Time to get to work on Rikers, monitor says

Federal monitor Steve J. Martin said in a report filed this week that the Department of Correction has made some improvements to Rikers Island but that issues, including with staffing, remain.  AP file photo by Seth Wenig

By Jacob Kaye

The federal monitor appointed to oversee Rikers Island issued his last status update on the jail in crisis, for the time being, saying all that’s left to do is for the Department of Correction to get to work.

While the general sentiment of Steve J. Martin’s update on the jail filed in federal court Wednesday was that the DOC had begun to improve conditions on Rikers, which has seen over a dozen in custody deaths in the past year, but that the bar to clear wasn’t that high to begin with.

“The dire conditions that emerged in the late summer and early fall 2021 are the culmination of decades of mismanagement — in particular, the department’s flawed security procedures, dysfunctional and convoluted staffing practices, and the department’s limited ability to timely hold staff accountable,” the monitor’s letter to federal Judge Laura Swain reads. “[In the past two months] the city and the department have expended significant effort to address the dire conditions in the jails.”

Martin noted several areas of concern that the city and DOC had begun to address, including intake, security protocols and staffing.

The intake process, which had seen detainees languishing in a small cell with at least a dozen others for days over the summer and into the fall, has been sped up, the monitor said. A handful of broken doors throughout the facilities have been fixed and officers are remaining on their posts more frequently, according to the monitor. Additionally, while a large number of correctional officers continue to call in sick or go AWOL every day, the monitor commended the DOC on its efforts to punish those who falsely claim to be sick or don’t show up for work at all.

Any improvement in staffing numbers stands to be threatened by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate for officers, which went into effect earlier this week. As of Wednesday, the start of the mandate, around 73 percent of officers had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The remaining 28 percent, or about 2,000 officers, stand to be placed on unpaid leave until they show proof of vaccination.

Despite the improvements, the monitor said that the DOC and city had a long way to go before the jails became safe and fully exited its current and compounding crises, adding that any major improvements will likely be a long way down the road.

“While the city’s and department’s efforts must be acknowledged, and the current situation is not as dire as it was in late summer and early fall, but the monitoring team must emphasize its ongoing concerns about the conditions of confinement in the jails which remain at a level below the minimal progress that was emerging in spring 2021, before the crisis began,” the report reads.

“The department’s decades of poor practices have produced a maladaptive culture in which deficiencies are normalized and embedded in every facet of the Department’s work,” the report continues. “This traps the department in a state of disrepair, where even the first step to improve practice is undercut by the absence of elementary skills — be it staff deployment, safety and security, or managing/supervising staff. It is therefore impossible to fix these problems quickly; it is also somewhat unrealistic to expect that the desired outcomes would be achieved during the recent period of crisis.”

Unlike previous status reports filed by the monitor in which Martin suggests federal intervention in the jail complex may have been necessary, Martin said that the department has the ability to fix it’s current issues from within.

Martin also said that in addition to setting reasonable expectations for improvements, the DOC should focus on first addressing four foundational issues, which, if unaddressed, will stymie any attempt at reform.

“The facilities are dangerous, leadership and supervisors do not inspire or motivate staff to cultivate their skills, staff are not deployed to the housing units in a manner that enhances safety, and accountability for misconduct is rarely imposed,” the report reads. “The monitoring team’s work with the department has consistently identified four foundational issues that stymie the efforts to reform the agency. These issues are interrelated and when combined, lead directly to the use of unnecessary and excessive force, violence among people in custody, and mismanagement of the young adult population.”

The four foundational issues include flawed security practices and procedures, inadequate supervision of staff and leadership who don’t have the right expertise to lead, ineffective staffing practices and limited accountability for staff misconduct.

While violence in the jail has increased overall in the past year, according to the monitor, the number of use of force incidents has seen a spike.

In Martin’s October update, he noted that there had been over 720 use of force incidents in 2021, a number he said was “extremely high.” In September, 183 of those incidents happened in intake areas.

Ahead of the monitor’s 12th Nunez Report, which is expected to filed in court on Friday and will cover much of the past months of crisis, the monitor said the status reports will come to an end and the work at reforming the four main issues will begin.

“The department and the monitoring team now need the time and space to determine how best to implement these initiatives, identify and remove obstacles and barriers that have inhibited progress, and devise mechanisms that can untangle current practice and reinforce the new practices that must take their place,” the report said.

On Wednesday, Schiraldi said that some of the DOC’s efforts to improve the jail are starting to show results – AWOLS are down 82 percent and the number of unstaffed posts have declined by 78 percent last month when compared to September.

“I mean, it's early, I’m not popping a champagne cork,” Schiraldi said. “We’re in the first quarter of, you know, a seven-game series right now. So, nothing to celebrate yet. But, so far, some early indicators are that the violence data, use of force data is bending in the right direction as the population declines, as we have fewer unstaffed posts and fewer [triple shifts].”