Rikers sees higher rates of mental health and violent felony charges, report finds
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Those with mental health needs and those facing violent felony charges have come to represent a large number of detainees being held on Rikers Island, a new report found. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
Two distinct populations on Rikers Island grew more than any other over the past decade – detainees diagnosed with mental health issues and those facing violent felony charges, a new report found.
In a study issued by the Independent Budget Office on Tuesday, the IBO said that no other groups saw the same explosion in population on Rikers Island over the past 10 years – which the report described as an “immensely volatile period” – than those needing mental health treatment and those facing some of the most extreme charges.
Not only have the groups come to represent a far larger portion of the city’s jail population than they did a decade ago, they also are staying, on average, far longer behind bars.
“The composition of DOC jails changed dramatically,” the report reads. “Two groups in particular make up a much larger proportion of the DOC population than they did before: those accused of the most severe criminal charge, and people identified by DOC as requiring mental health treatment.”
The new data comes as the future of Rikers Island remains murky, largely due to its population, officials say.
Not only is the total jail population – which was around 6,200 in February 2024 – too large to transfer to the 4,160 beds currently slated to be built in the city’s four borough-based jails but Mayor Eric Adams and his administration have been accused by advocates and lawmakers for making little effort to reduce the jail complex’s population through programming or addressing the lack of mental health treatment.
In fact, the Adams administration recently revealed that it planned to cut back on the number of mental health and substance abuse treatment beds available to detainees in the yet-to-be-built borough-based jail facilities in order to create more space for general population housing. The reduction in mental health beds, which was first reported by Gothamist, came as a part of a larger effort to grow the borough-based facilities by around 1,000 beds.
Originally, the Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan facilities were planned to be able to house a combined population of 3,300 detainees.
In 2014, when Rikers population hovered around 10,000 detainees, those with a mental health diagnosis represented around 37 percent of the population, according to the IBO.
They now represent around 51 percent of the jail’s population, the IBO said in its report.
The change in population was even more pronounced among those facing violent felony charges.
In 2014, around 17 percent of those being held pretrial at Rikers were charged with a violent felony. In 2023, 46 percent of Rikers’ population had been charged with a violent felony.
And while the two groups have grown to represent a larger portion of Rikers’ population, they are doing so separately. According to the IBO, those living with mental illness were less likely to have been charged with a violent felony than those not living with a mental illness, “so trends across these two groups are not being driven by the same stays” at the jail complex.
Having the two groups come to represent such a disproportionate number of the jail complex’s total population, has meant that the length of stay for the average detainee has also increased.
“While stays of less than one month still make up the majority of stays, people are generally staying longer on average,” the IBO said in its report.
The share of stays longer than a month increased from 31 percent a decade ago to 42 percent in 2023, the report claimed.
The average length of stay in 2014 was clocked at 55 days, according to the report. In 2023, the average length of stay had jumped to a little over 100 days.
The report said that the increase in the percentage of those facing violent felony charges and those with a mental health diagnosis in the jail’s population likely played a role in the increase in the average length of stay. Those facing violent felonies tend to be held longer on Rikers than those facing a lesser charge and those with mental health issues tend to be held longer than those without a diagnosis.
The average length of stay for a detainee with a violent felony charge in 2023 was 144 days, the report said – the average length of stay for that same population in 2014 was 125 days. Those facing nonviolent felony charges averaged 88 days in the jail and those facing misdemeanor charges spent around 40 days in the jail complex on average in 2023.
Similar increases were seen for those with mental health issues.
In 2014, detainees flagged for mental health issues were held for 88 days on average, the report said. In 2023, they were held for a little less than twice as long, averaging around 146 days behind bars.
Though the Adams administration plans to cut the number of mental health beds inside the borough-based jails – which are not expected to built until at least 2029, two years after the legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers Island – the administration announced earlier this month that it would begin construction of several outpost therapeutic housing units for detainees.
Units at NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull and North Central Bronx will “house detainees who have serious medical, mental health and substance-use needs and would benefit from a more structured, clinical environment,” according to the mayor’s office. Both are expected to be completed by summer 2027.
Similarly, construction is currently underway for a mental health unit at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, which is expected to be completed by the spring of 2025
Combined, the three units will have around 360 beds.
