Jail programming suffers a year after DOC cut nonprofit contract
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Department of Correction leadership, including DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, gave testimony at a City Council budget hearing on Friday, May 17, 2024. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The city’s Department of Correction has continued to struggle to provide re-entry services, educational programs, life skills training and other programs to detainees on Rikers Island a year after the agency cut a contract with half a dozen nonprofits and opted to provide the programming themselves.
Agency leadership said during a City Council budget hearing on Friday that the DOC is currently not providing the minimum hours of required programming for detainees on Rikers Island.
The revelation of the agency’s continued programming struggles comes almost a year after it cut a $17 million contract with five nonprofit organizations that had previously been running various social services programs in the notoriously dangerous jail complex.
After making the austerity measure last year, the DOC said it would be able to provide the programming itself. However, a year later, that promise remains unfulfilled.
When asked point blank by City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Committee on Criminal Justice, if the DOC was providing five hours of programming to detainees held in all facilities on Rikers Island as required by the Board of Correctin’s minimum standards, DOC leadership didn’t mince words.
“No,” said DOC First Deputy Commissioner Francis Torres, who served as the deputy commissioner of the DOC’s Division of Programs and Community Partnerships when the nonprofit contracts were cut last year.
Though Torres in her previous role working under former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina last year told the Council that the agency would be able to fill the shoes of the nonprofit providers once they had left, she admitted on Friday that that hadn’t been the case.
“We've had challenges,” Torres said. “I'm not going to tell you our programming has not been impacted, it has been impacted.”
The DOC first cut the $17 million contract with The Fortune Society, The Osborne Association, SCO Family of Services, Greenhope Services for Women and Fedcap Rehabilitation Services in June of last year. The providers were set to enter into the final year of the contract, which allowed them to provide anger management, parenting skills, workforce development, vocational training, social services and other programs for detainees on Rikers Island.
The DOC’s decision to end the contract – which amounted to less than one percent of its total $1.2 billion budget – came after Mayor Eric Adams ordered one of several across-the-board budget cuts to city agencies last year.
The severed contract drew condemnation not only from the providers but also from a number of lawmakers and criminal justice advocates who claimed that the cuts were antithetical to lowering the city’s recidivism rate and generally improving public safety.
The DOC, under Molina, defended the cut and claimed that they would be able to offer as many programs as were offered by the nonprofits. Nonetheless, DOC brass offered scant details about how the agency would fulfill that promise during a budget hearing last year.
During the May 2023 hearing, Torres said that “when it comes to that transition plan, we're working internally.”
It wasn’t until January of this year that a full accounting of the impact of the severed contract was made clear.
During the first four months of Fiscal Year 2024 – which began in July 2023 – the number of group-based programming offered to detainees on Rikers Island dropped by 29 percent and one-on-one sessions dropped by over 30 percent when compared to the first four months of Fiscal Year 2023, according to the Mayor’s Management Report released in January.
The decline came immediately after the agency prematurely terminated the $17 million contract with the five nonprofit service providers.
According to the Mayor’s Management Report, the overall number of detainees participating in programs, services and activities dropped by around six percent at the start of Fiscal Year 2024.
During the first four months of Fiscal Year 2023, when the nonprofits were providing programming in Rikers, there were over 11,300 one-on-one programming sessions offered to detainees. That number dropped to 7,878 in the first four months of Fiscal Year 2024, according to the report. Group sessions fell from 14,323 to 10,221 in the same time period.
DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, who took over the position from Molina in December, took notice of the decline. In February, she quietly asked two nonprofits, including Queens-based organization the Fortune Society, to return to Rikers to provide a limited number of programs free of charge to the DOC.
Since February, the Fortune Society has been providing transitional planning services and employment services in only one facility on Rikers, the Eric M. Taylor Center, the second-most populous jail facility on Rikers. Fortune has also been screening detainees and assessing whether or not they are eligible to participate in any of the alternatives to incarceration programs the nonprofit provides.
A week after the Eagle reported on Fortune’s return to Rikers, the Adams administration announced that it planned to send $14 million to the DOC to “enhance programing initiatives for people in custody.” The money will go toward contracts with nonprofit organizations that offer a range of services to detainees, a spokesperson for City Hall said at the time.
However, officials said on Friday that the new money not only has very little to do with the $17 million severed contract, but it also won’t be seen by providers for some time.
The city has yet to send out a bid to nonprofits for the funding and doesn’t plan to do so until at least the summer, DOC leadership said.
When asked by councilmembers if the agency would consider using the money to send out emergency contracts to bring the nonprofits back to the island quicker, DOC officials said they would not.
However, Stanley Richards, the CEO of the Fortune Society, said both his and the other nonprofits would jump at the opportunity to return to Rikers and restore the programming to what it once was.
“We stand ready to be engaged,” Richards told the Eagle on Friday following the hearing. “At this point, I encourage them to find ways to expedite the use of those resources to bring back programs to the department.”
Given the lag in programming over the past year, Torres was asked by Council Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan at one point during the hearing if the agency had regretted its austerity measure made last year.
“We responded to the request to reduce our budget,” Torres said. “It is true that we have been impacted, but we have not been idled in ensuring that there are other additional services.”
