Mayor de Blasio goes to Rikers
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Mayor Bill de Blasio visited Rikers Island for the first time during his second term after months of facing calls to do so. Photo via Mayor Bill de Blasio/Twitter
By Jacob Kaye
Despite pleas from lawmakers, advocates and correctional officers who wanted the city’s leader to see Rikers Island’s crumbling conditions for himself, Mayor Bill de Blasio resisted calls to visit the jail facility for weeks.
That changed Monday as de Blasio toured the jail complex in crisis alongside Department of Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi and other leaders in the agency. It was the first time the mayor visited Rikers since he began his second term in 2017.
“This was an opportunity to go and see exactly what work was being done,” the mayor said after the tour. “I was upset when I took office, I was upset four years ago, I remain upset. This is a place that should have been shut down a long, long time ago.”
Rikers Island, which has a population of around 6,000, has seen a dozen deaths in the past year – including two in the last week. Multiple elected officials have described humanitarian crisis level conditions for incarcerated people, who have been housed in showers, forced to defecate into bags and left alone when experiencing medical emergencies. Officers have been forced to work triple shifts with few to no breaks and have faced attacks from incarcerated people who have been housed in cells without properly locked doors.
The mayor and commissioner teamed up to introduce a five-point action plan to address the emergency earlier this month. He said his visit on Monday was scheduled not so that he could see the conditions for himself but instead see the progress of his plan.
“What I came here to see was the work that is being done to immediately address the problems,” the mayor said. “The mission for me today was to come and see the specific changes that are being made.”
De Blasio said he was looking for a reduction in the jail’s population, implementation of support for the medical staff on Rikers and a quicker intake process.
“The bottom line is all these things need to happen immediately,” he added.
Though he didn’t say how, de Blasio said that his goal was to get Rikers’ population under 5,000 as soon as possible. The mayor has resisted calls from advocates to implement his 6A work release program.
On Monday, he said that he would look into implementing it, something he did during the height of the pandemic, but warned that very few currently incarcerated people would qualify for the program.
The Legal Aid Society continued the call for the mayor to implement the program after his visit.
“While this visit is definitely a day late and a dollar short, if Mayor de Blasio has eyes to see, he just witnessed an unprecedented humanitarian crisis affecting thousands of his fellow New Yorkers at a facility under his own purview,” said Tina Luongo, the attorney-in-charge of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society. “We hope that the Mayor will finally move post-haste to release as many New Yorkers as possible, as dictated by the law and his authority.
“Too many of our clients and others have passed at Rikers Island this year, and all of City Hall should be focused on preventing another avoidable death on this administration's watch,” she added.
As they have done all summer, the mayor and commissioner derided correctional officers who have gone AWOL in historic numbers in the past year.
Around 93 officers went AWOL per day in August, missing a total of 2,700 shifts, according to the DOC. Two years prior, the jail had an average of 22 AWOLs per day, the agency said.
“[The Correctional Officers’ Benevolent Association] has exacerbated this crisis, the union has acted in an incredibly irresponsible manner,” de Blasio said. “Today was not about speaking to the union. Today was not about talking to individual officers. Today was about the work we have to do.”
COBA did not respond to request for comment before print time.
While the city promised to hire more correctional officers, Schiraldi said that the number of correctional officers on the books isn’t the issue, citing the fact that the number of incarcerated people outnumbered the number of correctional officers when de Blasio first took office.
“It's not really just a staffing problem, it's a staff coming to work problem, because a third of them are unavailable to work on any given day,” Schiraldi said. “We have triple [shifts], not because he didn't hire enough staff, because not enough staff are coming to work.”
Last week, the city sued COBA in an effort to get its officers back to work. The suit was withdrawn two days later after an attorney from the union told the court that the union hasn’t and won’t encourage officers to miss work.
Ultimately, de Blasio’s main takeaway was that the plan to close Rikers is the right way to go.
“We can’t do it today, we can’t do it tomorrow, but what we have to do as quickly as possible in the city is get off Rikers Island once and for all,” he said. “That plan is in place, it’s moving rapidly, that is the bigger solution.”
The city began construction on the parking garage and community center of the new jail – one of five to replace Rikers – in Kew Gardens earlier this year. It was the first facility to begin construction.
