Council passes bill to spur use of Rikers work release program

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed a bill aimed at ensuring a Department of Correction work release program is used more widely.  Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye

By Jacob Kaye

The City Council this week unanimously passed a bill that would require the Department of Correction to be more transparent about its use of a work release program meant to reduce the number of people housed on Rikers Island.

The legislation, backed by Criminal Justice Committee Chair Sandy Nurse, would require the DOC to issue a biannual report on the work release program, known as 6-A. Lawmakers say the program, which the city revitalized during the height of the pandemic, is inconsistently used by the agency despite the fact that the population in the city’s dangerous jails has ballooned over the past four years.

Councilmembers and advocates have demanded the DOC expand its use of the program ahead of the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers. While years of delays to the city’s plan to shutter the jails and open four new borough-based facilities have made meeting that deadline virtually impossible, officials say the city needs to make every effort to work toward the closure, which hinges on lowering the current detained population.

There are currently about 7,000 people being held on Rikers, including 1,500 who have been detained for a year or more, according to DOC data. The borough-based facilities, which are not expected to be completed in full until five years after Rikers’ closure deadline, are being constructed to hold up to 4,400 detainees at any given time.

“The population has increased significantly, and it is a factor in the rise in violence,” Nurse told the Eagle ahead of the bill’s passage on Tuesday. “And we need to continue to draw down that jail population in order to achieve the targets for the transition to the borough-based jails.”

The Council’s bill would require the DOC’s report on its use of 6-A to include details about how many people were considered eligible for the program and how many were accepted or rejected.

Under 6-A, the commissioner of the DOC can place people serving a sentence of less than a year into the work release program toward the tail end of their sentence. Detainees, who must meet a number of requirements to be considered eligible for the program, are put on a transition plan, paired with a local nonprofit provider and transported by the DOC to the provider or to a transitional housing facility. Once in the program, detainees are required to check in with a case manager weekly.

City data shows the program, which was most widely used when the city was attempting to lessen the number of people locked in the jails during the pandemic, was mostly a success.

Between 2022 and 2024, 115 people were released under 6-A. In 2022, six were returned to Rikers after violating the terms of their release, including one who was brought up on a new charge. No one released since then has been ordered back to Rikers for committing a violation.

At the start of the pandemic, the DOC released nearly 300 people through the program, accounting for a little more than half of the population of people serving a city sentence at the time. Around nine percent were re-arrested – including two people who were arrested on a violent felony – and four percent were returned to Rikers.

But use of the program plummeted in 2024. That year, the DOC granted work release to 43 of the 2,745 who were serving city sentences, according to the Independent Commission on Rikers, which recommended increased use of the program in its landmark report issued in March about the effort to close Rikers.

Though there are currently around 500 people eligible for release under the program, the DOC has released somewhere between 20 and 45 people through 6-A since DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie took office at the end of 2023, according to city officials.

​​“To help end the cycle of reoffending, we propose the city make greater use of [6-A],” the report read.

While the DOC said earlier this year that it expected to release around 60 people this year through 6-A, it is likely only about 30 will be released by the end of December, according to Nurse.

The Department of Correction did not respond to a request for comment on the bill’s passage.

The agency’s top officials have, in the past, fought against the lawmakers’ characterization that it has failed to utilize the program to its full potential.

But Nurse said the DOC has repeatedly told the Council that they don’t have much manpower dedicated to reviewing eligible detainees for the program.

“What we found is they were not putting adequate capacity toward reviewing these cases,” Nurse said. “This is 500 people that could be out working in some other program and not adding to the capacity crunch at Rikers, and relieving some of the stress on the number of beds there.”

“The point of the bill is that there are a number of programs available to DOC to get people off the island and safely back into the community, being productive,” she added. “And they are not using it.”