Crisis on Rikers comes to City Council

The New York City Council held an oversight hearing on the crisis on Rikers Island on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. File photo courtesy of the Freedom Agenda

By Jacob Kaye

The New York City Council held a marathon hearing Wednesday on the continued and compounding crises inside Rikers Island, which have reached a boiling point in recent months.

For three hours, council members on the Committees on Criminal Justice and on Civil Service and Labor grilled the city’s Department of Correction on the deteriorating conditions in the city’s jail, which includes incarcerated people being deprived of medical services and being held in showers and correctional officers being sexually assaulted. For the rest of the afternoon, the City Council heard testimony from criminal justice advocates, correctional officers, state lawmakers and family members of incarcerated people.

“I appreciate you guys kicking me around for it, you should kick me around,” said DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, who was appointed as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s third DOC commissioner in May. “The situation in the jails is worse than I imagined before I came on.”

The oversight hearing came a day after the mayor announced a five-point plan to address the jail crisis and two days after a group of lawmakers visited Rikers Island and reported witnessing “inhumane” conditions.

The DOC, as it has done all summer, blamed the conditions primarily on one thing: a correctional officer staffing shortage.

Since de Blasio first took office, there has been a 46 percent decline in the number of incarcerated people on Rikers and a 7 percent decline in the number of correctional officers, according to Schiraldi. There are currently around 6,000 people incarcerated – a number that’s on the rise – and a little over 8,000 correctional officers.

As has been the case over the past year, around one third of all officers were not able to work with incarcerated people, either because they were being medically monitored, out sick or AWOL, according to the DOC. Only 403 officers haven’t missed a single day of work in the past year.

During that same time frame, around 1,300 correctional officers have retired, according to Benny Boscio, the president of the Correctional Officers’ Benevolent Association.

Schiraldi said that the staffing shortage can be traced back to the effects of the pandemic.

“A lot of people did authentically get sick, some people tragically died, and people started calling in sick...and then it started spiraling from that point on,” he said. “More people started calling in sick, the staffing got thinner, people had to work triple [shifts], violence rose, programs had to get cut and the more violence rose, the scarier it got and more people called in sick.”

The staffing shortage has resulted in myriad issues, the commissioner said.

Incarcerated people in need of medical attention have been left without it, nine incarcerated people have died, more than half by suicide, while in custody this year, defendants have missed court dates because there’s no staff to take them and half a dozen correctional officers have reported being sexually assaulted by incarcerated people.

​​Administrative Judge for Criminal Matters in the Queens Supreme Court George Grasso said he’s seen the staffing shortage play out in courtrooms across the city. Over the past several months, Grasso has seen an increase in defendants held on Rikers missing court appearances because correctional officers have not been on hand to transport them.

“It's been a routine issue, and it was a routine issue in Bronx Criminal Court before I left,” Grasso said. “I think there's a direct relationship to the severe understaffing right now on Rikers Island and I think Rikers Island is in a terrible place right now.”

A spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration said that it does not track the number of defendants who miss appearances because they were not transported to court by the DOC.

A spokesperson for the DOC said that it didn’t have the number on hand.

Grasso added that he has appreciated Schiraldi’s attention to the issue and said that the two have met and been in contact in an attempt to work toward a solution.

“[Schiraldi is] very frank about the fact that right now he's severely understaffed for a variety of reasons,” Grasso said. “I think it's something that Mayor de Blasio has clearly been aware of for a long time. And I, like everyone else, am wondering why the mayor hasn’t acted earlier, and what actions he's going to be taking now to deal with this.”

As part of de Blasio’s five-point plan released earlier this week, correctional officers will be suspended for 30-days for missing work. He also said he would employ NYPD officers to oversee defendants in the courts, instead of correctional officers.

Queens Councilmember Adrienne Adams, whose mother was a correctional officer, said that she was concerned about the lack of attention to sexual assaults on correctional officers, most of whom are Black and brown New Yorkers.

The DOC is the only uniformed agency in the city that is not majority white and is not majority male.

“My fear is that some of those who are out right now considered AWOL have been traumatized because of their experiences of sexual assault within the walls of the jail,” Adams said, adding that she was disappointed in Cynthia Brann, the previous DOC commissioner.

“Be it known, on the record, that [Schiraldi’s] predecessor, as a woman, left a deplorable legacy of Correction,” Adams said.

Boscio, who sparred with lawmakers after their visit to Rikers earlier this week, again took issue with the characterization that his members’ repeated absences were to blame for the crisis on Rikers.

He also denied that officers were faking being sick and instead suggested that after working for over 32 hours straight, as many have had to do since the beginning of the pandemic, many actually are sick.

“If you're working 25 plus hours a day without meal breaks, who's expected to be at their best?” Boscio said. “They're exhausted, officers are physically and mentally exhausted.”

But not everyone believed Boscio, including Melania Brown, whose sister Layleen Polanco died in Rikers in 2019.

“While people are dying, his correctional officers are using the pandemic and using the crisis that we’ve got on hand right now to take vacation time,” Brown said. “I don’t know how clear today was, but today was very clear to me...these individuals do not care about our loved ones sitting behind those walls. They do not care and it’s our job to end this.”

The lawmaker’s attention to Rikers comes about a month after Steve Martin, the federal monitor appointed to oversee Rikers laid out many of the crumbling conditions discussed during Wednesday’s hearing in a letter submitted to federal court.

Though he said the situation was dire, Martin added that “the Monitoring Team strongly believes that, for the time being, the City and the Department are best suited to address these issues.”

Assemblymember David Weprin, who chair’s the Assembly’s Committee on Corrections, said that he believes the city should stay in control of the jail and that the federal government shouldn’t take over.

“I don't think that federal takeover is the answer,” Weprin said. “I think we want to keep control over it and work on improving it.”

The Assembly will hold a hearing on Rikers and other correctional facilities in the state on Oct. 1.