A federal judge recently agreed to hear arguments for and against appointing a receiver to oversee New York’s troubled jail system.
Those are expected to start this fall, but questions around who, what, how and how long – are questions that will dominate the city’s criminal justice community throughout the proceedings.
Yet unlike federal takeovers of police departments, receivership for jails is relatively rare, and the results thus far have been mixed.
This is what Gothamist has been able to dig up about receiverships in jails.
What are receivers?
Traditionally, receivers are court-appointed trustees or caretakers of a troubled property or entity. They represent the court that appoints them and are the “medium through which the court acts,” according to court precedent. Receivers have been put in charge of failing railroads, segregated schools, cities, and occasionally jails and prisons.
For something like a jail, it’s a big deal. In practice, it would mean an unelected judge, through a receiver, would control New York’s jail system and replace someone who was appointed by an elected official — in New York City’s case, Mayor Eric Adams and his jails commissioner, Louis Molina.
“Judges are not anxious to interfere,” Darnley Hodge, the court-appointed receiver for the Orleans Parish Jail in Louisiana, said in an interview. “If it gets to a point where the judge steps in, it’s because there were specific violations of the United States Constitution.”
What can a receiver do?
“The court takes it over completely and turns it over to another individual,” Hodge said.
In New Orleans, the seat of Orleans Parish, Hodge said he was given a list of 174 objectives, which he had to bring into “substantial compliance.” He focused on training staff, drafting a new budget, and working with the City Council to assuage its concerns. The court gave him very specific powers, and he could return to the judge to ask for more powers if needed. Hodge said the judge asked him to cooperate with the elected sheriff.
Margo Frasier was the court-appointed monitor in Orleans. She was brought in prior to Hodge in order to observe jail conditions and report to the court.
She said Hodge’s powers were more sweeping than he admits.
“He had budgetary control. He could hire and fire people,” she said. “He was able to essentially run the system.”
Hodge, who ran the system from 2018 to 2021, was able to fire the human resource director and overhaul the entire staff screening process. He was also able to order the construction of a new building for detainees with mental health needs.
What are the limits of a receiver?
Just as the powers of a receiver are granted by the court, they can also be limited by the court. In Orleans, some protections were given to correction officers above a certain rank.
“You could only fire them for some sort of misconduct, not just because you decided to replace them,” Frasier said.
In another example, the court process itself blocked the jail in Hinds County, Mississippi, from entering receivership. After the judge issued his order, Hinds County’s new Sheriff said he had a plan to turn the jail around and a receiver “will impede the County’s democratically elected leaders from realizing maximum value of taxpayers’ funds.” A higher court stayed the receivership while the matter is being appealed.
The contours of the consent decree and the judge’s eventual order to a receiver is also shaped by litigation.
“The judge will likely want to give the parties in the case an opportunity to advance names of who they think the receiver ought to be,” said Hernandez Stroud, who has studied receiverships at NYU’s Brennan Center. He said they may also want “to give the parties an opportunity to argue certain issues that may be legally relevant.”
In crafting a potential consent decree and receivership, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is handling New York’s case, must navigate what justice reform advocates say is a winnowing appetite in courts and localities for judicial control over local authority.
Lawyers who brought the case against Hinds County say the county fought hard against receivership because they knew the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would back them up.
Paloma Wu, deputy director of impact litigation at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the city may choose to wage a similar fight.
“They’re going to have the opportunity to put it up into the U.S. Supreme Court and the majority of those justices have said ‘Hell no’ to courts as a means to prevent ongoing constitutional violations,” she said.
How could a receiver affect the closing of Rikers?
In 2019, the City Council passed a law requiring that Rikers be closed by 2026, which was later amended to 2027. Justice reform advocates are concerned that a potential court takeover of the city’s jails would give the mayor a way out of having to fulfill that obligation.
“If a receiver could come in and somehow delay closing Rikers — I don’t know how it would happen, but I feel like it’s potentially a possibility,” said Keli Young, an organizer for Vocal NY. “That’s something we absolutely cannot allow to happen.”
Frasier says Swain likely doesn’t have that power under the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, which Congress passed to limit judicial overreach. Stroud, of the Brennan Center, notes that some see receivership as a faster route to closing Rikers by putting caps on the number of people incarcerated, though ultimately he says it’s not something a potential receiver will focus on.
“They’re not thinking about closure, Stroud said. “It’s a parallel process that would happen alongside the receivership.”
Where have federal receivers taken over jails in the past?
Appointing a receiver over a local jail is a rare occurrence. The Orleans Parish case is the only recent instance of a receivership over an entire jail. There, a federal judge appointed a “director of compliance” after a lengthy, and still-ongoing, lawsuit that started in 2012. Orleans Parish had two directors of compliance each lasting two years, from 2016 to 2020.
Hinds County was the other recent court-ordered appointment of a jail receiver but the case is still lingering in the appeals process and the receiver has not taken control.
Cook County, Illinois had a court-appointed “transitional administrator” with sweeping powers from 2007 to 2015 over its temporary juvenile detention center.
In Fulton County, Georgia, a receiver was appointed from 2004 to 2007.
The District of Columbia had a court-appointed receiver, but they were only put in charge of the medical and mental health care at Washington, D.C.’s jails from 1995 to 2000.
In 1989, the CEO of Wayne County, Michigan was appointed receiver of the jail, replacing the sheriff. A federal judge appointed a receiver over the McDowell County Jail in West Virginia in 1991.
State prisons have a longer history with court-appointed receivers: Alabama’s prisons in 1976, California’s prison mental health and medical care from 2005 to 2012, and a court-appointed “special master” was ordered for the the prison in St Croix, Virgin Islands
How successful have receivers been?
Receivers are frequently appointed from outside the local political sphere and come with years of professional corrections experience. Courts have rejected receivers who came from a jail with a history of violence. They are also given a defined list of objectives and often increased power and resources to accomplish them.
“Receivers have tended to be successful in rethinking staffing policies and practices in hiring staff and professionalizing staff,” Stroud said. “Creating classification systems where those systems lacked ways to categorize people based on risk based, mental or medical health care needs.”
That said, most of the jails that have had court-appointed receivers continue to face problems after the receiver has left. For example, advocates for people with disabilities say Cook County, Illinois’ juvenile detention is still “inhumane,” the Department of Justice opened another investigation into Fulton County Jail seven years after the close of the previous case, and U.S. marshals removed 100 people detained in Washington, D.C.’s jail because of mold and clogged toilets.
On average, receivers are only overseeing a jail for a few years before it’s handed back to a local government.
“The toughest part about reforming any organization is changing culture,” Frasier said. “You have someone come in and while they’re there, you have people with the attitude that this too shall pass, this will be gone.”
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