Adams taps former NYPD officer to lead DOC
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Louis Molina will serve as the city’s next Department of Correction’s commissioner, Mayor-elect Eric Adams announced on Thursday, Dec. 15, 2021. Photo via Adams/Twitter
By Jacob Kaye
Mayor-elect Eric Adams continued his week of appointments Thursday, naming Bronx native Louis Molina as the city’s next commissioner of the Department of Correction.
Molina, who will be the first Latino person to hold the role, will take over the DOC at one of its lowest moments in the past decade. More people have died in DOC custody this year than any year since 2013, including two people in the past week. The jail is also in the midst of a historic staffing shortage, with thousands of officers out sick or going AWOL each day.
“We need a Department of Corrections Commissioner who will provide humane conditions to inmates; reduce recidivism rates; support our corrections officers; and reimagine DOC from a revolving-door punitive system to a holistic rehabilitation system,” Adams said. “That person is Louis Molina.”
Molina, who currently oversees Las Vegas’ jails as the head of the Department of Public Safety, was once an NYPD officer, like Adams, and has family members who have clashed with the criminal justice system, he said Thursday.
“I bring a unique perspective to this role, not only because of the breadth of my experience, but also because members of my family have been involved in the criminal justice system,” Molina said. “I understand the flaws embedded in our system and the urgent need for reforms that balance the need for safety with the imperative of upholding human dignity.”
Molina will take over the DOC from current commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi, who will have served the department for less than a year, come his last day.
Schiraldi, whose career centered around criminal justice reform, was appointed in May and oversaw the department during its darkest months this year. With large amounts of staff absent and violence, both from staff and detainees, on a precipitous rise during the summer, Schiraldi and Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed the missing officers for the poor conditions on Rikers Island.
The clash resulted in the city suing the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association in September, as the city alleged the union had been encouraging its members to skip out on shifts. At the time, the number of AWOL officers was up 215 percent when compared to 2019. The city withdrew the lawsuit several days later after the union’s lawyer said COBA had never encouraged its officers to miss work in court.
Benny Boscio, COBA’s president, celebrated the news of Molina’s appointment on Thursday.
“It’s no secret that for the past eight years, our essential workforce has been put through hell and has been forced to work under intolerable conditions by an administration who viewed us as expendable,” Boscio said in a statement to the Eagle. “Now more than ever, we desperately need a proven law enforcement leader who understands the gravity of the crisis we’re in and is willing to work in collaboration with us to restore safety, security, and sanity to our jails.”
“We are hopeful that incoming Commissioner Louis Molina shares those same goals,” he added. “We welcome him to our agency and we look forward to working with him to hit the ground running on day one.”
In his remarks Thursday, Molina emphasized the importance of a motivated and well trained correctional officer staff.
“The women and men that work in the Department of Correction play a vital role in the rehabilitative process and ensuring that those placed in our custody by the courts are safe and that they maintain their access to justice,” Molina said.
Though he spoke of reforms during the press conference held at Brooklyn Borough Hall, where Adams currently serves as Brooklyn borough president, Molina said that before reforms can come the violence that has thrown the jail into crisis must first be dealt with.
“I want to be clear, programs of support make a difference, but we can’t achieve that if we don’t have safety and security as a foundation to deliver these important services to the incarcerated population in our care,” he said. “We will change the culture of our criminal justice system to emphasize the need for holistic rehabilitation over the punitive policies of the past.”
“For too long, we have managed our public safety approach with slogans, not science, and our strategies to improve safety and security as well as programs and support, must be evidence based, if we want to achieve trust and legitimacy in our system of justice,” he added.
Molina is no stranger to Rikers Island – in 2016 and 2017, he worked as an internal monitor with the DOC, keeping track of the agencies work to come into compliance with the stipulations of the Nunez lawsuit, the court case that resulted in the creation of the federal monitor appointed to oversee the jail.
He also worked in the Westchester Department of Correction, where he helped the county end its federal monitoring program by coming into compliance with the court’s requirements.
Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge of the Court of Appeals and chair of the Independent Commission on New York Criminal Justice Incarceration Reform, urged Molina and Adams to stay true to the city’s plan to close Rikers by 2027.
“Commissioner Molina showed during his posts at Rikers and in Westchester that he is committed to fundamental change – precisely what's needed to end the dangerous dysfunction at Rikers and urgently advance the plan to close those shameful jails for good,” Lippman said in a statement. “Our Commission looks forward to working with him and Mayor-Elect Adams to remake our jail system, including getting people with serious mental illness and women off Rikers permanently and getting shovels in the ground for the new borough-based jails.”
But what exact reforms are on the table under an Adams administration were up for question Thursday after he made remarks saying he’d bring back solitary confinement. The statement came after de Blasio announced a plan to phase in the Risk Management Accountability System in the coming weeks.
“So the mayor announced December 31 he’s going to empty out punitive segregation,” Adams said, according to the Daily News. “January 1, they are going back into segregation. If they committed an act of violence that is unacceptable. You know, I’m not going to allow inmates and officers to be the victims of violent people.”
The Legal Aid Society said in a statement that Adams’ announcement would throw “away years of progress undoing the physical and mental harms caused by solitary confinement, and it reveals the new administration’s intent to reinstate regressive and violent policies over modern and more effective practices.”
“Mayor-elect Eric Adams has pledged an ‘emotionally intelligent’ response to complex issues of law enforcement but reinstating solitary confinement, a practice that the United Nations has decried as torture and the Mandela Rules limit, is the exact opposite,” the public defense group said. “The Mayor-elect spoke today about how Rikers Island is a stain on New York — the way the City jails have long abused isolated confinement is one of the darkest parts of that stain. We demand that Adams retract this plan at once.”
On Wednesday, Adams named Queens native Keechant Sewell as the city’s next police commissioner. She will be the first Black woman in the city’s history to lead the NYPD.
