Mayor shares emergency plan to end Rikers chaos
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Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a five-point plan to tackle deteriorating conditions on Rikers Island on Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021. Photo via mayor’s office/Flickr
By Jacob Kaye
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that he’ll wield the powers afforded only to the city’s executive to attempt to get the deteriorating conditions on Rikers Island under control.
The mayor, who hasn’t visited Rikers Island during his second term in office, introduced a five-point plan to clean up the city’s notorious jail complex which he plans to implement through an executive order.
“We need to do things differently,” de Blasio said. “We’re going to use executive powers to address some of these [issues on Rikers].”
The mayor has faced a growing number of calls to address the increase in violence inside the jail in seemingly perpetual crises. On Monday, a group of lawmakers, including three from Queens, visited Rikers Island and said they saw fecal matter on the floors, individuals being held in showers and one person attempting suicide.
The mayor’s new plan comes a week after 24-year-old Esias Johnson became the ninth person to die in custody in Rikers this year and about a month after a group of over 200 correctional officers held a rally outside the jail demanding the Department of Correction provide better working conditions.
“We have a situation that is just not acceptable and it has to change fundamentally,” de Blasio said.
At the center of the mayor’s plan are actions that aim to address the correctional officer staffing shortage, which both the mayor and DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi say are at the center of the issues on Rikers.
The plan calls for NYPD officers to take the place of correctional officers inside courtrooms. Rather than have correctional officers take incarcerated people to their court date, taking them away from the jail, police officers will instead take their place.
The mayor said he also will institute new punishments for correctional officers who miss shifts at work.
The DOC said around 93 officers went AWOL per day in August, missing a total of 2,700 shifts. Two years prior, the jail had an average of 22 AWOLs per day, according to the DOC.
Under the mayor’s executive order, AWOL staffers will be slapped with a 30-day suspension.
“We understand tremendous challenges have existed in Rikers before the pandemic and the pandemic made them worse,” de Blasio said. “I understand it’s tough work and a tough environment, but folks not showing up for work is unacceptable and when any officer doesn’t show up for work, they actually put every other officer in danger and that’s not acceptable.”
Benny Boscio, the president of the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association, said his union wasn’t consulted on the plan and called on the mayor to resign.
“Mayor de Blasio’s latest reckless and knee jerk solution to the crisis he has created for the past eight years only reaffirms why he is unfit for office and for the sake of saving the thousands of lives at Rikers Island, he must resign immediately,” Boscio said in a statement to the Eagle. “Transferring the relatively few officers we have assigned to the courts will not even make a dent in this staffing crisis. And if he wants to start suspending officers for 30 days without pay, he should lead by example and resign for failing to show up and do his job for the past eight years.”
Additionally, the plan calls for officers who have been out for more than one sick day to provide documentation of their illness. Correctional officers have unlimited sick leave, a policy the DOC commissioner said has been abused.
Despite his goal to shut down Rikers Island by 2027, de Blasio said he’d be opening two clinics that had previously been shutdown. The clinics will hopefully help speed up in-take and help incarcerated people receive medical treatment faster, something that advocates say has been lagging and life threatening this year.
De Blasio also added that he would order emergency contracts to repair broken cell doors, clean the facilities more quickly and scan mail to reduce the number of contraband items entering the facility.
Lawmakers Monday said that incarcerated people were essentially able to roam free in some of the facilities because of the broken doors.
Schiraldi, who is currently serving as de Blasio’s third DOC commissioner, spoke in support of the plan.
“There really is no one thing you can do to fix this problem,” he said. “That's why the Mayor's got five points, not one point to his plan.”
“Got to get the population down in a safe and effective way by working with the courts, working with the state, but encourage people to come to work, you also have to discipline them when they take off, as the Mayor said,” Schiraldi added. “So, it's a whole bunch of things it's both-and, not either-or.”
While not part of his plan, de Blasio also called on state leaders to make changes to help calm the situation on Rikers.
He asked Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the Less is More Act, a bill sponsored by her now- Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin which would reduce the number of people incarcerated for non-violent parole offenses.
He also called on judges to issue supervised release for non-violent offenders instead of sending them to Rikers for pre-trial detention.
Lastly, he called on the Office of Court Administration to calendar 500 court cases immediately out of the 5,000 people currently being held in pre-trial detention on Rikers. Around 1,500 of those people have been held on Rikers for over a year, according to the mayor.
“The mayor, blaming the court system for the chaotic situation on Rikers Island, is like the captain of the Titanic blaming the iceberg,” said OCA spokesperson Lucian Chalfen. “The mayor’s proposal is not new. It is something we have been doing through the entire pandemic.”
Chalfen added that getting people processed through the courts would require the defendants to first show up to court, which has been an issue.
Johnson, who died on Sept. 7, had missed a court date because Rikers staff was unavailable to take him, according to the Daily News.
“The prosecutors and, particularly, the defenders have to be serious about discussing dispositions on these cases,” Chalfen said. “That is how the system works.”
Public defenders at the Legal Aid Society also took offense at the mayor’s plan, noting that no one item explicitly looks to decarcerate the population on Rikers.
“It is simply unconscionable and unworkable that significant and immediate steps to decarcerate Rikers Island and other local jails are not a fundamental part of this plan,” said Tina Luongo, the attorney-in-charge of the Criminal Defense Practice at the Legal Aid Society. “Fixing this multi-layered crisis will take time - time that people whose lives are in jeopardy from dangerous and uncontrolled conditions do not have.”
De Blasio said that ultimately, the only solution to the issue is to shut down Rikers once and for all – a plan that isn’t set to materialize for another five plus years.
“Everything goes back to the problem of Rikers Island itself,” he said. “We need to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.”
