort to punish the union went almost nowhere. After guards were docked two days’ pay, the union paid them back.32 (Years after Bloomberg left office, Seabrook would be found guilty of accepting a $100,000 kickback for investing $20 million of the union’s pension money in a hedge fund in 2014 that went bust.33 In 2019, he was sentenced to fifty-eight months in prison.)

  Bloomberg and his commissioners found no long-term solutions to the Rikers problem, but he would try at least one innovative way to deal with young people who kept returning again and again to the courts and the dreaded Rikers system. Bloomberg offered private investors a sort of wager, in what was believed to be
New York’s first “social impact bond” that would allow the wealthy to gamble on a city reform. In this case, Goldman Sachs would put up $7.2 million to pay for several programs designed to keep 10 percent of the troubled teenagers from returning to Rikers. Bloomberg added $6 million through his philanthropies, in part as a guarantee to Goldman in case the program failed. The city taxpayers would only pay the full bill if the program succeeded.34

  Bloomberg’s experiment failed to work, at least in the way he tried it in New York. Three years into the project, the Vera Institute of Justice ruled that the program “did not reduce recidivism (by 10 percent as required) and therefore did not meet the pre-defined threshold of success.”35 Bloomberg Philanthropies paid the $6 million guarantee to Goldman. Goldman lost $1.2 million on the deal—barely a blip for both enterprises. More important, it was free for the city’s taxpayers, and advocates still saw possibilities for future social impact bonds.

  For the unfortunates at Rikers, the social impact bond was simply another experiment gone wrong. And even with the number of prisoners steadily decreasing, the place continued to be dangerous and unforgiving. Linda Gibbs, who was Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for health and human services, which included Rikers, once simply shook her head when she was asked what should have been done about the island. “It should be closed,” she said long after Bloomberg had left city hall.36 Bloomberg’s successor soon promised to close Rikers in ten years (after he left office),37 thus, once again, handing off this inmate purgatory to some future New York City mayor.