Rafael Negron woke up in his Rikers Island dorm on October 26th, vomiting and demanding to see a doctor. Instead, he claimed, correction officers told the Type 1 diabetic he had to go to court.

On any other day, Negron, 29, would be desperate to go in front of a judge and get his case moving forward. He’s facing murder charges for a shooting last year — an act he and his lawyer insist was in self-defense — and has been held at the city jail for 13 moths. But unlike his guards that day, he'd already been told his hearing had been cancelled. The judge, Negron’s lawyer had been told, was too busy and lacked the staff necessary to hear the case, making Negron one of a rapidly growing number of detainees held at Rikers for more than a year.

That morning, Negron was placed in handcuffs and loaded into a cage at the back of an empty bus, where he said he was refused water and waited for hours, only for the officers to tell him he was right — he didn't have court that day.

Negron said his diabetes makes him prone to dehydration, so when he returned to Rikers he felt ill, but had to force himself to slowly drink from his bottle, drip by drip, to avoid vomiting again. The next morning he was transferred to Bellevue Hospital where he stayed for two days, according to his family. He’s been hospitalized a total of five times since first being incarcerated.

In that time, Rikers has descended into crisis as hundreds of corrections officers have failed to show up for work. Fourteen people held in New York City jails have died so far this year, the majority of them at Rikers — five by suicide. But what’s driven that crisis is not just a staffing issue.

The city’s court system has been overwhelmed with a growing backlog of cases since the start of the pandemic, which came to an almost complete standstill for most of last year. As of last month, more than 52,000 criminal cases were pending in New York City state courts, nearly a 40% increase since early 2020. And even now — with courts partially reopened — COVID-19 restrictions have meant more delays and cancelled hearings, leaving an increasing number of people like Negron stuck in jail as they wait for trials.

“You go to court, but you never see anybody,” Negron said. “You go. They reschedule, you go and reschedule. Go and reschedule. To the point where you don’t even want to go no more.”

Policy experts and former corrections officials say case delays are one of the single biggest factors contributing to the recent growth in the city’s jail population, which is now nearly one and half times bigger than it was in April of last year, according to Department of Correction data, and detainees are staying for longer. Of the more than 5,400 men and women currently held in Rikers and other city jails, nearly 1,700, almost a third, have — like Negron — been awaiting trial for more than a year, almost double pre-pandemic levels.

“No one should ever be in a jail for that long. It's not a prison. It's to hold you pretrial during the pendency of a case,” said Michael Jacobson, Director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance and a former New York City correction commissioner.

Reducing this backlog could drastically reduce the number of people held in the city's jails, Jacobson and other current and former city leaders said, but the problems that fueled the crisis aren’t new. Most were only exacerbated by the pandemic, and fixing them would require costly and difficult changes to the criminal justice system: adding more courtrooms, upgrading and syncing records sharing programs, and getting correction officers to show up for work, just to name a few. And leaders said these options are often at odds with the conflicting interests of the judges, police, prosecutors, and guards who make the gears of the system turn.

“I Know You Didn’t Mean This To Happen”

As a child growing up in the Bronx, Rafael Negron wasn’t allowed to play outside because of the dangers beyond his apartment door. He and his sister Stephanie Negron spent their childhoods in West Farms, a working-class Latino neighborhood, under the watchful eye of their single mother, Darlene Perez, who hosted game nights and Halloween parties indoors as a way to keep them out of trouble.

“I was afraid of things going on outside,” Perez says. “I didn't want him hanging out.”

But as Negron became a teenager, he found it hard to navigate the world outside. He was handsome and popular with girls in school, but large crowds made him anxious and he struggled taking tests. Soon after being transferred to a big high school in his sophomore year, his mother said he stopped wanting to get out of bed and didn’t want to go anymore. Eventually, he dropped out.

Negron’s family said he started to find his way in his early 20s. Inspired by the house flipping shows his sister loved to watch, he threw his energies into construction jobs — painting an aunt’s room, remodeling a friend’s house. For Christmas one year, he built a mock fireplace for his mother out of plywood, painted white with red ribbons attached, so they had a place to hang their stockings for the holiday. By 2019, he was juggling two to three gigs at a time and had even earned a certification in workplace safety in the hope of bringing home more money.

Then COVID-19 hit, halting society and his progress with it. His odd-jobs dried up. He spent months looking for work with no luck. In the past, Stephanie’s nursing salary could have kept the three of them afloat, but now his girlfriend Melanie Rodriguez, who he’d met the year before, was living with them. A few months into the pandemic, they learned Melanie was pregnant. Negron was going to be a father.

His family said this is when a friend of a friend offered him a way to make quick cash, dealing marijuana.

“I said, ‘I don’t want you to do this,’” Perez recalled telling her son. “And he was like, ‘But how am I gonna get money? Mel is pregnant and I need to have everything ready by the time she gives birth.’ I’m like, ‘But this is not the way that I want you to do it.’”

He didn’t listen to her. Negron’s family said that in summer 2020 he started selling inside a secluded apartment courtyard in Inwood, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Manhattan. But it was risky. He lived in constant fear of being robbed or caught by police. That autumn, before his more serious troubles began, he told his mother about a few men who’d dropped by the courtyard and threatened him.

On a brisk evening last October, Negron stood in the shadows of the courtyard and wore a hooded jacket to protect himself from the wind swaying the tree branches back and forth. He was in the middle of his night shift, he said, when a man walked up and put his arm around him.

“He started antagonizing me, like I should know who he is,” Negron said.

Surveillance footage from that night shows the two men getting into a fight and Negron firing a weapon, though it’s difficult to see exactly what happened. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said it could not comment on an open criminal case.

According to Negron’s attorney, the gun belonged to the other man and that, after he’d pulled it out, Negron got hold of it to defend himself.

“I definitely wanted to see my family again,” Negron said. “I was having a baby I wanted to see.”

Perez remembered her son calling her crying. Police had found and arrested him soon after the shooting.

“He was saying, ‘I'm so sorry, mom. I'm so sorry,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘I know you didn't mean this to happen. Don't say sorry to me.’”