DOC to slash outside programming for detainees
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In this Thursday, April 20, 2017 photo, Neftali Thomas Diaz talks with employment specialist Frederick Muldrow at The Fortune Society in New York. The Department of Correction proposed this week cutting its contract with The Fortune Society, and several other organizations like it. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
The Department of Correction has told half a dozen organizations that provide services and programs to jailed New Yorkers that they will no longer be contracted to work with the agency come July.
Top DOC officials this week told the organizations, including The Fortune Society, The Osborne Association, SCO Family of Services, Greenhope Services for Woman and Fedcap Rehabilitation Services, that their combined $17 million contract with the agency will come to an end on June 30. The contracts were supposed to run through March of next year.
Additionally, a separate contract with The Horticultural Society of New York is also being ended prematurely, sources told the Eagle.
The off-loading of third-party contracts comes as Mayor Eric Adams has ordered the agency to reduce its spending by 4 percent in the coming fiscal year. The $17 million saving measure accounts for less than 1 percent of the agency’s 1.2 billion budget.
The move to cut ties with the organizations, which advocates and lawmakers say successfully reduce recidivism as well as the likelihood of violent incidents inside the jails, has been met with astonishment and outrage by the providers, criminal justice organizers and a number of elected officials.
“We were completely shocked,” said Ronald Day, the vice president of programs at the Fortune Society, which is based in Long Island City.
“Throughout the more than three decades that we've been doing this work, there has never come a time when there was ever a discussion about eliminating a program, as they are talking about doing now,” he added.
The organizations, which have been working with the DOC under this specific contract for around two years, provide a number of different programs to incarcerated individuals in the city’s jails.
The Fortune Society alone conducts re-entry programs, educational programs, work training programs, stress management programs, parenting classes, wellness programs, financial literacy lessons, entrepreneurship classes and life skills classes under the contract.
The providers also conduct behavior-focused interventions, including relapse prevention, anger management and trauma-informed groups.
A DOC spokesperson told the Eagle on Tuesday that though the contracts are ending, the agency will continue to provide the services and programming in-house. However, the spokesperson did not respond to follow up questions about how many staff members will be assigned to implement the programs.
“The Department will assume the responsibilities previously carried out by contracted providers, and continues to offer dozens of additional programs to people in custody, including educational programming, fine/performing arts, and other enrichment activities,” the spokesperson said.
The programming is not mandatory for detainees, and the DOC spokesperson said that attendance has been waning. On average, around 70 percent of seats in the programs, which are held for an hour and a half, Monday through Friday, go unfilled, according to the spokesperson.
But Day disputed that claim, saying that the Fortune Society alone has serviced over 2,000 detainees during the life of the contract – that accounts for about 33 percent of Rikers Island’s average daily population.
More importantly, Day said, the programs work. If an incarcerated individual receives services while incarcerated, they are five times more likely to seek out reentry services and other programming after being released, according to Day.
“We know that when people receive services in the community, chances are significantly increased that they don't continue to be involved in crime, that they are more likely to be successful when they come out,” Day said.
“We want to support them and help them turn their lives around so that they can be successful, contributing members of society,” Day added. “Many of the individuals that we work with are able to do that.”
Day said that he has little faith that the DOC will have the ability to successfully implement the programs themselves. The agency has been bleeding staff members over the past four years. In August 2019, the agency had a little more than 10,000 correctional officers on its books. In March 2023, that number had fallen to 6,660, according to DOC data. In March, the agency had around 400 vacancies.
The staffing crisis has affected the DOC’s ability to take detainees to medical appointments and to court, and has limited the ability of detainees to use Rikers’ facilities and services like the law library and barber at various points over the past several years.
Though a recruitment campaign is currently underway and 85 recruits are scheduled to graduate by the end of this week, Day says it won’t be enough.
“I have not had anybody from DOC tell me with a straight face that they'll be able to do the work that the providers have done,” Day said. “You don't just come in and say, ‘We're going to do what the providers have done, or anything even remotely close to that.’”
“We just have to be frank about what the reality is going to be like,” he added.
For the Fortune Society, the reality is the loss of a $3 million contract and the likelihood that they’ll be unable to retain the two dozen staffers assigned to work on the jail programs.
“We have to plan to do layoffs with people,” Day said. “When a contract is terminated and the funds go away – primarily, it’s potentially losing the 24 staff that we have working on the contract. And of course, the most important thing is that we won’t be able to deliver services to people who need it most.”
Queens City Councilmember Lynn Schulman, whose late partner, Adelaide Connaughton, worked at the Fortune Society, said that she believed the cuts would do little to improve already tenuous conditions inside Rikers Island or safety in the city.
“The Department of Correction’s proposed cuts to eliminate contracts for discharge planning, which helps those leaving Rikers Island, is more likely to impede public safety rather than promoting it,” Schulman said in a statement to the Eagle. “Public safety investments like this should not be undermined by budget cuts.”
The cuts are expected to be examined during the City Council’s upcoming criminal justice budget hearing on Friday, which DOC officials are scheduled to testify at.
A spokesperson for City Councilmember Carlina Rivera, who chairs the Committee on Criminal Justice, said that the councilmember had not been briefed on the cuts and doesn’t have “clarity on what [the cuts are] and what the implications would be.” Counsel for the committee recently sent a communication to the Adams administration seeking more information and, as of Tuesday morning, had not yet received a response. The spokesperson declined to share the communication with the Eagle.
Should the DOC go through with the cuts, Rivera’s spokesperson said that they have doubts that the DOC will be able to do what the organizations have done for the past several decades.
“With the way that the jails have been run over the past decade – we had a historic year last year with 19 deaths – we don't have confidence in the Department of Correction’s ability to administer this kind of programming,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that they believe that there are other ways for the DOC to save $17 million in its budget.
“They can cut vacant positions, or they can find this also in overtime [wages], from what we understand,” the spokesperson said. “It's our preference that the department right size their budget in other ways than cutting critical programming.”
The Legal Aid Society, which has represented a number of incarcerated individuals in lawsuits alleging abuse by members of DOC and the city, blasted the cost-saving measure in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.
“In a jail that has exorbitant use of force and violence rates and cannot manage basic jail functions like getting people access to medical care, the programs provided by outside professional providers need to be expanded, not eliminated,” a spokesperson for the public defense firm said. “DOC has demonstrated that it has neither the culture nor the competence to provide these programs itself, and cannot be trusted to perform this crucial function.”
