A detainee was stabbed. A correction officer was slashed. And another person imprisoned on Rikers Island had scalding water thrown on him, causing second-degree burns all over his body.
Those episodes were included in a letter that a federal monitor filed with a court on Tuesday that described “unreasonably high” levels of violence inside the city’s sprawling jail complex this summer.
The letter, filed by Steve J. Martin, who has been appointed to oversee New York City’s jail system, said that the violence in the jail complex had worsened significantly since a report filed in May described a “pervasive level of disorder and chaos” in the system as a whole.
It described a number of violent incidents, including a series of episodes that began when an assailant passed through an unsecured door to throw scalding water on another imprisoned person. One person involved in that attack was stabbed four days later, while another assaulted a correction officer and a fellow detainee this month, causing serious injuries to all three people — including the assailant.
The monitor’s letter attributed many of the problems to staffing shortages, which it found had seriously compromised the safety of “detainees and staff, which in turn, generates high levels of fear among both groups with each accusing the other of exacerbating already challenging conditions.”
“Turmoil is the inevitable outcome of such a volatile state of affairs,” the letter said.
The majority of those held on Rikers, as well as those in city jails overall, are being detained pretrial. There are currently close to 6,000 people in custody in the city’s jail system; more than three-quarters of them have yet to be tried, and are presumed innocent.
The monitor’s letter also noted that at least four people being held at Rikers were believed to have died by suicide since December 2020, and that overall, the levels of self-harm among those imprisoned there were troublingly high.
Decrying the “deterioration of basic security protocols and denial of basic services and protections” that had led to the escalation in violence, the letter said that about 35 percent of the Correction Department’s 8,500 staff members had either called in sick or were otherwise limited in working with those behind bars. By the end of July, the letter said, the department had reported that its staffers had failed to report for 2,300 shifts that month without providing advance notice that they planned not to work.
The staffing shortages and the violence have intensified even as the city has appointed a new correction commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi, who began work in June and has vowed to remedy the department’s staffing issues, saying that until he does so, the system will remain dysfunctional.
In a statement on Tuesday, the commissioner said that the department was committed to addressing the issues raised by the monitor, and that it had worked diligently to “impose formal discipline or other corrective action when warranted.”
Like the federal monitor, Commissioner Schiraldi has said that the department has enough employees, even as a corrections officers’ union, which is suing New York City for inhumane working conditions on Rikers, has called on the city to hire thousands more.
Keith Powers, a Democratic city councilman who leads the criminal justice committee, said in an interview that he approved of the commissioner’s focus on improving the morale of department staff while addressing the issue of absenteeism.
But, Mr. Powers emphasized, “we are in an absolute emergency inside the city jails.”
Benny Boscio Jr., the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union suing the city, said in a statement that the letter showed that the federal monitor “was working as a public relations arm of the D.O.C.”
“Officers are out sick because they continue to be forced to work under hostile and inhumane working conditions where they are forced to work 25 hours or more without meals and rest and are brutally assaulted by inmates with impunity,” Mr. Boscio said.
“Fix the inhumane working conditions and you will fix the staffing crisis,” he added.
Public defenders say in interviews that conditions on the island have them intensely worried about their clients’ safety.
One public defender in Brooklyn, who declined to give her name because she was not authorized to speak on the record, said that one of her clients who had been on the island since June had been assaulted multiple times, had not received necessary medical attention and had indicated to a correction officer that he intended to harm himself, to which the correction officer was unresponsive.
Such episodes were reflected in the monitor’s letter, which found that staffers on Rikers were often slow to act when a person in their care was threatening self-harm. Staffers also failed to intervene in violence between those imprisoned, the letter said, and regularly made derogatory comments to those behind bars.