NEW YORK — The New York City Correction Department last year found a program that worked to reduce violence in some units in its jail for younger detainees — but then the agency fired the initiative’s leader and now its future seems very much in flux.
The decaying 50-year-old jail for young detainees, known as the Robert N. Davoren Center, has historically been among the most violent of Rikers Island facilities. The people involved in the program, called the Young Adult Restorative Housing Initiative, thought they could change that.
Over six months in the last half of 2021, they took over several housing units in the Davoren Center with the goal of giving detainees more of a sense of ownership and control during their incarceration.
