The New York City Board of Correction wants to scrub the word "inmate" from every page of its jail regulations, a years-long language crusade that changes nothing about how the city actually runs its troubled lockups.
The board's latest proposal would extend its glossary rewrite into two more chapters of the Minimum Standards, the rulebook governing conditions inside New York City jails. Sections that once referred to "inmates" and "prisoners" would instead read "people in custody" or "person in custody," defined in the regulations as "any person confined in a facility." A chapter formerly titled "Classification of Prisoners" has already been renamed "Classification of People in Custody."
The push started in 2021, when the board declared that "people in DOC custody are people first and the circumstance of their incarceration is not their defining feature." Five years later, the board is still at it, now proposing to carry the same edits through Chapters 2 and 3 of its standards, which it calls "continuing this vital effort."
The city itself concedes the point that critics would make for them: the terminology changes do not alter jail operations, housing policies, or disciplinary procedures. Not one lockdown protocol changes. Not one staffing ratio improves. The words on the page get softer. Everything behind the bars stays the same.
New York City is not the first jurisdiction to play this game. In 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed state legislation replacing references to "inmate" throughout New York law with "incarcerated individual," amending dozens of provisions across the state's legal code. The city board chose different phrasing, "person in custody" rather than the state's "incarcerated individual", but Fox News Digital reported that neither the board nor the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association nor the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform organization, responded to requests for comment explaining the reasoning behind that distinction.
So the city and the state now use two different euphemisms for the same person sitting in the same cell. The bureaucracy grew. The jail did not improve.
The timing of the board's latest language push lands against a striking backdrop. On Wednesday, July 15, 2026, one day before Fox News Digital published its report on the proposal, Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended a FIFA World Cup semifinal watch party at Rikers Island, where England faced Argentina.
Mamdani addressed the people held at the facility directly, as Fox News Digital reported:
"These are New Yorkers, and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Rikers."
Whether the watch party and the regulatory proposal were coordinated or simply coincidental is unclear from available reporting. But the optics are consistent: a city government that appears more focused on the feelings of people behind bars than on the conditions, the staffing shortages, and the violence that have defined Rikers Island for years.
The board's own proposal text frames the language overhaul as a matter of institutional philosophy. In its 2021 commitment, the board stated plainly:
"Therefore, the Board has made a commitment to employ person-first language in its Standards and general communications going forward."
That commitment has now consumed at least five years of regulatory attention. The board began removing "inmate" from its Minimum Standards in 2021. The latest round extends the same find-and-replace exercise into additional chapters. No filing date for the newest proposal has been made public, and no timeline for its approval has been disclosed.
Fox News Digital's Greg Wehner reached out to the Board of Correction, the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, and the Vera Institute of Justice for comment. None of those responses appeared in the reporting. The people who actually work inside New York City jails, the correction officers who face daily risk, were not heard from in the public record surrounding this proposal.
That silence is worth noting. Correction officers did not ask for a vocabulary lesson. They have spent years asking for safer working conditions, better staffing, and leadership that treats jail security as seriously as it treats press releases.
The board's regulations will no longer call a prisoner a prisoner. They will call him a "person in custody." The definition, "any person confined in a facility", is functionally identical to the word it replaces. The person is still confined. The facility is still a jail. The only thing that changed is the number of syllables city lawyers have to read aloud.
And that is the core problem with this kind of governance. Renaming a category does not reform it. Rewriting a chapter heading does not reduce recidivism, curb violence inside the walls, or bring accountability to a jail system that has resisted meaningful oversight for decades. It gives officials something to announce without requiring them to do anything difficult.
New York City taxpayers fund the Board of Correction to oversee jail conditions, not to workshop vocabulary. When the board spends half a decade editing pronouns while the jails themselves remain dangerous and dysfunctional, it tells you exactly where the priorities are.
You can call someone a "person in custody" all day long. It does not make the custody any safer, any shorter, or any more just. It just makes the paperwork longer.
