City Limits

"The city must pay nearly $143 million to over 40,000 people who were held in a city jail longer than they should have after having posted bail. The Freedom Agenda...shared information about the settlement with their clients and members."

NY Amsterdam News

“If the mayor actually plans to invest in mental health, we’d see people like Mr. Valles getting the help he needed in the community,” said Freedom Agenda’s Darren Mack."

Hip Hop Wired

"They have to fix this problem, and hiding it is not fixing it,” said Lezandre Kahdu, [a member of Freedom Agenda] whose son died in a city jail in 2021."

NY Daily News

"Lezandra Khadu, [a member of Freedom Agenda and] the mother of Stephen Khadu, a 24-year-old inmate who died at Rikers in April 2022 from meningitis, confronted Adams at an event in Brooklyn earlier this week to ask him if he had an update on what’s going on with a city investigation into her son’s death."

News 12

"Advocacy groups and concerned New Yorkers joined together outside of City Hall on Thursday to call on Mayor Eric Adams to shut down Rikers Island for the safety of inmates and New Yorkers."

Chief Leader

"Nationally, on average, for every four people in jail, there is one correction officer on staff, whereas on Rikers, for every four people in jail, there are four and half,” wrote [Darren Mack of Freedom Agenda & Councilwoman Carlina Rivera] in a piece advocating for the closure of the island penal colony by 2027.

Epicenter NYC

"After Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to close Rikers in 2018, three organizations, Freedom Agenda, Create Forward and the Humanities Action Lab, came together to collaborate on how Rikers should be remembered."

NY Daily News

As next year’s budget is negotiated, our city faces an unacceptable status quo, in which our neighbors are languishing on Rikers for longer and longer periods of time, while effective and affordable alternatives exist.

Queens Daily Eagle

"Darren Mack, the co-director of Freedom Agenda, accused the mayor of paying “lip service to investing in mental health” while the “number of people with serious mental illness locked up at Rikers keeps growing under his watch.”

NY Daily News

“Darren Mack of Freedom Agenda called Rikers Island a “death camp.”