A number of Bronx and other elected officials were taken on a tour of Rikers Island on Monday, Sept. 13. Their aim was to highlight what they said are illegal and unsafe conditions at the jail. Among the group were State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi (S.D. 34), Congressman Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), Assembly Member Kenny Burgos (A.D. 85), Assembly Member Amanda Septimo (A.D. 84), as well as public defenders and activists like Min. Dr. Victoria Phillips of the Jails Action Coalition.

 

Ahead of the visit, Bowman said the group intended to call on City and State governments to use every tool at their disposal to immediately release people from what his office called “the extreme and dangerous conditions at Rikers,” citing nine people who had died in NYC Department of Correction (DOC) custody this year. He said these included three on Rikers in the past month, and added that self-harm was also reaching an alarming rate of 95 incidents per 1,000 people.

 

Before the tour, a spokesperson on behalf of various public defenders, including The Legal Aid Society, Neighborhood Defender Service, and The Bronx Defenders, said releasing people from Rikers to alleviate the stress from what they called a deeply flawed and inhumane system was a matter of life and death. “The jail itself is dangerously overcrowded, with a population that has surged to more than 6,000 people, above pre-pandemic levels,” their statement read.

 

They also said that the deadly Delta variant continued to threaten the lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, a threat, they said, which was exacerbated by what they called the failure of DOC staff to ensure people had access to basic human needs. “Their refusal has left incarcerated people without adequate food, medical attention, or access to other basic services that the City is legally and ethically required to provide,” they said.

 

The public defenders added that their clients were missing court appearances, being denied access to counsel, being denied any chance to go outside for recreation for months on end, were being subjected to a broken and inhumane intake process, and rather than being processed and housed promptly, newly incarcerated people were being kept in limbo and held in what they called squalid conditions in intake for weeks on end.

 

Their demands included:

• calling on prosecutors and judges to use their discretion to both reduce the number of people sent to jail, and release people currently held in the city jails, including a drastic reduction in and elimination of cash bail;
• calling on the mayor to use his authority under Correction Law Article 6-A to grant work release to people serving sentences in city jails, just as he did at the onset of the pandemic;
• calling on the mayor to take all available measures to address the staff absenteeism, and alleviate the staffing crisis principally by reducing the number of incarcerated people, thereby reducing need; and
• calling on the governor to sign the “Less is More Act,” which, they said, would drastically reduce the number of people held in jails and prisons by reforming New York’s punitive parole system.

 

For her part, after the visit, Biaggi tweeted, “Today, I visited Rikers Island, and what I saw was horrifying beyond words – garbage and bleach covered floors, incarcerated people kept in showers instead of cells, with little food and water.” She added, “No one is safe on Rikers. @KathyHochul must sign the ‘Less is More Act’ immediately.”

 

The Less is More Act, which has not yet become law, restricts incarcerating New Yorkers for technical and non-criminal parole violations and also requires hearings to happen more quickly. Norwood News reached out to DOC for comment following the remarks by the various elected officials and public defenders. On Tuesday, Sept. 14, DOC responded, citing the signature that same day by Mayor Bill de Blasio of an emergency order to execute the “Rikers Relief Plan,” a five-point plan to address the “challenges” on Rikers Island.

 

The five-point plan includes measures to:

• adjust staffing at courts by shifting NYPD to help operate courts, allowing some Department of Correction (DOC) staff to shift back to duty on Rikers;
• toughen accountability for AWOL (absent without official leave) staffers, with 30-day suspensions for correction officers who do not show up to a post;
• expand medical evaluation capacity for staff with additional medical providers, to evaluate DOC officers for duty;
• engage in emergency contracting to, among other actions, quickly repair broken doors, clean facilities more efficiently, distribute commissary more quickly, scan mail onto tablets to reduce drugs entering facilities, and
• speed intake to reduce crowding with a goal of moving people through the intake process in 24 hours or less. Two currently closed clinic spaces will be opened to allow greater capacity.

 

“New York City will take any action necessary to keep everyone safe throughout the justice system,” said the mayor. “These reforms will do just that – both by taking immediate steps to put officers back on duty, and by making deeper reforms to reduce the number of incarcerated New Yorkers.” De Blasio added, “We will uphold our obligation to provide a safe, clean environment on Rikers Island while pivoting to a fairer and more humane justice system.”

 

DOC officials said the mayor also called for the following actions across the justice system:

• enacting the Less is More Act;
• speeding up transfers out of Rikers into State-operated locations in five days or less;
• calendaring 500 court cases immediately out of the 5,000 people on Rikers Island in pre-trial, including over 1,500 people who have been held for over one year, and
• encouraging judges to use supervised release for non-violent offenders, instead of pre-trial detention at Rikers.

 

Rikers Island is a humanitarian crisis.

It calls for every level of gov’t to step up. Starting w/NYC & NYS.

Incarcerated pple who haven’t received HIV, diabetes, or psychiatric meds. 500+ cells broken. Pple who haven’t spoken to lawyers or family in weeks. Urgency is needed. https://t.co/6Mk10z4nHQ

— Alessandra Biaggi (@Biaggi4NY) September 14, 2021

 

On Sept. 7, during a press conference held to discuss the staffing crisis caused by AWOL staffers at Rikers and other jails, DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said he had wanted to start the conference with good news but unfortunately had to share “the worst kind of news,” when he confirmed that an individual in custody had passed away at the Anna M. Kross Center that morning.

 

The identity of the person had not, at that time, been released as the family had not yet been notified. “A full investigation is underway, and we will be releasing more details,” the commissioner said, before adding, “We want to give you a clear understanding of exactly what is driving the current conditions in our facilities and what we are doing to address it.”

 

Schiraldi said that since March 2020, the agency had been plagued with several different problems. “From COVID, to the loss of some of our members of service, to the death of people in our care, to assaults on staff, it has been an extremely challenging and emotional time,” he said.

 

On behalf of DOC, he said he offered his condolences to the families of the 13 staff members who had died from COVID-19 during the pandemic, as well as offering his deepest condolences to the families of loved ones who had passed away in DOC custody in recent months. “Going forward, we will continue to proactively notify media of deaths in custody,” he said. ‘Any death of staff and any death in custody is a tragedy and we take these types of events very seriously.”

 

Schiraldi said such tragic events had been taking place within the much larger context of their staffing shortages, and explained that staff were the heart and soul of DOC’s operations. “We cannot improve safety until we are fully staffed,” he said, adding that nearly a third of uniformed staff were unavailable to work on a given day. “When staff do not show up to work, every aspect of our operations suffer, so do the employees who pick up the slack and people in custody. Safety suffers.”

 

He said that DOC officers had been assaulted and as a result, some of the needs of people in custody were not being met. “The best way to reduce violence in jails is to have people supervising, and actively involved in delivering services and programing, and this can only happen if people come to work in adequate numbers,” the commissioner said.

 

He said DOC were hiring 200 more officers which would total 600 new officers in the City’s jails to help improve conditions. “They will start three to four months of training, October 1st,” he said. “We are also actively recruiting for reinstatement, uniformed staff who left service with the department in good standing within the last four years. They will start training on Oct. 1 as well, but will only require two weeks of training so they will be available to help with our staffing issues sooner.”

 

In terms of headcount, he said on Jan. 1, 2014, DOC had 11,000 inmates and 9,000 uniformed staff, and today it has 6,000 incarcerated people and 8,400 uniformed staff. “That means that, in 2014, we had more incarcerated people than staff,” he said. “Today, we have the opposite.”

 

The commissioner said that while it was true that DOC had lost some staff, they also had a 46 percent decline in inmates, and only a 7 percent decline in staff. “The problem isn’t inadequate staffing, it’s people not coming to work,” he said. “I want to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush at this moment. Some staff came to work every day during the pandemic, and some got COVID, and returned to work as soon as they were better.  These people are heroes and shouldn’t have to suffer by working triples while others feign illness.”

 

He said some people were truly sick or injured and should listen to their doctors until their health improves and they are able to return to work. “Finally, some people are not sick and are taking advantage of the generous, unlimited sick leave policy that is granted to uniformed staff members in New York City because of the difficult jobs they work and because we generally trust them not to abuse it,” he said.

 

Acknowledging that it was reasonable for people to ask how DOC knows that people are abusing the system, he provided a what he called a few disturbing indicators. “The notion of ‘banging in,’ not coming to work even though they are able to do so, is so common that people are sharing their vacation experiences while ‘out sick’ on social media,” he said. “Just yesterday, a social media post was posted on-line calling for a department-wide ‘bang-in’ day. I don’t believe it was terribly effective, but it gives you an example of how public the notion of feigning illness or AWOLing has become.”

 

Schiraldi said the 19 percent sick rate is more than six times higher than the NYPD’s sick rate of 3 percent, and three times higher than the FDNY’s which is 6 percent. “There were nearly two-and-a-half times as many people out sick on July 4th (486) as on June 4th (203),” he said.

 

The commissioner said that staff at DOC are required to work overtime when they are needed. “Some staff do so, and relieve their colleagues, which is great. That’s what we want them to do. I thank them for that,” he said. “Others work single shifts while their colleagues work triples. Sometimes, when we ask people in preferred posts to work doubles to relieve others who are working triples, those who have just completed single shifts with no sign of illness, suddenly say they are sick.”

 

He said that several times, DOC had taken busses to the court pens to get the entire cadre of uniformed staff there to come to Rikers to relieve fellow officers who were getting ready to go on triple shifts. “On some occasions, none of them got on the bus,” he said.

 

The commissioner was eager to highlight that such attitudes were not common among the majority of staff, who he said were hardworking people who do the right thing every day, and who he called “heroes.”

 

He then explained that when DOC instituted a new policy of requiring all staff to go to Mt. Sinai [to be examined] before they could be considered sick, they quickly saw about a two-thirds reduction in the number of people calling in sick. However, he said, in contrast, the “AWOL numbers,” the number of times people did not come to work, and did not call to explain why, went up to 2,795 in August alone.

 

He said they are now focusing on encouraging people to come to work, and disciplining them when they AWOL, or when they otherwise misuse sick leave policies. “This is what we are doing to get people to come back to work, so we can be properly staffed, do an effective job of fixing the units, programming people and getting people properly trained to work with populations like young adults, people with mental illness and consistently post them to those positions,” he said. “When we do this, violence will go down and people will want to work on units they don’t want to work on now because violence is so high.”

 

The commissioner said another action being taken by DOC was “working assiduously to increase programming and design the kinds of living units that any of us would want if our son or daughter either worked here or was incarcerated here.”

 

He acknowledged that the DOC cannot discipline its way out of the situation, but said it would be irresponsible not to hold people accountable. ‘I cannot look the mayor or City Council, or New York City residents in the eye and ask them to spend more money hiring more and more staff while nearly one third of my staff are unavailable to work on a given day,” he said.

 

He concluded by appealing to those DOC employees who were able bodied and out sick or AWOLing or contemplating AWOLing, to come back to work. “We need you to get in here and help your fellow officers in uniform and to help restore the department’s reputation and provide decent care for those incarcerated in our facilities,” he said.

 

He then thanked those officers who do show up each day despite being asked to work extra shifts. “Every day they put their lives on the line and we appreciate all that they do for this City,” he said. He also pleaded with any judges, district or defense attorneys who were working on people’s cases who were on Rikers, to expedite their cases. “We had 50 percent higher length of stay pretrial prior to the pandemic than jails in the rest of New York State, and since the pandemic, it went up by 30 percent,” he said.

 

“We need your help because the fewer people we have in here, the better we are going to run this place,” he added. According to DOC, New York City once had nearly 22,000 people in City jails in the mid-1990s. Schiraldi said the City has shown that it can have both lower incarceration rates and less crime. “As the number of people in our jails declined from nearly 22,000 in the mid-1990s to below 6,000 pre-pandemic, crime in the city, including violent crime and homicides, also plummeted to historic lows,” he said.

 

Shortly after Schiraldi took office in June, DOC launched #NEWDAYDOC, targeted initiatives which officials said were designed to increase staffing and safety. They said the agency is delivering on these initiatives, and have accomplished the following:

• adjusted schedules and placement of all available uniform staff to support facilities;
• all DOC staff have been returned from Horizon Detention Center;
• realigned schedules of uniform staff working at HQ to provide additional facility weekend coverage;
• have scheduled a new Correction Officer Academy for October to onboard up to 600 correction officers, and have begun recruiting staff who had left DOC in good standing within the last four years for reinstatement;
• scheduled a new Correction Officer Academy exam for October to further assist with ongoing recruitment, with the filing period now open;
• established a new process for calling out sick in partnership with Mt. Sinai to return staff to duty more quickly;
• supported the heroic staff who come in every day to working long hours;
• Providing meals to staff on double and triple shifts;
• offering free rides home and back to work to anyone who works into a triple shift;
• created space in the Staff Wellness Center for staff to rest or sleep after long hours;
• refurbished the staff garden to provide a restful place in which staff can relax;
• installed a total of 250 new cell doors at one facility, with an additional 250 on the way;
• instituted a commissary ban for incarcerated people who commit violent infractions;
• realigned disciplinary processes to enable facilities to own accountability for lower-level staff misconduct;
• improved communications with the District Attorney’s Office, resulting in several recent rearrests and indictments of incarcerated people who assaulted staff or other people in custody;
• met with judges and DAs in multiple boroughs to accelerate the cases of DOC’s most violent incarcerated people;
• reestablished the Young Adult Task Force which involves staff, community leaders, and the Board of Corrections in supporting young adults and reducing violence, and
• working with the Federal Monitor on a plan to post officers more effectively.

 

Schiraldi acknowledged that there was still much more to do, but that DOC was making every effort to improve conditions. He said the Department’s staffing shortages were also affecting health operations, including the availability of escorts to bring patients to the clinic, and of DOC personnel to staff the clinics. In response to this shortage, he said CHS had prioritized critical services to highest-risk patients.

 

The commissioner compared the work required at DOC to buying a new house. “Some places, you go in, and you think, ‘All I need to do is some patching and painting in the kids’ rooms and living room and it’s good to go, and other places are a gut-reno.'” He said DOC was the latter category and needed watershed reforms before it would be in the kind of shape City residents and staff could be proud of, and that incarcerated people and their families could feel safe in. “I was a reformer – a gut reno guy – not a paint and patch guy,” he said.

 

Norwood News also reported recently on the issue of solitary confinement in New York correctional facilities.

Extremely happy that @GovKathyHochul signed the ‘Less is More’ act today. Thank you to @NewYorkLtGov– who was and remains committed to this bill & reform from the beginning. Huge thanks to advocates like @DonnaHylton– who fought hard for this bill unapologetically and fiercely.

— Jamaal T. Bailey (@jamaaltbailey) September 17, 2021

 

On Friday, Sept. 17, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced, “in cooperation with the the City of New York,” which she joked was a headline in itself, that 191 Rikers Island inmates would be released from the City jail, as well as the signature of the Less is More Act. “It’s about protecting human life. It’s about protecting human rights. It’s about protecting human dignity,” she said, adding that New York State incarcerates more people for parole violations than any other state in the country. Hochul is also directing the State Department of Corrections to start the process of transferring 200 Rikers inmates into state prison facilities.

 

The full press conference can be watched here.