Sworn Statement Plus Thousand-Yard Stare Plus Counselor Signature Required
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch from the five boroughs and one borough-adjacent New Jersey diner.
RIKERS ISLAND, N.Y. — Following Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s announcement that the city would begin transferring seriously ill detainees from Rikers Island to Bellevue Hospital, the Department of Correction today confirmed that the policy is being expanded to also cover detainees with what the agency described as “really, deeply, urgently bored conditions.”
Under the expanded protocol, any detainee who can produce documentation of “structural existential malaise” will be eligible for transfer to a designated Bellevue ward, where they will receive medical evaluation, psychiatric care, and access to a small library that contains, according to one early reviewer, “the same six books as the jail library, but with better lighting.”
The Diagnostic Criteria
“We want to be clear that the new transfer category is not a get-out-of-Rikers card,” said Department of Correction Acting Commissioner Jaylen Pratt at a Bellevue press conference. “Detainees must provide a sworn statement, signed by a counselor, that they have reached a level of boredom that is, in our view, clinically significant.”
Approved indicators of clinically significant boredom include: a written request for a window; the ability to recite all 47 ceiling stains by name; and “a thousand-yard stare lasting longer than the average season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Civic Implications
The new policy has been welcomed by criminal-justice advocates including the Vera Institute of Justice, who described it as “the first acknowledgement by the City of New York that the state of being detained is, itself, a medical problem.”
It has been criticised by the Manhattan Institute, who said the policy creates a “concerning incentive structure” in which detainees may, in the words of one fellow, “compete to be the most palpably bored person on the island.”
Mamdani Response
Mamdani, asked at a separate event whether the expansion was a serious policy or a piece of performance art, replied, “Why can’t it be both?” He then walked into a crowded Bellevue lobby, where 42 people were already filming him.
The mayor confirmed that the city would explore further transfers from Rikers throughout 2026, and that any detainee with the additional condition of “clinically significant rage at the L train” would also qualify.
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SOURCE: https://prat.uk/category/satire/