Problems With Rikers Island Prison Tough to Fix

Rikers Island is a 10-jail facility where an average of 11,000 inmates a night—men, women and youths—are held on charges ranging from trespassing to murder.

FILE - This June 20, 2014, file photo, shows the Rikers Island jail with the New York skyline in the background. Far from New York City's skyscrapers and trendy neighborhoods, Rikers Island sits by itself in the East River, a 10-jail complex where an average of 11,000 inmates a night are held on charges ranging from trespassing to murder. AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File

NEW YORK—Victor Woods shook uncontrollably, his body wracked by convulsions, as fellow inmates held him in their arms and shouted for help.

Amid the chaos inside a Rikers Island dormitory, surveillance video showed a lone figure of relative calm: a guard watching it all unfold as he sipped a cup of coffee.

“I’m not touching him,” the guard was quoted by inmates as saying.

Within hours, Woods, a 53-year-old unemployed tunnel worker who had been arrested a week before on heroin possession charges, was dead.

Woods was the seventh inmate to die in 2014 at Rikers.