Rikers is a jail, not a prison. Jails are meant to hold people who have not yet completed their trial. Once you're convicted you get sent to prison.

Exactly the point. The police can waste your time. Those people can’t go to work and will likely lose their job because they are being jammed up by police.

It's not just time.

Rikers is as much of a violent, torturous, psychologically-toxic shithole as any prison, and people (often teenagers) can spend years stuck there [0].

[0]: https://revealnews.org/article-legacy/for-teens-at-rikers-is...

I just spent 8 years in the county jail while the police wasted my time to try and get a conviction out of me. They offered to let me walk free on my first court date if I plead guilty, but I refused, so I did 8 years locked up. I'm actually still in custody now, just not at the jail. Might be in custody for another couple of years until the case is dismissed.

Looking at the statistics for Cook County Jail, there are a number of unconvicted people who have been in there for almost 12 years waiting to go to trial.

Yea, the bail situation in this country is fucked.

It varies a lot by state, however. Not every state has private bail bondsmen, bounty hunters, etc.

This and OPs question are not related.

Thankfully people can use the fact that their trial hasn't yet completed to console the fact that they will be in Rikers for months.

That seems expected, it’s a jail not a prison. At any given time a lot of the people there are in the midst of a trial.