A group of eight State lawmakers held a press conference at the entrance to Rikers Island jail on Thursday, April 6, amid, they said, reports of “continued unsafe and inhumane conditions,” at the jail. The visit was scheduled as legislators awaited updates from three-way budget negotiations, and in the context of those negotiations, they allege Gov. Kathy Hochul was “pushing civil rights rollbacks that would result in many more people being held at Rikers without being convicted of a crime.”

 

Among the group were State Sen. Nathalia Fernandez (S.D. 34) who represents parts of The Bronx, State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez (S.D. 59), who represents parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, State Sen. Jabari Brisport (S.D. 25), who represents Brooklyn, Assembly Member Latrice Walker (A. D. 55), who represents parts of Brooklyn, Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani (A.D. 36), who represents parts of Queens, Assembly Member Marcela Mitaynes (A.D. 51), who represents parts of Brooklyn, Assembly Member Phara Souffrant Forrest (A.D. 57) who represents parts of Brooklyn, and Assembly Member Tony Simone (A.D. 75) who represents parts of Manhattan.

 

They were accompanied by representatives of Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, Center for Community Alternatives, the campaign to Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) and HALT Solitary.

 

Walker said, “I will begin another hunger strike beginning on Easter Sunday in honor of all the people we spoke to today who are detained at Rikers and all the other people who are locked up pretrial. What Gov. Hochul is trying to do with bail reform goes beyond rollbacks. She wants a wholesale dismantling of bail reform without a legal or empirical basis. So, I have to do what I have to do to keep New York State from filling jails with Black and brown people.”

 

For his part, Mamdani said, “Too often, policy is debated in abstract. Let us be clear: Rikers Island is the Governor’s proposal brought to life. 19 New Yorkers lost their lives at Rikers last year. Plainly put, the Governor’s proposals are a death sentence for many New Yorkers. We will have blood on our hands if allow these bail policy changes to be made in the state budget. Since bail reform was enacted in 2019, the likelihood of rearrest for people out on bail has not increased by even a single percentage point. What we have seen, however, is a campaign of fear and propaganda.”

 

The group arrived unannounced at Rikers at 9 a.m. on Thursday to, they said, “inspect as much of the jail as possible,” before gathering nearby at 1 p.m. in Queens to speak to the press. A similar visit was organized by other elected officials in September 2021, as reported.

 

Brisport said “innocent until proven guilty” was not a progressive idea and was foundational to the nation. “Yet our Governor wants to lock up more people who have not been found guilty of a crime,” he said. “During our visit I spoke with people who have been held at Rikers for literally years just waiting for their day in court; as though that were not a sufficiently egregious injustice, the conditions they’re being held in are stomach-churningly horrific. If the Governor has her way, the Rikers population will swell with people who have not been convicted of a crime, and these conditions will become even deadlier for our people being held there,”

Meanwhile, Mitaynes said, “with certainty,” the visit showed undeniably inhumane conditions. “The people at Rikers Island are not just a number,” she said. “They are our neighbors, our family members, our community and they deserve safety. It’s appalling that Governor Hochul has chosen this time of economic hardship to consider rolling back our effective bail reform laws. People who haven’t yet been convicted of a crime don’t deserve to be held at Rikers Island. In fact, no one deserves this amount of suffering. The data is clear: New York’s bail reform has been a resounding success for New York in keeping communities safe and our families whole.”

 

Rikers has been plagued with bad press for many years. This is due to, among other reasons, the number of people who have died while in custody, awaiting trial, and also due to the number of violent incidents involving both detainees and NYC Department of Corrections (DOC) officers. Norwood News previously reported on calls to end solitary confinement at the jail.

 

The jail has an average, reported daily detainee population of about 10,000, though it can hold a maximum of 15,000. It is scheduled to close in 2027, and be replaced with borough-based jails each holding around 3,300 people. In the Bronx, the new site is slated to open at the former Lincoln Hospital and NYPD compound at 745 East 141st Street. As reported, Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark weighed in  with her thoughts on the matter as part of our latest profile on the district attorney as she runs for a third term in office this coming June.

 

Back at the press conference, Souffrant Forrest said she joined the group to see firsthand what was occurring at the jail ‘I am appalled once again at the conditions that I have just witnessed,” she said. “If the governor was with us today, and saw what we just saw, she would not be pushing draconian bail policies that will dramatically increase pre-trial detention rates and further exacerbate the unconscionable humanitarian disaster currently unfolding 8 miles off the coast of New York City.”

 

She added, “When over 85% of the people being held in these squalid, overcrowded conditions have yet to even be found guilty by a jury of their peers, it becomes abundantly clear that we need more compassion, more resources, more treatment, and far far less people languishing behind bars.”

 

Meanwhile, Simone said the job of legislators was to tackle real problems face by their constituents. “The reality is, bail reform solved a problem, it didn’t create one,” he said. “Sending more people to the humanitarian disaster that is Rikers Island is not a solution. The reforms passed in 2019 give protections to people who had been unfairly targeted by the justice system, and the Senate and Assembly must stay strong to keep those reforms in place.”

 

Alice Fontier, managing director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, also gave her thoughts on the matter, saying, “The Governor should follow these legislators, who are true community leaders. If she saw with her own eyes the pain, trauma, and inhumanity of Rikers Island, she could not continue to advocate for gutting the purpose of bail and sending more people into these cages just to score a political ‘win.’ I encourage the Senate and Assembly leaders to listen to their members and hold the line on bail.”

Norwood News contacted the governor’s office for comment. A spokesperson for the governor responded, referring us to an extract from the governor’s State of the State policy book which reads, “Data from before and after the enactment of bail reform actually shows that eliminating the “least restrictive” standard for bail eligible offenses — while retaining it for less serious crimes — will not increase the overall rate of pretrial incarceration.”

 

The spokesperson added that Hochul has spoken at length about the intent behind her bail proposal. On Feb. 1, in her budget address, the governor said, “I’m looking forward to a thoughtful conversation with the Legislature about our bail laws. I reaffirmed my belief in the necessity of making changes and will not turn our backs on the progress that was made. But conflicting language in the law leads to confusion and a lack of accountability for the judges that make their determinations. So let’s just simply provide clarity. Let’s ensure judges consider factors for serious offenders, and let’s leave the law where it is for low level offenses. We move forward, and focus on to our other public safety challenges.”

 

On Feb. 6 in Syracuse, Hochul said, “After having some changes last year to the bail laws, we want to make sure that people accused of low-level offenses, who don’t have money, don’t end up sitting in jail when someone else accused of the same offense, who happens to have money, or their parents can bail them out, gets to go home. That is the description of injustice. That is what the bail laws changed, and we’re not talking about changing that, but when you get to serious crimes, violent crimes, crimes involving guns or harm to other people, you have to give the judges the discretion to be able to take a look at that.”

 

Later, on March 7, in Rochester, referring to the case of Bronxite, Kalief Browder, the governor said, “From the beginning, I have supported the underlying premise of the bail changes, because we had a situation that came to light, and it’s emblematic of many other situations where a young person was held, not because of the severity of a crime, stealing a backpack, literally stealing a backpack, but spent years in Rikers awaiting his chance to go to court. Now, if that child, that teenager, had parents with money in the bank account, or they had their own money, and they could have made bail, they could have been back in school, could have gone off and got a job, could have had a very, very different outcome.” Browder was never convicted of stealing the backpack.

 

She continued, “But the laws did not allow that. He didn’t have the money. He had to be detained. So, when you think about did that really make sense for a society to hold someone for years waiting for their trial for such a minor crime, when someone else accused of the exact same crime would be back out home? The difference being the size of your bank account… oh, that’s not a system of justice at all. No one would believe that it was. But the bail changes from 2018 swept up too many crimes and covered too many situations, and ones that were common sense would say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe someone could actually get out for doing that crime with a gun,’ that they’ve hurt other people, and they could do it again.”

 

In March 22 in Albany, she said, “We’re not incarcerating people for low level crimes or criminalizing poverty, but giving judges the discretion necessary to ensure public safety — and public opinion is clearly on the side of this clarification.”

 

Norwood News contacted the DOC for comment on the visit and comments by the legislators and will update this story upon receipt of any feedback we receive.

 

As reported, in December 2022, department officials provided an update on the latest initiatives to improve conditions at the jail, saying key indicators were showing progress in staffing levels and a reduction in violence as they continued their efforts to move the agency forward. These included the following:

• Assaults on uniform staff that involved a use of force decreased by 28.4% through December 29, 2022, compared to 2021.

• Assaults on uniform staff without the use of force or serious injury decreased by 44.7% through December 29, 2022, compared to 2021.

• Use of force incidents are down 14.4% through December 29, 2022, compared to 2021.

 

They added that searches of all kinds recovered over 5,000 weapons and over 1,300 drug contraband by the end of December 2022.  They said a major contributor towards the weapons and drug contraband seized was the department’s restarted Tactical Search Operations (TSOs) at the end of February, moving from one TSO in 2021 to 86+ in 2022. They said more weapons were recovered within the first ten months of the department’s administration under DOC Commissioner Louis A. Molina than in the yearly totals for each calendar year between 2018-2021.

 

“We are proud of the work we have done over the past year and remain laser-focused on reversing decades of neglect, investing in staff, and implementing common-sense reforms to improve the jails. We are now seeing substantial results through our efforts,” said Molina at the time. “The marked progress we are making is moving this agency forward into becoming a safer and more humane place for all those in our care and who work here and where operations are firmly rooted in only the best correctional practices. While there is still a long way to go and we are mindful that longstanding issues which pre-date this administration will take time to resolve, we are headed in the right direction.”

 

Other reported improvements cited by DOC at the end of last year included the following:

• the creation of an Office of Management Analysis and Planning to improve how the department reports and uses data in its decision-making process;
• the launch of a public-facing data dashboard for transparency purposes so the public can track our progress;
• the assembly of a new leadership team of dedicated, experienced, and committed professionals;
• the breaking up of gang-affiliated housing;
• over 3,500 uniform staff members trained and certified in how to utilize and deploy Narcan;
• reductions in the number of employees taking sick leave (At the start of the year, over 2,600 uniform staff were out sick. This averaged to under around 800 uniformed staff out sick in November, an approximate 69% decrease.);

• the resumption of in-person visitations due to improved staffing brought external program providers back e.g. faith-based programming, like Pastor Tim Johnson who implemented his “Fatherless No More” initiative;

• the launch of an anti-violence action plan at RNDC in March 2022, which led to an 85% decrease in slashing and stabbings as of November 2022;

• 315 windows in the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC) fabricated with mesh coverings to prevent individuals from breaking plexiglass, keeping both people in custody and staff safe, with such coverings in the process of being installed at the facility housing young adults;
• review and sign off by the commissioner on over 2,600 disciplinary cases in 2022, significantly reducing a backlog of cases, more than any other recent commissioner;
• implementation of a modern commissary process to improve access to commissary items for people in custody;
• the launch of a staff attendance tracking pilot program in RNDC and the finalization of the contract for a modern staff scheduling system;
• the resumption of a partnership to facilitate off-island family visitation for children with justice-involved parents, and for the first time, the extension of the program to include fathers.
• the launch of a new tablet initiative for people in custody which includes a feature affording free phone calls through the tablet, considered a groundbreaking game-changer in terms of keeping people in custody connected to their loved ones. A majority of facilities now have access to such tablets.

 

Department officials said they remain committed to creating a safer and more humane environment for all who work and live in the City’s jails.

 

On Tuesday, April 11, District 12 City Council Member Kevin Riley, who represents parts of the north Bronx and District 33 City Council Member Lincoln Restler, who represents parts of Brooklyn, lead a rally focused on “A Pathway to Closing Rikers Island and Ending Mass Incarceration in NYC,” at City Hall Park, Manhattan

District 2 City Council Member Carlina Rivera, chair of the committee on criminal justice, who represents parts of Manhattan and who is currently on parental leave, made herself available over Zoom for the event.

Officials for Rivera said she looked forward to continued work with colleagues to hold the mayoral administration accountable, hearing and passing legislation that creates a more just and humane criminal legal system, and allocating funding to what was described as critical community programs and social services.

“Holding the mayoral administration accountable to the deadline to close Rikers by 2027 has been central to my chairship of the Committee on Criminal Justice, and I intend to continue fighting in coalition to ensure the City meets that deadline,” said Rivera.

 

“In order to reduce the jail population to meet the needs of closing Rikers and opening borough based jails, I have introduced legislation which would establish jail population review teams for each borough to identify people in custody of the Department of Correction whose cases could be resolved or who could be safely released into the community,” the councilwoman added.

 

Rivera concluded, “Streamlined case processing is just one way we can reduce unnecessary, even harmful jail time, imposed on New Yorkers. I will continue to advocate for necessary actions, including but not limited to reducing the incarcerated population, recalibrating the Department’s budget, rightsizing Correction staff, investing in services and programs that build safe communities, and centering humanity.”