Jake Pearson

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.

The New York City mayor wants to spend $130 million over four years to overhaul how the nation’s most populous city deals with mentally ill and drug-addicted suspects, diverting many to treatment instead of the city’s troubled Rikers Island jail complex.

NEW YORK—New York City’s reform-minded jails commissioner is facing opposition to his plan to put the 250 most dangerous inmates in a new, restrictive cell block on Rikers Island that would allow them to be locked away for up to 17 hours a day.

NEW YORK—New York City jail officials plan tighter screening of guards and other employees after a city investigation found they were easily able to smuggle vodka, heroin, marijuana, and razor blades into Rikers Island in exchange for hundreds of dollars in “courier” fees from inmates.

NEW YORK—New York City is using a $400,000 federal grant to review suicides and acts of self-harm in city jails with an approach commonly applied when things go wrong in the medical and aviation industries, officials said on Tuesday.

These are the deaths in New York City’s Rikers Island jail that don’t make headlines—prisoners with diseases, disorders, and addictions who succumb to heart attacks, infections, and other causes officially filed away as “medical.”

The newly appointed commissioner of New York City’s jail system violated city law by sending as many as 47 mentally ill inmates into 23-hour confinement without first getting approval from mental health clinicians, a city oversight board said Tuesday.