Rethinking Rikers New York City is trying to radically overhaul the Rikers Island. Chicago’s Cook County Jail could serve as a model. Take a look inside both jails in 360 video.

There are big changes underway at Rikers Island, the troubled New York City jail complex. The city is spending millions of dollars on efforts to break the cycle of violence that has raged there for decades, even as Mayor Bill de Blasio is laying the groundwork to close it.

Eight hundred miles away, in Chicago, a decade-long effort to end violence at the Cook County Jail has made significant progress. This summer, a judge ended 43 years of federal oversight, declaring that the jail had become “a model of how to best run a pretrial facility.”

To understand the challenges and possibilities involved in reform, journalists with The New York Times walked the cellbocks of Cook County Jail, a mass of brick, concrete and barbed wire dating to the early 1900s, and of Rikers, a sprawling compound in the East River, each providing a glimpse at efforts to create more modern, less violent jails.