It was death at Rikers Island, the awful emblem of New York State’s jail and prison system, that propelled calls for cash bail reform. Those demands achieved some success: Beginning this January, courts across the state could no longer set cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. But Rikers remains a deadly place, now host to one of the most concentrated coronavirus outbreaks worldwide. The jail’s chief physician called it a “public health disaster.” On Sunday, Michael Tyson, a 53-year-old man jailed at Rikers on a technical parole violation—failing to report a change in residence, according to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision—was the first person who tested positive for Covid-19 to die while in custody.

According to data compiled by the Legal Aid Society, Rikers has a coronavirus infection rate of 6.5 percent, vastly higher than that of New York City (0.8 percent), New York State (0.675 percent), and the United States (0.1 percent)—as well as earlier hotspots in Wuhan, China, and the Lombardy region in Northern Italy. There are still 4,383 people locked inside the jail, and as of Sunday, the day Tyson died, there had been 273 cases among Rikers detainees, according to the corrections department.



To protect New York residents from the coronavirus, its jails and prisons desperately need attention. “This tragedy would have been entirely avoidable,” said Tina Luongo, criminal division attorney-in-charge at Legal Aid, if New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo had directed the corrections department “to act decisively from the outset of this epidemic,” releasing people in New York’s jails and prisons, “who, like Mr. Tyson, were especially vulnerable to the virus.”

Just days before, away from the vast audience the governor draws for his daily televised coronavirus briefings, he was presiding over a rollback of some of those only recently won bail reforms. In the afternoon, Cuomo gave stressed New Yorkers succor by way of slideshows, monitoring the state’s progress in flattening the coronavirus curve. Then at night, he pushed through a budget that included his criminal justice agenda, under threat of a government shutdown—“including the Department of Health,” his top aide said.

Cuomo got his wish. The budget passed on Thursday significantly scaled back money bail reform, meaning that more New Yorkers merely charged with criminal offenses would languish in jail if they couldn’t afford to make bond. At the same time as the coronavirus threatened to overwhelm Rikers, along with other jails and prisons across the state, Cuomo was ensuring those cells would remain filled with people too poor to purchase their release, unable to take the precautions the governor reminded viewers of each day. “As we’ve said before, the coronavirus is truly vicious and effective at what the virus does,” the governor said at his Sunday briefing. “It’s an effective killer. People who are very vulnerable must stay isolated and protected.”