Stanley Richards knows how bleak life can be at Rikers Island , New York City’s notorious jail complex. As a young man, he spent two years locked up there for robbery. Now, he runs the place as the city's new Department of Correction commissioner. In January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped Richards to become the first formerly incarcerated person to oversee the city’s jails. His office, inside a converted chapel, is across the road from his old cell block. The aging dormitory where Richards was once an inmate before turning his life around was emptied of prisoners three years ago, due to deteriorating physical conditions. But on a recent visit, he stopped by his old 10-by-7-foot cell (3-by-2 meters) and reflected on how little seemed to have changed — except perhaps his perspective. “It doesn’t give me bad feelings, you know,” Richards said as he surveyed the graffiti-scrawled concrete walls, metal bed frame and sealed window of the tiny cell.…