BY SARAH O’CONNELL
In the early morning of December 7, Rikers detainee Aramis Furse was found “unwell” in his cell by an officer. Less than 90 minutes after being transported from the facility to a hospital in Queens, he was pronounced dead. Furse was the 14th to die in the custody of the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2025. Another Rikers inmate had died in custody less than a month earlier.
“The safety of everyone in our care is always our foremost concern, ” said Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, NYC Correction Commissioner, in a news release regarding Furse’s death. She added that the Department is “mourning the tragic death” of Furse, and will fully investigate the event.
The announcement of Furse’s death sparked outrage among prison reform advocates who have long been calling for conditions at Rikers to be improved until the facility can be shuttered.
Inmates at Rikers “have suffered immense violence, medical neglect and preventable deaths,” said Yonah Zeitz, the Advocacy Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, an organization working to build community power and win systemic change.
The organization is urging Governor Kathy Hochul to sign legislation that would overhaul the State Commission of Corrections (SCOC), an agency responsible for the oversight of New York state correctional facilities, including Rikers. By reviewing over 200 SCOC inspection reports, news outlet New York Focus found that major problems went unresolved for years, contributing to violence and deaths in correctional facilities. Though the agency released a report in 2018 listing Rikers as the worst jail in the state, it has taken no action to intervene as conditions deteriorate.
The Katal Center is also campaigning for the city to continue on the path to close Rikers, which Zeitz said the Adams administration had “abandoned.”
Introducing the city’s planned borough-based jails is “one step in terms of improving the culture that we have behind bars,” said Alana Sivin, director of the Greater Justice New York program of the Vera Institute of Justice, a policy organization committed to ending overcriminalization and mass incarceration. The new facilities will feature increased access to medical and mental health care, and smaller units will allow better monitoring. Sivin added that “as long as we have our jail system as it is right now, that’s not a system that treats people with dignity.”
Medical neglect has long been reported among Rikers inmates. City records show that, during the month of April 2022, people detained on Rikers Island missed nearly 12,000 medical appointments. A state judge ordered the New York City Department of Corrections to pay out fines to Rikers inmates who had been deprived of medical appointments. The decision was called a “critical step towards holding the City accountable for its unwillingness to ensure the health and safety of people incarcerated in its jails” in a statement from the Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, and Milbank LLP, the firms that brought the lawsuit.
However, in response to Faust’s passing, the Legal Aid Society and Brooklyn Defenders emphasized that the DOC has proven ill-equipped to handle conditions on Rikers Island.
In May of 2025, state judge Laura Taylor Swain announced that she would appoint an independent remediation manager to work in conjunction with the DOC Commissioner.
“Neither court orders nor the Monitor’s interventions are sufficient to push the DOC toward compliance,” she said.
While the remediation manager still has not been named, Silwa added that she hopes the manager will realize that conditions in the DOC can not be improved while Rikers still stands. Silwa hopes mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani‘s administration will maintain a close relationship with the manager. She also hopes to see Mamdani’s administration “really working to reduce the jail population by investing in alternatives to pretrial detention” and to speed up construction of the borough-based jails.
Furse’s family told News 12 they were not contacted when he was transported to the hospital, only finding out when someone saw it on the news and informed them. They were trying to get him to a drug treatment program, but described him as otherwise healthy and known for being soft-spoken and respectful. Furse was arrested in early 2025 and was set to appear in court the week of his death.
“Even though the condition surrounding him,” Furse’s father said, “he was very optimistic.”