11/22/2025
A Failing Jail System With a Billion-Dollar Budget and Rising Deaths
When 38-year-old Edwin Ramos died in custody on November 21, 2025, at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island, he became the thirteenth person to die in New York City jails this year, more than double last year’s total. A correction officer found him in medical distress in a bathroom shortly after midnight. Medical staff and EMS attempted to save him before he was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Hours later, his father learned of his son’s death not from the Department of Correction, but from a court officer at a hearing where Mr. Ramos was expected to appear for a plea. The Legal Aid Society called the death another example of a “dysfunctional jail system,” a description backed by the city’s own oversight reports.
New York City spends more than 1 BILLION dollars annually on its jails, yet the system repeatedly fails to protect those in its care. The vast majority of that budget goes to staffing, salaries, benefits, and chronic overtime. Correction officers deserve fair pay for work that is dangerous and demanding, but a system that prioritizes payroll over treatment leaves inmates without access to reliable medical care, mental-health services, or rehabilitation programs.
On paper, the jail system is supposed to provide mental-health care, addiction services, basic medical treatment, and educational programs. In practice, services are frequently delayed, canceled, or disrupted due to understaffing and safety issues. Oversight reports from the federal monitor and the New York City Board of Correction document repeated lapses in medical care, missed safety checks, unmonitored housing areas, and delayed medication. Many in-custody deaths have involved preventable failures.
Oversight alone has not solved the problem. The Department of Correction manages daily operations, while the Board of Correction and a federal monitor are supposed to enforce accountability. Warnings are issued, reports are filed, and meetings occur, yet the system continues to falter. Rules are broken, protocols ignored, and tragedies persist.
A jail should not be a warehouse where people sit until their sentence ends. It should stabilize, treat, and prepare people to return to their communities safely. New York City has the resources to achieve this, but most of its billion-dollar budget is tied up in staffing, leaving little for programs that address mental health, addiction, and reentry. The result is preventable deaths, escalating crises, and families left grieving.
Edwin Ramos did not have to die. Neither did the twelve who died before him this year. These deaths are not inevitable; they are the product of a system that has lost control of its most basic responsibilities. Until the city prioritizes management, accountability, and rehabilitation over payroll and overtime, preventable tragedies will continue.
Rikers Island has become a symbol of a failing system. The city must choose whether it will continue to tolerate that failure or finally build a jail system capable of protecting and rehabilitating the people within it. Lives depend on that decision.
