Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Rikers Island sits in the East River just across from LaGuardia Airport and its 10 jail campus is the main carceral complex for New York City. For decades, advocates and journalists have documented the dysfunction, violence and deteriorating condition at Rikers. Now, new photos obtained through a public information request by Gothamist reveal just how bad the conditions are.

The disturbing photos were shown to hundreds of prosecutors in an August presentation prepared by the Board of Correction which oversees and regulates the Department of Correction. With me now is Matt Katz, reporter for WNYC and Gothamist who requested these photos. Matt, thanks so much for being back on The Takeaway with us.

Matt Katz: Oh, sure thing, Melissa. Thanks.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you tell us what some of these photos show?

Matt Katz: Yes. They're pretty disturbing stuff. Images have emerged from Rikers in the past, but nothing of this significance, at least nothing in the recent past. We have about 30-35 slides, pictures and videos that were shown to these prosecutors. One of them is an image of a man in an intake facility. There are pictures of the crowded intake areas where people who are arrested first come and there's no place to really move. People are lying on the ground and apparently in these intake facilities, there is a lack of toilets.

You see in one image, a man defecating in his shorts and being left in his soiled clothes for nearly 12 hours. There are timestamped images showing this individual from one point in time to another. He eventually gets new clothes but it's another incarcerated person, not jail staff that bring him a change of clothes. We have images of a detainee locked in a cage to shower that they use as a solitary confinement for periods of time.

This person is locked in for nearly 24 hours before he's removed via gurney because he injured himself. There's pictures of moldy food. There are several images and videos of incarcerated people administering first aid and chest compressions to other sick detainees because there's no medical staff or correction officers who are apparently available or present or willing to assist people who appear to be in serious medical need. It's a range of images that try to give the prosecutors a full sense of the depravity at Rikers Island right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're describing this, it feels important to remind people that most folks at Rikers are awaiting trial. They have not been convicted of a crime. You're talking about intake. This is simply meaning someone who's been arrested in this country, people who have rights. I want to take a listen for a moment to a former Rikers detainee, who was a panelist at the August event. Let's take a listen.

Five Mualimm-ak: The purpose is to explain to them that when you're sentencing someone to Rikers, when you're asking for high amounts of bail when people are poor, you're actually condemning them to a death sentence possibly.

Matt Katz: Yes, that's Five Mualimm-ak. He spent many years as an incarcerated person at Rikers Island. Now he runs a non-profit, Incarcerated Nation Network and he tries to assist people who are leaving incarceration. He was a panelist at this event as you mentioned, he was there in order to add to the images that were being shown by the Board of Correction to tell these prosecutors what life is like in Rikers Island.

The Manhattan district attorney, the boss for these prosecutors wants them to understand that when the prosecutors are going before judges to either request bail on bail-eligible crimes and request that the judge keep people held in jail before their trials, pre-trial, and not release them under some sort of supervision on the street, or when they go before a judge and file charges. I talked to a former prosecutor in that very office who said most crimes can actually be charged in a variety of different ways.

Prosecutors have a ton of discretion, in really two ways. In deciding whether or not to request that a judge hold somebody pretrial, either on bail or not or whether the judge should release that person, may be under some supervision. There's programs where the courts work with non-profits, and they can help guarantee the person shows up to court even if they're not locked up until their court date. Prosecutors have power there.

Prosecutors have wide discretion when it comes to deciding what charges to file. I spoke to a former Manhattan prosecutor who said that most crimes, almost all crimes can be charged in a variety of ways. Maybe a prosecutor does not file as harsh of a charge against an individual because the prosecutor is aware of where the individual will end up before trial and that's Rikers Island. The issue is that people are being held at Rikers even though most are pre-trial for longer and longer periods of time. Almost a third of those held at Rikers Island stay there for more than a year.

This is a facility not meant for long-term stay. There are not the kinds of programs that one might get in a prison when they're sentenced to years behind bars. There is a documented lack of medical care with people just who are in need of seeing a doctor are not taken or not escorted to their medical appointments. This happens thousands of times every month, it's documented by the city. The point of this program was to really to make prosecutors think about these things and visually understand where they're having such a huge role in sending somebody to live and perhaps die.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What's been the response from the Department of Correction?

Matt Katz: The Department of Correction, this is the agency that actually runs the city jails, did not know that the Board of Correction's watchdog agency was doing this Zoom presentation before 200 to 300 Manhattan prosecutors. We sent them the presentation that we obtained via public information requests and they said it represented maybe just a point in time. There might have been an individual who soiled himself but they could not confirm how long that person was left like that.

Yes, there were crowded cells and there was an individual in a cage shower, but they would not confirm that that actually was going on for a long period of time or represented reality. They also said this is a new administration that's in charge of the city jails right now because the mayor was just elected earlier this year. He put in a new team and the Commissioner of the Department of Correction blamed his predecessors for a lot of the dysfunction at the facility and the physical damage at the facility that he says he's trying to repair.

There is an effort afoot to rest control of the city jails away from this current administration, though a lot of activists and defense attorneys want an actual federal takeover of New York City jails because they believe a federal receiver appointed by a judge is the only way that they can try to make this place a little bit more humane.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What happened to the movement to close Rikers?

Matt Katz: It's still slated to happen. This was a decision made by the prior mayor in New York a couple of years ago to close Rikers Island by a certain date and create smaller jails in different places in the city. The problem is, and this is supposed to happen by 2027, these smaller jails they're being built, they're starting to make that happen. The big issue though is that is very dependent on the number of people incarcerated by New York City to be a lot lower than it is now.

The decision to close Rikers was made at a time when the jail population was lower than it is at this point. The reason why it's gotten higher and higher is because Mayor Eric Adams directed his NYPD to focus more on lower-level crimes and make more arrests, which they've done. Also, crime rates and certain elements of crime have gone up according to police data, the number of people committing certain crimes has increased.

They need 3,300 people incarcerated by New York City in order to put them in the other jails in the city, otherwise, you're not going to have enough space, and they're going to have to keep people at Rikers Island. However, right now, there's more than 5,000 people incarcerated by the City of New York. What this presentation really showed is the role so many elements of the criminal justice system as you very well know have in decreasing incarceration and dealing with the scourge of mass incarceration in this country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering for policymakers who are making these decisions. When you point to even the issue of reducing the population enough to get to a place where some of these spaces can be closed. I'm wondering if you have insights from these decision-makers about how they adjudicate knowing these kinds of conditions exist on the one hand but also knowing that they're in a public opinion space where oftentimes right now crime ends up at the top of public opinion poll around what's most important and they're wanting to appear to be a certain kind of decision maker.

Matt Katz: Yes I think it's very messy and their decisions aren't always clear. The Manhattan prosecutor, the District Attorney Alvin Bragg was elected as a so-called progressive prosecutor. They're the individual who does whatever he can to ensure that people don't get locked up or if they do for as little amount of time as necessary because there's a fundamental understanding that jail and prison damages people and does not necessarily make communities safe, that's his philosophy.

Yet from day one, from the day he took office earlier this year, he has been attacked on the pages of the New York Post for example, and other affiliated media outlets like Fox News. The criticism of him is that the reason why certain crime rates are higher right now in New York city is because there's a progressive prosecutor and people think they can get away with anything. When people are scared and when people are nervous taking the subway for whatever reason because they saw a bad news story or because something terrible might have happened to them, some people's instinct is to lock criminals up and then the criticism builds.

Then they see a headline saying that there's a progressive prosecutor who wants to let everybody out of jail and that's part of this and it influences Alvin Bragg. He sees these headlines when he is at the bodega and it influences prosecutors, it influences judges who don't want their names on the cover of the paper if they happen to give a short sentence or let somebody out on a low bail who ends up committing another terrible crime.

The line prosecutors all the way up to the District Attorney and the judges and everybody else in the system, they might believe philosophically that we lock too many people up in this country but then when the rubber meets the road, sometimes those decisions don't reflect that philosophy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Matt Katz is reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. Matt, thanks for your work in obtaining these photos, and thanks so much for joining us here on The Takeaway.

Matt Katz: Really appreciate the conversation, Melissa, thanks.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In a request for comment from WNYC to the New York Department of Correction DOC Commissioner, Louis A. Molina responded with this, "These disturbing images represent points in time not continuous conditions on Rikers Island. Our infrastructure and staffing challenges which are the result of years of mismanagement and neglect are no secret. Every day we're pursuing our action plan in partnership with the Federal Monitor to permanently eradicate the very condition seen in some of these photos."

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