Paul Manafort Gets Saved from Rikers Island by Trump Justice Department
It's been a tough few months for former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. Last fall, a jury found him guilty on a host of fraud charges brought by former special counsel Robert Mueller. A few months later, and just moments after a federal judge sentenced Manafort to a little more than seven years in prison, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance unveiled a 16-count indictment against Manafort under New York state law, this time related to his role in an alleged mortgage fraud scheme. Donald Trump has hinted at the possibility of rewarding Manafort's loyalty with a pardon, but the pardon power extends only to federal crimes, which means that if Manafort is convicted in New York, the president won't be able to return his former benefactor to a life of leisure purchasing astonishingly expensive menswear.
In preparation for Manafort's prosecution, federal authorities handed him over to New York officials, who seemed set to keep Manafort—as they typically do with federal prisoners facing state charges—on New York City's notorious Rikers Island, and likely in solitary confinement. As the New York Times notes, high-profile inmates are often held in isolation at Rikers, ostensibly for their own protection.
But earlier this week, deputy attorney general Jeffrey Rosen—the second-in-command to William Barr in Trump's Department of Justice—intervened on Manafort's behalf, asking Vance to allow Manafort to remain in federal custody due to concerns about Manafort's "health and personal safety" at Rikers. (The precise rationale for this request is unknown, but his lawyers told a federal judge last fall that their client is grappling with "significant" health issues, and he made one Northern Virginia courtroom appearance in a wheelchair.) On Monday, Manafort was transferred instead to the Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan, a smaller federal facility; it remains unclear whether he'll be moved during the remainder of the proceedings against him.
The ten jails on Rikers Island hold about 10,000 people on any given day; close to 90 percent of them are black or Latino. Since the facility opened in 1935, it has become notorious for what federal monitors have called a "culture of violence" escalating at an "alarming rate" within its walls. A 2015 report from the Marshall Project and New York magazine provided despairing first-person accounts of rotten food, shoddy medical care, rampant corruption, sexual assault, brutal beatings, and other human rights violations.
That same year, The New Yorker published the story of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old Bronx boy accused of stealing a backpack. Browder's family couldn't afford the $3,000 bail, and so their son awaited trial for three years in Rikers, where he suffered unimaginable physical and mental abuse. The state eventually dropped the case against him altogether; in 2015, some three years after his release, Browder died by suicide a month shy of his 22nd birthday. In 2017, New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio announced the city's intent to shutter the 84-year-old facility within a decade. “Closing Rikers Island is a key piece of creating a smaller, safer and fairer criminal justice system in New York City," he said, calling the task "the right thing to do."
Many of those on the island shouldn't even be in prison. According to a 2017 report from the city's Independent Budget Office, close to 80 percent of those in Department of Correction custody are pretrial detainees, like Manafort and Browder, who have not been convicted of the crimes with which they've been charged. Of these detainees, 72 percent remained incarcerated only because they were unable to post bail. The annual cost of this system to taxpayers, the report says, is about $1.162 billion, or $118,693 per pretrial detainee per year; for half of the inmates unable to pay, the amount of their bail was $5,000 or less. Thousands of New Yorkers, all of whom are innocent until proven guilty, are too poor to leave Rikers Island. Manafort just had to ask.
None of this is to suggest that Manafort's concerns are groundless, or that he "deserves" to be the victim of lawlessness and violence that define Rikers Island. The facility is a dangerous place for everyone, not just Manafort, and no one should be subjected its horrors. There are plenty of inmates whose lawyers would love to move them elsewhere—anywhere other than Rikers Island—to preserve their clients' "health and personal safety." Yet it is Manafort, a wealthy, white political operative with powerful friends in the right places, who gets to enjoy special treatment. This is America's two-track criminal justice system at work: one for people who have no choice but to endure state-sanctioned mistreatment, and one for the privileged few who can buy their way out of it.
Originally Appeared on GQ
