On March 25, 39-year-old Barry Cozart collapsed at Rikers, New York City’s notorious island jail complex. He’d been held on burglary charges since November. Staff tried to revive him by performing CPR, according to the Department of Corrections, but he later died in a hospital.
“I’ve never cried so hard in my life,” his brother, Ron Lee, told Filter.
Far from the “criminal” stereotype, Lee said, Cozart was a community leader who owned two barbershops and performed stand-up comedy. The family is now waiting for the toxicology report—Lee said his brother wasn’t using drugs—and worrying about potentially sinister findings.
“My brother is dead. Shut. It. Down.”
“They’re killing people left and right,” Lee said.
Just a few days after Cozart’s death, 49-year-old John Price, another man in Rikers, who was being held on drug charges without bail, was pronounced dead at a hospital, where he’d been taken after requiring medical attention.
“My brother is dead. Shut. It. Down,” Lee said of Rikers.
The deaths of Cozart and Price were the first among Rikers detainees since New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) took office in January. They’ve thrown more focus on longstanding efforts to shut down the jail complex, which stalled—or were actively thwarted—under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
On April 7, Mamdani announced the opening of a 104-bed health facility to house current Rikers detainees with serious medical needs, which are not met there. It’s a first, concrete step in moving some of the population, which numbered more than 7,000 in 2025, off of the island. The new unit, associated with Bellevue Hospital, is slated to be one of three; the other two will primarily house people with serious mental health needs.
“Opening this new clinical facility is how we begin to close Rikers Island—not with promises, but with action,” Mamdani stated.
“Opening this new clinical facility at Bellevue Hospital is how we begin to close Rikers Island—not with promises, but with action,” Mamdani stated. “For too long, people with serious medical needs have been left to suffer in a system that was never designed to care for them. Today, we are building something different: a system that delivers real care, treats people with dignity and makes our city safer for everyone—incarcerated people, corrections officers and all New Yorkers.”
Mamdani has kept the jail complex visibly in the news. He observed Ramadan with Muslims in Rikers, and on Passover penned a letter to Jewish people detained there. “Like the Jewish people in Egypt, you too hold fast to your faith in the face of the unknown.”
The city council voted to close Rikers back in 2019—so long ago that Mamdani was still pursuing a rap career. The plan was to build new jails in different boroughs in order to empty out the sprawling jail complex, which for decades has been overcrowded, violent, lacking in adequate medical services and fatal: Forty-eight people died in city jails (most of which are on Rikers Island) or immediately upon release during Adams’ tenure.
Despite the council vote and the campaign to close the facility, Adams—who won the 2021 mayoral election as a “law-and-order” candidate, during the backlash to Black Lives Matter—proved an obstacle.
“The fact that Mandami is prioritizing this in his first 100 days is a really good sign.”
“When the administration changed, Adams, a former police officer, was not in support of closing Rikers,” Deanna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, told Filter. “He stalled progress. Not a single borough-based facility was built.”
Hoskins is now hopeful. “The fact that Mandami is prioritizing this in his first 100 days is a really good sign,” she said. She pointed to his appointment of Stanley Richards as DOC commissioner; Richards, formerly incarcerated, is seen as a strong signal that there will be a serious effort to end the Rikers abuses.
Mamdani, Hoskins said, is paying attention to the pain of New Yorkers. “He’s actively working to address the harms entrenched into the walls of Rikers Island.”
She brought up the horrific story of Kalief Browder, whose case helped galvanize the movement to end cash bail and close Rikers.
Browder was arrested and sent to Rikers at the age of 16 after he was (wrongly) accused of stealing a backpack. He refused to take a plea deal, maintaining his innocence. He spent roughly three years in the facility, where he was subjected to violence by guards and other detainees. He was placed in solitary confinement for long stretches.
“Think about all the people experiencing that pain that we haven’t heard about.”
After his release, Browder became a symbol for the reform movement. But according to his family, he couldn’t get past his experience in the prison complex—he’d pace around his room for hours, likely a trauma response to being forced into solitary. He hung himself in his family’s home at the age of 22.
“Here’s this kid, arrested for a book bag. The trauma he acquired, he couldn’t handle,” Hoskins said. “We criminalized him for being poor. That’s one case that got our attention. Think about all the people experiencing that pain that we haven’t heard about.”
Darren Mack, co-director at Freedom Agenda, is personally familiar. He was sent to Rikers in the early 1990s when he was 17. He spent 19 months there.
“At the time Rikers was out of sight, out of mind. It was as dysfunctional, as horrible, as it is today,” Mack told Filter. He recalled what he described as the worst thing he saw: a man experiencing a mental health crisis who did not get help. “He had feces smeared all over himself, banged all night on the walls. He was not getting the care he should have gotten.”
“The system has been failing people for too long. It’s a new day.”
Like Hoskins, Mack is hopeful about the mayor’s first step of opening a health care facility for medically vulnerable Rikers detainees. “This is something we’ve been advocating for,” he said. “An alternative to incarceration. We need to fast-track more facilities like this.”
As for right-wing opposition—unsurprisingly, the New York Post is not ecstatic about the plan to close Rikers—Mack thinks it represents just a small fraction of New Yorkers who want to maintain the violent status quo.
“We believe every life has value,” he said. “The system has been failing people for too long. It’s a new day, and new administration, and we’re moving forward, moving forward.”
Photograph by Doc Searls via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
