Department of Correction officials have cooked up a really bad idea as to who could supersede Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie as the court-ordered receiver that a federal judge seems inclined to direct: Lynelle Maginley-Liddie. “Operation Lynelle,” as this effort has been called, would undermine the whole point of an independent receiver.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here that we hope we can clear up: that the commissioner is not currently empowered to circumvent some of the power of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association and the stultified rules of the department and its contracting processes is just one part of the problem. It’s a big element of the problem, no doubt, but the other part is that successive commissioners over many years and under multiple mayors are to some extent beholden to those mayors’ political imperatives.
As Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain wrote in her recent findings of contempt against the city and the DOC, “the last nine years also leave no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the Court’s orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay.”
The idea of a receiver is potent at least in part because the receiver has no mayor to keep happy, no subsequent municipal or political career to consider, no litany of friends in department to bend to, no sense of being tethered to the department’s overall culture and, yes, the powerful correction union.
That this person comes from outside and is responsive only to the lifetime-appointee federal judge that will sign off on the appointment is the whole idea, not an inconvenience to remedied by taking the authority away from the commissioner and then just vesting it back into to the same person.
Yes, this presents some of its own concerns around accountability — for good or ill, the commissioner is a member of an administration duly elected by the city’s voters, while a receiver is unelected and not similarly accountable to democratic structures. Yet it’s an emergency situation triggered by emergency circumstances that have been allowed to fester for many years.
None of this is meant to be a reflection on the efforts or character of Maginley-Liddie herself, who cleared the admittedly low bar of working much more fully with the federal monitor and the court than her predecessor Lou Molina, who took it upon himself to protect the department from oversight rather than engage productively with it. We can’t exactly fault her for not having turned the department around in the year that she’s been in the top job, though the record does show that progress has been halting in that time.
That’s sort of the elemental issue; no commissioner, regardless of background or promises, has come close to the sort of sustained improvements on violence and accountability that would be necessary to not only get the department up to par but prevent backsliding.
This isn’t the type of situation where we can live with trial and error until something works. Every day that passes without the improvements repeatedly and exhaustively outlined by the court and in the monitor’s reports puts every detainee and correction staff at some level of unacceptable risk. We hope that the judge will understand this, for the safety of all on the island.
