This week, Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain held oral arguments in the contempt motion against the city and the Department of Correction for its handling of the Rikers Island complex. Swain said she’d rule on contempt soon, but the more significant directive was to give 45 days, until Nov. 12, for the city’s lawyers, federal prosecutors and representatives for the plaintiffs to draw up a leadership plan that would include specifics on a potential federal receiver. This might seem to like just more kicking of the can down the road, but one of the city’s biggest arguments against and obstacles to the appointment of a receiver are the enormous question marks that would overhang one. What, exactly, could such an official do or not do? How does this rejigger the department’s chain of command? What does it mean for subcontracting, for the union contract, for the monitor? What does success even look like for a receiver, what sort of term would they have, how are additional modifications potentially decided and on and on. The delicate nature of these questions and the significant implications of answering them correctly (or incorrectly) has loomed over the idea of receivership, with city lawyers more or less arguing that this was too tall an order to tackle and that the city was best suited to just figure things out. With a negotiated plan that features at least some of the contours of a receivership in hand, the specter of that step moves closer, and hopefully the judge will feel more inclined to reach for that lever when she determines it’s time. We would argue that it’s past time. One misconception here is to assume that this is mainly a political question, that the decision to support or not support the appointment of a receiver is one about one’s political inclinations or how one feels about any particular mayoral administrations. As we’ve said often, the failures on Rikers Island go back many City Hall administrations. Eric Adams tried to fix it, but it’s just too broken for any mayor to repair. But this is not a political consideration, and it transcends the scandals, squabbles and politicking of the Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams years. You can go back over Federal Monitor Steve Martin’s reports, year after year, and find similar patterns, waxing and waning in cycles but ever-present, putting detainees and staff at risk and denting the bona fides of a city that is supposed to care about treating residents fairly. Any single improvement, taken at this scale, seems like a blip in an otherwise consistent pattern of failure, and that simply cannot continue. It seems like Swain is increasingly seeing things from this angle, demanding that city lawyers explain how long exactly the court would have to wait for real improvement, given the good intentions and waffling over the years, all stopping short of delivering real results. No one should pretend that this is a decision to be taken lightly, which is why she’s ordered this plan to precede any such determination, and why this entire process has taken so long. Yet it is the right choice, not just in our belief but the belief of, at this point, almost every party involved in this litigation.