Mayor de Blasio on Wednesday acknowledged the developing crisis on Rikers Island, but that’s about it.
“These are serious problems that need to be be addressed,” the mayor said. “The whole culture of the Department of Correction needs a lot of change.”
De Blasio blamed the problems on the pandemic, but offered no solutions or plans to turn the troubled jail complex around.
The problems on Rikers — including days-long waits for a bed, unending quarantine periods, unstaffed units, and a decline in security and basic services, like food and medical assistance — have been reported extensively by the Daily News.
On Tuesday, the federal monitor overseeing Rikers issued a report which confirmed conditions are deteriorating. While the correction unions insist it’s a result of low staffing and the DOC claims the cause is officers calling in sick or going AWOL, monitor Steve Martin said the system has the resources and the staff, and it’s a management problem.
U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who oversees the monitor, called the findings “deeply disturbing” on Wednesday. “The court … looks forward to an update that will indicate that concrete steps are being taken by the city and the department to address the serious problems described in the report,” she wrote in a filing.
De Blasio though offered little Wednesday in the way of fixes. “COVID clearly had a really, really big impact on this situation and created a whole host of challenges, but we’re going to work our way through it,” he said.
The mayor also underscored his commitment to closing the notorious city jail complex. An $8 billion plan was approved in 2019 to close it and build four new borough jails, but resistance is building from neighborhood groups, some local politicians and the correction unions.
“We’re going to close Rikers Island,” he said. “There may be folks who want us to go back in time. This is an 80-plus year old facility that doesn’t make sense anymore. It is based on a punitive, negative dynamic when what we need is a dynamic focused on how we redeem people, turn their lives around, make them positive members of society again.”
The jail population is at 5,968, up 49% from where it was in July 2020 at just under 4,000.
De Blasio said the 2020 number was the result of an effort to get people out of Rikers so they wouldn’t be exposed to the virus.
He disputed the notion that it’s because judges are setting bail at a higher rate under political pressure to address the violent crime spike.
“What is clear is the court system also wasn’t functioning a year ago so we were seeing all sorts of situations that would have normally led to someone ending up in Rikers as part of a functioning criminal justice system. It wasn’t happening,” he said. “That is now happening again, particularly for violent offenses and that’s necessary.”
But Alice Frontier, managing director of Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, called the mayor’s comments “disingenuous,” and said the reason for the increase isn’t gun violence, but cash bail.
“Prosecutors continue to seek bail, and courts continue set it — not just for ‘gun violence’ as the mayor claims, but on almost any case in which the court is legally allowed to set cash bail,” she said. “Every day, poor New Yorkers are packed into Rikers simply because they cannot pay for their freedom.”