Mamdani Turns Rikers Murderer Into Victim in Larger Plot to Abolish Prisons

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani demonstrated yet again this week how much of his ideology ultimately leads to mass mercy to the guilty and cruelty to the innocent.

On Tuesday, he posted a tribute on X to an unnamed prisoner at the Rikers Island facility.

“I am deeply saddened by the death of a New Yorker in City custody at a jail on Rikers Island early this morning. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones as they grieve this loss,” he wrote. “We do not yet know the cause of death, but we do know that too many New Yorkers have died on Rikers Island. The Department of Correction and its oversight partners will investigate the circumstances surrounding his death.”

He further said that he was working to fully close the facility, which he insinuated was inhumane.

The anonymous prisoner was quickly identified as 41-year-old Clarence Woodward, a convicted murderer who butchered Jose Miranda, a father of two, at a Bronx laundromat in 2024.

Woodward had apparently been found unresponsive in his cell at 5 a.m. Tuesday.

Details of his cause of death haven’t been released, though there have so far been no direct accusations of violence or improper actions by authorities.

Mamdani simply decided to make Woodward out as a “victim” of Rikers and used other deaths at the facility to insinuate that it was the prison’s fault Woodward died.

And that is the larger point of Mamdani’s tribute to a man convicted of a most heinous crime, among many other lesser villainies.

This wasn’t just about Woodward, as infuriating as it is to elevate such a man. This is part of the overall leftist messaging in a long-term plan to invert traditional forms of justice in America to bring us closer to the utopian and, frankly, horrifying point of police and prison abolition.

Mamdani’s statement should come as no surprise. Whatever one can say about the current state of the NYPD, which has maintained its professionalism under Mamdani, the “criminals are the real victims” attitude is baked into his ideology and his governance.

The mayor didn’t just pay tribute to this murderer for no reason.

And I very much doubt it was just a matter of his staff not knowing Woodward’s background. They almost certainly didn’t care. No, this was about furthering the stated goals of the Democratic Socialists of America and its allies, who see prison abolition as an inevitable endpoint of their program to fundamentally transform society.

Their ideology guides them to the view that crime, violence, and all the bad things of the world happen because of inequality, because society is comprised of victims and victimizers. Crime, no matter how heinous, is therefore always pinned on collective, systemic root causes.

They see themselves as part of the courageous vanguard who will make the dream of a crimeless future a reality if you just give them all the power they desire.

Mamdani has been careful, unlike some of his more intellectually challenged socialist friends, to not immediately kick the scaffolding from under the police force that keeps New York one of the safest big cities in the country. Instead, he will break the system apart brick by brick to ensure that his anti-law enforcement goals will eventually be met.

He’s pulled support for enforcing smaller crimes (that are now getting out of control). He’s creating an opening for Mamdaniville homeless encampments to mushroom up and multiply.

And he’s begun the process of dismantling Rikers to squeeze out the possibility of future incarcerations.

The mayor made it clear when he visited the prison earlier this year that he wants to “normalize” hardened criminals so that we could imagine some future in which they are loosed en masse back into our society. He made sure to get plenty of photo ops with his big, phony grin to show the cameras and the public that these are just regular folks being cruelly cooped up in our supposedly overincarcerated society.

But as we can see with someone like Woodward, a man who wasted his life committing crime after crime before viciously ending the life of a random stranger, there is a very good reason we keep some people locked away.

Socialists can’t accept that because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. They genuinely believe that monstrous behavior can be transcended by giving away free housing, providing free meals, leveling wealth (that isn’t theirs), and enacting tribalist “anti-racist” policies that will supposedly resolve the sins of history by embracing a racial essentialism in the name of equality.

Ironically enough, that system sounds a lot like prison.

So, we’ll undoubtedly see more of the same from Mamdani in the future as he carefully pulls apart the already battered New York justice system. He will continue demonstrating that his sympathy is with criminals, not victims as he victimizes law-abiding boogeymen who stand in the way of his vision for “progress.”

Expect more valorization of sick killers “victimized” by our the system and more demonization of what he sees as the real evildoers of society—a CEO who is a billionaire instead of being merely a millionaire like Mamdani’s parents and his “working class” friends’ parents, a grocery store owner who doesn’t have a cozy relationship with the government, a homeowner who happens to be white.

Those are the values that Mamdani is building New York’s glorious, socialist future on.