Once more, Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain has found the city and the Department of Correction in contempt of court — 18 counts this time around — for a lack of progress in correcting the violence and dysfunction on Rikers Island. Contempt is a special finding in the judicial system, not simply determining that the defendants are wrong but have failed to comply with what the court has ordered. In her summary of the case so far, Swain lays out the long unhappy tale of the city’s efforts to improve the dire conditions on Rikers which is essentially a history of successive correction commissioners and city lawyers promising to do better, laying out paths and plans and benchmarks, only to fail to deliver. As Swain succinctly writes in the first sentence of her findings of fact on conditions in the jails, “the use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015.” Whatever bits of progress and planning the city can point to now cannot negate that simple statement, that things are worse than when they were declared unconstitutional. She has a well-established theory of the cause, writing that “the last nine years also leave no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the Court’s orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay.” This political capture of what is supposed to be a critical process to safeguard the life and safety of people (officers and detainees) for which the city has a direct responsibility is why Swain notes the court is “inclined to impose a receivership.” Successive commissioners under successive mayors have had every opportunity to demonstrate that that they could engage soberly and quickly in a remediation of shortcomings — exhaustively documented by Federal Monitor Steve Martin over almost a decade. But it never happened. Swain had already previously ordered the plaintiffs, the city and the monitor to begin drawing up a framework for the mechanics of a court-appointed receiver — what authorities would one have, how the receiver would relate to the existing administrative structure of the department and so on. We will let them hash it out, but if we may make a recommendation for an overarching objective, the structure should prioritize a receiver empowered to cut through the bureaucracy and ancient rules that have thus far tripped up any forward motion — not having to get departmental sign-off for big-ticket executive decisions. The receiver should be answerable to the court for the limited purpose of righting the ship. This framework is due Jan. 14, which will be less than a week before Donald Trump is sworn in as president, which will mean new leadership for the Department of Justice as the judge is weighing it. We do not know if Trump’s choice of Jay Clayton to be the next Manhattan U.S. attorney will maintain departing U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ support for receivership, which was a significant step in the consensus-building for the controversial idea. Wherever Clayton lands, the judge should not take it as a marker of the wisdom or need for a receiver, which has already been well-established.