Mayor Adams’ jail chief has a solution to the problem of city correction officers who critics say exploit union rules by calling in sick: Hire more of them.
At a City Council hearing Wednesday, Correction Commissioner Louis Molina signaled that he will ask for as many as 2,000 new officers to solve the staffing crisis at Rikers Island, which has led to a guard shortage at the island’s jails that endangers detainees and staff and has forced many officers to work triple shifts.
“The department has nearly 2,000 fewer correction officers today than it did at the end of 2019,” Molina said.
“This attrition of staff, coupled with staff that is unavailable because of the impact of pandemic surges and other medical needs, has diminished our staffing levels. It is vital that we take action now to address these issues.”
Council members blasted Molina’s proposal, saying he instead should focus on holding correction officers accountable for abusing the department’s lax absence policies.
“Many of us believe you have a crisis in the existing staffing that needs to be addressed to get them back to work,” said Councilman Keith Powers. “This is the central issue that is facing an agency in turmoil right now.”
“Adding staff has been proven not to address the underlying issues in the department or improve conditions in Rikers,” Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, chair of the Criminal Justice Committee, told Molina.
“The crisis is felt deeply felt throughout the city and needs to be addressed urgently. I do think you have a ton of resources. I understand you might disagree.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander noted at the hearing that between July and October of last year, the Fire Department had a paid absence rate of about 10% and the Sanitation Department had a paid absence rate of about 11% — while the Correction Department’s absence rate swelled to 27%.
“The agency cannot keep its house in order when it is paying nearly a third of its staff not to work,” Lander said. “The Department of Correction doesn’t need more resources — it needs fundamental reform.”
The Correction Department spends $556,000 per inmate per year — four times what it spent a decade ago, the city Comptroller’s Office reported in December.
Moreover, DOC has a far better staffing ratio and a much larger budget comparatively than any other jail agency in the country, according to the federal monitor that oversees the jails.
Mary Lynne Werlwas of Legal Aid’s Prisoners Rights Project called the Correction Department “the biggest grift in city government today.”
“DOC remains the most over-staffed jail in the U.S. The problem is the staff don’t come to work and it’s having catastrophic consequences for health and safety in the jails,” Werlwas said. “The council simply cannot rubber stamp this budget.”
Over the last week, Correction Department figures show, an average 1,400 officers per day were on sick leave and hundreds more were on light duty. Those officers make up nearly 30% of the agency’s uniformed staff.
In a report issued Wednesday, Lander’s office said officers calling in “newly sick” hit 25% the week of Feb. 4, even though COVID-19 cases declined.
Hundreds of officers have abused the department’s unlimited sick leave policy, and more of them call out sick on weekends and holidays, a Daily News analysis of city data shows. Between Sept. 27 and Jan. 26, 6,637 posts went unstaffed.
On Friday, detainee Herman Diaz choked to death on an orange at the Eric M. Taylor Center in part because there was no correction officer nearby as required to render aid or call for help. The incident was seen as another example of how the crisis is affecting concrete events in the jails.
Molina did not specify the number of new staff he seeks. “We’re currently working to assess what is the right operating level needed, and that is ongoing,” he said. “It’s not just about how many officers we have. We have outdated facilities whose footprint impacts the ability to deploy staff.”
He has an ally in Benny Boscio Jr., head of the correction officers union, who said 2,500 to 3,000 new officers are needed and blamed “the media and certain special interest groups” for “grossly mischaracterizing” the staffing situation.
“The previous administration’s experiment to divest from our workforce, while forcing our officers to do more with less has failed miserably,” he said. “Those failures have needlessly hurt the lives of countless correction officers and the inmates in our custody.”
In a hearing that was at times tense, councilmembers cited Daily News articles and the recent federal monitor’s report several times in criticizing Molina over transparency and a failure to have data to answer their questions during the preliminary budget hearing.
“You come before this committee with no answers to basic information that’s been public record in the media for a long time, and we’re being told, with the whole team from DOC here, we’re unable to get basic information on topics you should have prepared for,” said Councilman Shekar Krishnan of Queens.
Molina said he “takes issue” with the monitor’s suggestion he was stonewalling them. “I am committed to collaboration with all oversight bodies,” he said. “The DOC provided voluminous amounts of data to the monitoring team.”
Meanwhile, Lander, the comptroller, said the city has to reduce the current jail population of roughly 5,600 40% to 3,300 to achieve the population required in the plan that would close Rikers and create four new new borough-based jails.
“We need to look with a real set of open eyes, because without a strong, clear re-committment to the bold plan to close Rikers, I fear we will reach 2027 with crumbling facilities on Rikers still open and many more people incarcerated than new facilities can hold,” Lander said.
Lander said the DOC’s budget is expected to rise to $1.34 billion in fiscal year 2022, or 7% more than in fiscal 2021. That increase includes overtime, which has soared 71% to $132 million since before the pandemic. Overtime is expected to grow by $116 million over the next two years.