Crisis on Rikers begins to cool, monitor says
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The federal monitor appointed to oversee Rikers Island said the DOC has sped up the intake process, which previously saw large groups of detainees languishing for days, in a new report filed on Thursday. Photo via Dunn et al. v the City of New York
By Jacob Kaye
The federal monitor appointed to oversee Rikers filed his third status report on the crisis inside the jail in federal court Wednesday. It will be the last status report concerning the jail’s current crisis before the release of the monitor’s 12th Nunez Report, which will be filed by the end of the month.
In the Wednesday filing, which was originally scheduled to be filed earlier this week before the monitor requested a two-day extension, monitor Steve J. Martin said that despite continued serious concerns, the city and Department of Correction have made some progress toward taking the jail complex out of an emergency situation.
“The Monitoring Team remains concerned about the dangerous conditions in the jails,” Martin wrote in the letter to federal Judge Laura Swain. “The risk of harm to both incarcerated persons and staff in the daily operations of the jails remains high. The Department has taken some positive actions to address the mass absenteeism of staff and the issues related to intake, but significant work remains to address the entrenched and troubling security practices, decades of mismanagement, and lack of accountability for staff misconduct.”
In past status reports, the monitoring team highlighted several main points of crisis the DOC and city should focus on addressing, including the lack of security inside Rikers, mass staff absenteeism, the alarming number of self-harm incidents, the intake process and changing leadership of the jail.
This year has been the deadliest on Rikers Island since 2016, with over a dozen people dying in DOC custody through September, several by suicide.
But in the monitor’s latest report, Martin says the DOC has taken several steps toward trying to prevent further self-harm incidents from occurring. The department has been telling staff about their obligations under the Suicide Prevention and Intervention Policy on a daily basis, according to the monitor. It also sent out a new memo to officers about their obligations and convened a task force, looping in “external stakeholders to evaluate the self-harm incidents that occurred this year, and identify and recommend any needed improvements to the Department’s processes to prevent such incidents in the future.”
The department and Mayor Bill de Blasio have blamed the increase in self-harm incidents and general violence on the historic number of officers going AWOL or taking sick days – officers have unlimited sick time and DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi has said in the past that it is abused.
Though anywhere from 1,400 to 1,600 uniformed staff were out sick and anywhere from 17 to 52 were AWOL on any given day from late September until early November, the DOC told the monitor it’s making strides toward boosting its staffing and punishing those who don’t show.
Through Nov. 4, 119 staff members had been suspended for going AWOL – the department always had the ability to suspend officers for ditching shifts but hadn’t taken the action in recent years.
Additionally, 91 officers have been transferred from court facilities where they were assigned, back to Rikers after the mayor directed NYPD officers to replace them in the courts earlier this year.
There have also been 24 people enrolled in the department’s training academy as of Oct. 21 and a little more than 1,600 people passed the department’s officer exam.
In September, Schiraldi said that the DOC was calling every officer “who left within four years in good standing,” and encouraging them to return to work. So far, only two have come back to the department, according to the monitor’s letter.
Going forward, the monitor said the DOC needs to continue to focus on improving safety in the jails.
“To emerge from this period of dysfunction, the Department and the Monitoring Team must focus on addressing the foundational elements to improve safety in the jails—this requires significant time and dedicated effort in order to support improved practices,” the letter reads.
A DOC spokesperson noted the improvements made by the department in a statement to the Eagle.
“As the Monitor notes in the status report, we have been working ‘at a breakneck pace’ to actively address the issues involved,” the spokesperson said. “We have made significant improvement to our New Admissions process, we’ve taken a broad range of steps to address staffing issues and we’re seeing steady improvement, and we will continue working with the Monitoring Team to address the larger systemic issues. We want New York City’s jails to be as safe, humane, and as efficiently run as possible, period.”
