Amsterdam News
05/20/2025
In the early 1800s, Richard Riker, a descendant of the family who owned Rikers Island, participated in a kidnapping ring for decades that sent African Americans into slavery. Riker used his power as a judge and the pro-slavery Fugitive Slave clause of the Constitution to send countless souls to the south.
Riker’s methods were intentionally sloppy and cruel. He did not care whether the person in front of him was the person being sought; it did not matter whether the person was a child or an adult, or if they had proof of their freedom. However they came to be in New York, the essence of their crime was their Blackness.
More than 100 years after the Riker family sold the island to New York City, the Riker name remains linked to subjugation and brutality. Today, more than 5,900 legally innocent people are detained in conditions at Rikers Island so abhorrent that it is the source of multiple federal and class action lawsuits related to use of force, access to medical care, basic sanitation, and illegal use of solitary confinement.
Race and wealth (or lack of it) largely define who is granted the presumption of innocence. Black New Yorkers are admitted to Rikers at 11 times the rate of white New Yorkers, and judges continue to set bail at levels that amount to a ransom, in defiance of New York’s landmark 2019 pre-trial reforms. While some tragic stories like the experiences of the Exonerated Five and Kalief Browder should remind New Yorkers that police and courts can make grave mistakes, false allegations continue to disrupt lives.
Rikers Island may be entering yet another level of infamy, with Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement that he intends to issue an Executive Order to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to open an office there, in defiance of New York City’s sanctuary laws. While many people associate mass deportations with people of Latin American heritage, one in five people facing deportation is Black. As with all Black people in the U.S., police stop, search, and arrest Black immigrants at disproportionately high rates; Black immigrants are nearly three times more likely as non-Black immigrants to be detained and deported as the result of a criminal offense.
It bears repeating again here that Rikers is primarily a pretrial facility. The vast majority of people (85%) locked up at Rikers have not been convicted of a crime.
Let us now take a moment to contrast these circumstances with those of the mayor, who controls the fate of so many people. He is a free man while his charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign contributions are pending. He is able to work as mayor and live at home. He can hold media events where he proclaims his innocence and stands with his supporters. He has assembled a ferocious team of lawyers, paid for by his legal defense fund, which started with $1.7 million. Adams experiences the criminal legal system differently, because the baseline impulse of the system is to preserve power over the weak, and Adams is a powerful man. (To be clear, Adams’ case is in the federal system, while Rikers is part of the city’s criminal legal system.)
Even for a powerful man, though, Adams’ case is moving unusually. The current presidential administration has sought to have Adams’ charges dismissed — a move so controversial that attorneys in the U.S. Attorney’s office and four of Adams’ deputy mayors resigned in protest. The Trump administration’s request to drop the charges explicitly cited their belief that doing so would enable the mayor to participate more fully in his deportation agenda.
As he noted in his book, “The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War,” Jonathan Daniel Wells noted that so many New Yorkers were not just complacent about slavery; like Riker, they were complicit in its perpetuation. Whether motivated by anti-Blackness, personal gain, or the devil’s bargain between New York’s financial institutions and the cotton-growing South, people like Riker viewed Black lives as merely pawns. In this modern iteration, Adams is using his power to trade thousands of souls for his own preservation.
Riker and his ilk did not act unopposed, however. David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist, formed the New York Committee of Vigilance to stop the kidnappings, and carried out other acts of liberation, by acting as a visible “conductor” on the Underground Railroad and publishing abolitionist tracts. Our charge here is to act in similar opposition, to prevent Rikers from continuing its legacy in any way.
As individuals deeply affected by the inequities of the pretrial system, we recognize the urgent need to dismantle the enduring legacy of racial injustice exemplified by Rikers Island. We will continue our organizing to end this grim chapter, and invite all New Yorkers to join us as we fight for a future where we can all live safe and free.
Darren Mack, the descendant of Black Southerners and co-director of Freedom Agenda, has personally endured the injustices of incarceration at Rikers. Kevin Beckford, a Black man of Jamaican heritage, is Senior Associate at the Pretrial Justice Institute and has witnessed firsthand the mistreatment of his Black immigrant family members in this flawed system. Both of their organizations are members of the Campaign to Close Rikers