Pols protest gov’s bail proposal following Rikers visit
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From left to right: Senator Kristen Gonzalez, Senator Nathalia Fernandez, Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, Assemblymember Tony Simone, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, Senator Jabari Brisport, Assemblymember Latrice Walker and Alice Fontier, the managing director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
A group of lawmakers decried the governor’s attempt to change the state’s bail laws following a visit to Rikers Island on Thursday.
The state officials, including several from Queens, denounced Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to eliminate the state’s “least restrictive” standard, which she says has caused confusion among judges who are unsure when they can or cannot set bail against a defendant.
The fight over the bail change and its inclusion in the state’s budget has delayed the passage of the state’s fiscal document, which was due on April 1 – it’s not expected to be passed until at least next week. After touring several facilities on Rikers Island on Thursday, the lawmakers – all of whom were already opposed to the bail change – said their position has not changed.
“We will have blood on our hands if we allow these changes to be implemented in our New York State budget,” Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani said.
In protest of Hochul’s proposal, one lawmaker, Brooklyn Assemblymember Latrice Walker, said she’d go on a hunger strike beginning on Easter.
Walker, an architect of the 2019 bail reform laws, went on an 18-day hunger strike last year in protest of a different set of bail reform rollbacks the governor somewhat successfully worked into the state’s budget.
The lawmakers, which included Queens State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, Senator Jabari Brisport, Senator Nathalia Fernandez and Assemblymembers Marcela Mitaynes, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Tony Simone, Walker and Mamdani, argued that eliminating the least restrictive measure will ultimately lead to an increase in the number of New Yorkers being held on bail.
Adding to the already growing population on Rikers could potentially spell doom for both detainees and the staff who work there, the elected officials said.
“The budget is a fiscal document and yet, here we are negotiating with a governor who is using it as a means by which to send more for Black and brown New Yorkers to their deaths,” Mamdani said.
In a statement to the Eagle, a spokesperson for the governor said: “Governor Hochul's Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she continues to work with the legislature to deliver a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers.”
Earlier this week, the federal monitor appointed to oversee Rikers about a decade ago issued a status report on conditions in the city’s jail complex. Though not as damning as previous reports in recent years, the monitor’s report found that violence in Rikers, including assaults on staff, use of force incidents on detainees and stabbings and slashings remain at “alarming” levels.
However, the monitoring team also noted that the jail complex and the Department of Correction appeared to be in a state of “flux,” slowly implementing policy changes outlined in an “action plan” created last year to stave off a federal takeover of the jail.
“The Department’s headquarters and the jails’ conditions of confinement may be best described as in a state of flux, as both begin to gradually transition away from deep dysfunction towards the beginnings of improved management,” the monitor, Steve J. Martin, said in the report.
Mamdani, who has toured Rikers prior to Thursday’s unannounced visit, said that he found it difficult to assess whether or not conditions in the jail where three dozen people have died in the last two years have improved in recent months.
“It's hard to say [if conditions are improving],” Mamdani told the Eagle. “[The DOC] will show you a nice recreation room with a ping pong table, video games that can be played, but even in that very place, when you talk to the individuals who are incarcerated, they’ll tell you, ‘I’m just here for an hour – when I go back to where I live, there’s no toilet paper, no garbage bags, there’s cockroaches, mice.”
The eight lawmakers had shown up to Rikers Island on Thursday hoping to split up and tour as many facilities as possible. But that plan was thwarted when DOC officials told them that they’d be traveling as a group and to only two predetermined facilities.
“Their visit instead was coordinated and contained,” said Alice Fontier, the managing director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. “They put them into one van and took them to the facilities that they wanted them to see.”
“And yet, even in the places they wanted them to see, what [the officials] see is people who are stuck, trapped with no access to anything,” Frontier added.
The DOC did not respond to request for comment Thursday.
Setting bail against a defendant can lead to years of incarceration before a jury even decides whether or not they are guilty or innocent. According to the monitor’s recent report, the average detainee spends 115 days inside Rikers Island, an average that is nearly two times larger than it was around eight years ago and is four times the national average.
Of the approximately 6,000 people incarcerated on Rikers, 780 have been there for one to two years, according to DOC data. Around 500 detainees have been held for over two years, DOC data shows.
The 2019 bail reforms were passed as a way to combat the disproportionate number of New Yorkers held in jails solely because of their limited financial means. Despite limited changes to the number of New Yorkers rearrested while awaiting trial, the reforms have been rolled back nearly every year since their passage.
The least restrictive means clause, which requires judges to consider the least restrictive means when considering whether to remand, release or set bail against a defendant, existed prior to the passage of reforms.
However, Hochul says that in light of the reforms, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, the clause has caused confusion among judges and has limited their discretion.
The governor, who has said she supports the “underlying premise” of the reforms, has proposed eliminating the standard for “serious offenses,” though she has yet to specify exactly which offenses would make the list.
“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,” Hochul said in February. “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.”
In addition to the lawmakers who toured Rikers on Thursday, a number of criminal justice reform groups, the Legal Aid Society and District Council 37, New York City's largest public employee union, have urged the governor to stop pursuing the bail change.
“Governor Kathy Hochul’s hijacking of the budget process to force through rollbacks is not based on merit, but is merely a desperate political attempt to beef up her ‘tough on crime’ bona fides with portions of the electorate,” the Legal Aid Society said in a recent statement.
“This is obvious to anyone with eyes to see,” they added.
When asked on Thursday whether or not they’d be attempting to communicate their experience in the jail complex with the governor or her team, the lawmakers said they’ve so far been iced out of the conversation.
“I've never met the governor [to discuss bail],” Mamdani said. “And I don't think that we will be invited to share this kind of testimony.”
“It's been litigated in the press, it's been litigated on the front page of the New York Post,” he added. “But these are the facts, that's where we should be making decisions.”
