Jordan Neely Needed to Be Institutionalized

Progressives are right to point out that he needed housing and care. But he only would have gotten it if forced to accept it.

Dear readers,

Last winter, Lisa Miller wrote a deeply informative cover story for New York magazine about the events in Jordan Neely’s life, leading up to his 2023 death at Daniel Penny’s hands on a New York City subway train. One through-line in the story is the immense amount of government resources that were thrown at trying to keep Neely out of trouble. Through police, courts, jails, homeless outreach, and treatment facilities, New York’s taxpayers spent lavishly on an effort to keep Neely alive, in mental health care, and not posing a danger to the public or himself. But it didn’t work because he was insane and he was not forced to accept the care he needed — except during a stint he spent in jail on Rikers Island, when he was successfully medicated.

Miller describes his 15-month stay on Rikers as follows:

Neely was beloved by the health-care staff at Rikers. He was quiet and could frequently be found lying on his bed. In an environment that breeds conflict, paranoia, defensiveness, and violence, Neely was gentle, earnest, and stable. He smiled and said “Good morning,” according to mental-health-care workers on his floor. K2 is everywhere in Rikers, but Neely was not a habitual user, nor did he get into fights. He took his prescription medication. He enjoyed art therapy and did his homework, filling out worksheets to help him learn cognitive behavioral techniques. There was something innocent and vulnerable about him, people who knew him said, which made him extraordinary. He engaged in therapy — rare in Rikers — and openly hoped it would help him. He would say, “Oh, I just don’t know if I’m making friends here,” one Rikers clinician told me. He occasionally did his Michael Jackson routines in his tan scrubs when the art therapist brought in a boom box.

The mental-health-care workers I spoke to at Rikers believe jail is more destructive than restorative or healing. (“I identify as an abolitionist,” one of them told me.) But they acknowledge the paradox. Neely was someone who “did better in jail than on the streets,” says the clinician. At Rikers, at least, “he was not totally on his own.”

The reason Neely ended up spending 2022 on Rikers Island was that he committed assaults against two women in 2021, causing serious injury to one of them. In early 2023, he ended up in an “alternatives to incarceration” court, where he pleaded guilty to felony assault, but instead of prison he was sent to a residential mental health treatment facility in the Bronx. The idea was that, if he completed his treatment successfully, his felony record would be expunged, and if he didn’t, he’d be sent to prison. But the treatment facility was not secure, and Neely walked out of it after two weeks, ending up back on the streets. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he never got arrested — instead, he ended up in the altercation with Penny and died.

It’s sort of an odd thing — the government sent Neely for inpatient treatment and told him he’d be imprisoned if he didn’t continue receiving it. But it didn’t lock the door from the outside on the facility where he was being treated. The obvious question is why not: If the state is prepared to use the threat of prison to force someone into psychiatric treatment, why not make the psychiatric facility itself secure? One barrier to the use of secure treatment facilities is that Medicaid is barred by federal law from paying for care for residents in mental health care facilities with at least 17 beds, a decades-old rule that is intended to stop Medicaid from funding traditional mental institutions. But not using secure treatment has created a gap that people like Neely can fall through:

The reality for Jordan Neely and others like him is that he needed more intensive care than is available in any voluntary inpatient or outpatient program, and he required a more therapeutic kind of attention than exists in any locked one. The state can’t imprison people who aren’t criminals, and it can’t turn mental illness and drug dependence into a crime, a conundrum at the nub of every facile political dispute pitting the civil rights of people with homelessness against perceived threats to public safety. “There should be some transition from Rikers that maybe has a secure element to it but is also therapeutic,” says a person who met Neely during his stay in Rikers. “We’re killing ourselves to jerry-rig what doesn’t exist because it’s too much of a hot potato to talk about any kind of secure, residential, therapeutic environment.” [Neely’s friend Dwayne] Blizzard is clearer about this: “When he got locked up, that could have saved him.”

I do not have an opinion about whether Penny committed a crime when he killed Neely — on whether a “reasonable person” would have considered his actions to be excessive in the face of the threat Neely appeared to pose. I also don’t think the question is very important. People in situations like Neely’s face a tremendous number of dangers, and subway vigilantism is not high on the long list of reasons why they are likely to die tragically young; effectively, by failing to institutionalize him, the state was condemning Neely to death, and Penny’s chokehold just happens to be the way the death manifested. At the same time, bystander chokeholds are not a scalable response to the problem of violent and emotionally disturbed persons on our subway, and crazy people are a particularly unsuited group of potential offenders to try to rationally deter with the threat of violent response. Ultimately, the problems of the mentally ill homeless and the problems of subway riders who would like not to be harassed by them will not be addressed by correctly calibrating our rules about self-defense; addressing them will require the state to use more coercive power to force dangerously mentally ill people into treatment. Nor should it be the responsibility of ordinary members of the public to protect themselves from these people — we pay taxes (in New York, a lot of taxes) for a vast law enforcement and social services apparatus that is supposed to handle these problems for us.

But I do think it would behoove progressives with pat takes about how what Neely really needed was housing and care to know that he was offered these things over and over again by that extremely well-funded apparatus. If you wanted him to have housing and care, you needed to be prepared to force them upon him; and if you weren’t, then you don’t have a solution to the problems of people like him.

Very seriously,

Josh

Correction: An earlier version of this post misdescribed the nature of the federal “IMD exclusion,” which prohibits Medicaid from paying for certain mental health care. Medicaid is prohibited from paying for care for residents aged between 21 and 64 in facilities with at least 17 beds that primarily provide mental health care; the restriction is not specifically related to whether the facilities are secure.