In a new mini-issue of the public affairs magazine Vital City about the ongoing crisis at New York City’s Rikers Island jail, Professor Emeritus Malcolm Feeley and Van Swearingen ’01 analyze the history of efforts to reform prisons and its lessons for today.
“From Plantation Prisons to the Modern Era” draws insights from the efforts by judges and special masters to dismantle Southern prisons originally modeled on plantations and mandate changes in California, Feeley and Swearingen propose the jurist handling the Rikers case appoint a receiver to take over.
“Considering the duration and the magnitude of problems at Rikers Island, it is surprising that a receiver was not appointed to take charge years ago,” they write. “But as obvious as it is, the process of getting from here to there is fraught.”
Feeley’s many books and scholarly articles include Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons, published in 1998. Swearingen, who also earned a master’s from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, specializes in litigating prison conditions for Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld in San Francisco.
They note that in the Plata v. Schwarzzenegger case involving the delivery of medical services to inmates in the California prison system, Judge Thelton E. Henderson ’62 appointed a receiver to assume control of the process, and now even the state is asking the court to expand the receiver’s authority to cover mental health services as well. In light of this, Feeley and Swearingen conclude that persistently failing prisons and jails are like failing companies; in effect they should be declared bankrupt and placed in receivership. Given the seemingly intractable problems at Rikers, they recommend that the federal judge handling the case should in effect declare the jail bankrupt, and appoint a receiver with full authority to reorganize it from top to bottom.
Even in the hands of a receiver, Feeley and Swearingen argue, change is difficult and often takes many years. Yet it still rises to the top of the list of potential solutions, they write, and close with two questions: “Does a judge have the courage to make this appointment? And if so, who would take the job?”