HOT07: The Myth Of A Staff Shortage At Rikers
Hi friends - In today’s special episode of House of Tomorrow, I’m sharing a longer version of an article I published at Slate over a year ago. It concerns a prevalent narrative about the violence at the Rikers Island jail complex, a crisis which has been blamed on understaffing. As you can read below, this narrative is false.
I’m publishing this longer version of the article because, tragically, the crises have grown worse in the past year. 18 people have died in the jail system so far this year, already surpassing the 15 who died in 2021. A push for federal receivership was shot down by the chief judge for the southern district of New York, in large part because the federal monitor, Steve J. Martin, opposed it. He argued that a plan he devised with corrections chief Louis Molina was showing progress. (Notably, the plan Martin says is promising has nothing to do with increasing staffing, because there was never a staffing shortage.) I do not think federal oversight would have been a panacea; the benefit of a receiver is that they could float above local politics and would be permitted to override union contracts. But there was no guarantee that those things would actually happen. The main problem with Rikers is that people are being detained at Rikers.
With that in mind, I wanted to share this longer version of the article I wrote last year, in which I try to explain some of the complex problems at the jail. There are some things I missed here, like the influence of COBA, NYC’s corrections union, on the jail’s culture and how guards are able to avoid assignments that involve supervising incarcerated people or escorting them to medical appointments. Where necessary, I tried to clarify dates, as this article first ran on September 29, 2021. I hope it’s not confusing to republish this somewhat newsy op-ed over a year after its first appearance. If anything below has since been contradicted or refuted, let me know.
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September 29, 2021
The Real Reason Behind the Crisis at Rikers Island
On September 22, 2021 the 12th death of the year occured in NYC’s jail system. Stephan Khadu, 24*, was held at the Vernon C. Bain prison barge, a dystopic multi-story boat docked north of Rikers Island, where 11 other incarcerated people have died this year. Five of those who died took their own life, a sign that conditions at the jail have devolved horrifically. Advocates and politicians visiting the island seem shell-shocked by what they saw: people languishing for days without food or water, without medical attention for serious injuries, crammed into tiny spaces and defecating into plastic bags. Even for a notoriously horrific jail, where correction officers have created fight clubs, savagely beat people in custody and where multiple high profile in-custody deaths have happened, many are describing conditions that are without precedent.
Alice Fontier, managing director of Neighborhood Defender Service, described overflowing toilets with twenty-five people packed into intake cells and shower stalls, unable to contact their lawyers or loved ones. “I have been coming to this jail since 2008, this is unlike anything that has ever happened here,” she said.
A narrative was quickly orchestrated that the catalyst for the jail’s spiralling conditions is a staff shortage. The Mayor, Department of Correction and multiple news outlets have described a “staffing crisis” stemming from sick calls from CO’s either concerned with covid, or feigning ill-health out of fears for violent conditions on the island.
That staff absenteeism is escalating problems in the jail is not disputed: the jail has had hundreds of unmanned posts in the past few weeks and correction officers have not been escorting people to appointments, leading to thousands of missed medical appointments, missed court appointments, visits and recreation. CO’s have reportedly been working double or triple shifts.
But there is one major problem with the narrative of a staff shortage: The jail has a higher staffing ratio than it had six years ago, nine years ago, and 30 years ago, even factoring in people taking vacation days, people calling in sick, and guards medically restricted from handling incarcerated people. Rikers has a dramatically higher staffing ratio than any other jail across the country—even on days when roughly 2,000 people are unavailable to work.
A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Correction said the jail has 7,230 correction officers on staff as of September 28, 2021, and records show the jail holding 6,088 people on Sept. 17. With reports of 1,367 officers calling in sick and another 700 “medically restricted” from working with the incarcerated population, that leaves about 5,163 correction officers. That’s a 0.8 to 1 ratio of officers to incarcerated people, dramatically higher than the national average, which is 0.23 to 1. (Using the federal monitor’s estimate of sick calls from last July, which counted all uniformed staff and not just COs, I found the ratio was even higher, at nearly 1:1.)
The city has had more uniformed correction officers than incarcerated people since 2016, according to the city comptroller’s reports. By comparison: The corrections department had about 11,000 uniformed employees in 1990 handling a population of about 20,000 incarcerated people, according to data from the city’s Independent Budget Office. Even on the days in 2020 and 2021 with the most sick calls, the ratio of guards available to work to incarcerated people was at or near a 30-year peak.
So how was an unprecedented crisis on Rikers Island caused by a staffing ratio that is not only with precedent, but relatively high? There are a number of factors: a department of corrections that a federal monitor has described as extraordinarily mismanaged, a whiplash increase in the jail’s population within just a year, and prolonged stays in an intake room designed for short stays, as well as an unprecedented pandemic.
The population on Rikers grew from 3800 to 6000 in the course of a year from spring of 2020 to this September (2021). To mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, the city took a set of then-unprecedented steps to reduce the population. The city provided hotels for people it released to socially isolate, an alternative to the crowded shelter system.
But as the year progressed, the city saw a spike in homicides - to levels that were still historically low - along with a drop in overall crime. Governor Cuomo, then riding a wave of popularity from daily powerpoint infomercials, clawed back a nascent bail reform law in response to selective tabloid headlines and a narrative about a crime wave. The reforms, which limited the ability of judges to set bail, had played a role in the jail population’s nearly 80 year low. But once the reforms were rolled back, judges were able to set bail more frequently and the population climbed up to pre-pandemic levels and surpassed it.
While the current population is similar to the pre-pandemic jail population, the quick rise created a bottleneck in spaces only designed to hold people for 24 hours. According to advocates and politicians, people stopped receiving food, showers or medicine in these crowded intake areas. According to a report a federal monitor sent to a judge September 23, 2021, violent incidents in intake areas were 170 percent higher in August 2021 than in August of 2020.
Compounding the problem, hundreds of people who were meant to be transferred to state prisons remained at Rikers. In May of 2021 , DOC officials said there was a backlog of over 900 people who had been in DOC custody for over 600 days. “Where we are a detention facility, it was never designed to operate as a prison,” explained one DOC executive staff member during a May 2021 city council hearing.
A federal monitor tasked with reducing use of force at Rikers, part of a consent decree in a case called “Nunez and United States v. City of New York,” has been clear that the jail is, in fact, overstaffed, and that this overstaffing has historically been a cause of violence. In a letter to a federal judge in August 2021, the monitor, Steven Martin, acknowledged “staffing problems” but attributed it to mismanagement and not understaffing.
In another report published May 2021, Martin wrote that corrections staff had been complaining since 2020 about understaffing due to sick calls, something that confounded the monitor, who saw the ratio of guards to incarcerated people was already staggeringly high.
“The size of the Department’s complement of Staff, particularly the number assigned to the jails, is highly unusual and is one of the richest staffing ratios among the systems with which the Monitoring Team has had experience,” he wrote. “This is true even with the unusually high number of Staff who have not reported to work due to chronic illness, COVID-19, and other reasons.” He cites a day in March of 2021 in which 2000 people were unavailable to work, yet there was still nearly one guard for every incarcerated person, a ratio that hasn’t changed drastically.
In that report the monitor acknowledged “some markers that could suggest understaffing” including rising violence and people not receiving services. But staff were always available - they were either not being deployed because of a convoluted management system or unwilling to do the work required. He described a counterintuitive phenomenon where having too much staff increased distrust and reduced delivery of services.
“The presence of an abundance of Staff appear to diffuse Staff’s sense of responsibility and leads them to believe that “someone else will handle the problem”—creating the classic ‘bystander effect’ in which Staff do not uphold standards of conduct nor call out the improper or misuse of force when they see it,” he wrote.
The lopsided ratio also led to more violence, as individual staff members were calling in emergency response teams to handle minor issues, resulting in a large show of force that escalated confrontations.
Year over year data from the city comptroller’s office seems to confirm this, as use of force cases spiked in the same time period that the guard to incarcerated person ratio surpassed 1:1.
As for absenteeism and its role in the current crisis - the monitor said the Department of Corrections organizes staff shifts manually, through an arcane and tedious system that hinders its ability to shift around its abundant staff to empty posts. “The process of making substitutions when an assigned person does not report to work, as expected, is both convoluted and disorganized,” the monitor wrote in an August 2021 letter to judge Laura Swain. Guards are working triple shifts not because there’s no one else available, but because the process for shifting personnel when guards are AWOL is byzantine.
Five of the deaths on Rikers in 2021 were suicides. But the monitor was clear that even in some situations when an in-progress suicide was witnessed, no guards intervened. At an emergency hearing the Friday before this article was published, Swain, heeding Martin’s concern, told a city attorney that the city had to instruct its guards to intervene if a suicide was taking place.
The “staffing crisis” narrative presents a warped and inaccurate view of what’s happening in the city’s jails and has led to confounding proposals that could potentially escalate the crisis. De Blasio’s proposed interventions have centered less on decarceration and more on increasing available staff. The DOC is set to hire 600 new corrections officers over the next six months. After initially refusing to release people on short sentences under a work program, de Blasio agreed to release a few dozen, a fraction of those eligible. Governor Kathy Hochul, to her credit, signed “Less Is More” legislation and fast-tracked release of some people held on technical parole violations.
Focusing on staffing numbers removes the onus from the people with power to decarcerate the island: judges, district attorneys and prosecutors, who continue to send people to jail with high bail they can’t pay.
The city’s five elected district attorneys have discretion to request bail, and judges often follow their lead. In most cases, DAs and judges can choose supervised release, in which a city worker provides reminders for the client to return to court. But that hasn’t been happening.
“If the DA’s don't request bail, the judge is not going to set bail on their own,” said Amanda Jack, a public defender with Five Boro Defenders.
The purpose of bail is, supposedly, to make sure that someone who has been arrested returns to court. But as analysis has shown, close to 92 percent of people released pre-trial either attend all their court dates or appear within 30 days of a missed court date. The number is higher for people charged with violent felonies.
“Most people when they have a way to contact their attorney, and know when their court dates are, come to court,” Jack says.
Yet public defenders representing clients in the past few weeks say that high bail is consistently requested by district attorneys and accommodated by judges. In New York, judges are not allowed to use dangerousness as a reason for setting bail, but the frequency with which high bail is being set suggests this has been happening.
Jack says the disruption in the court system caused by the pandemic is being used as an excuse to imply people are flight risks. When courts were shut down, appearance dates were moved multiple times, sometimes without proper notification. Instead of extending grace to those suffering from a bureaucratic mess created by the pandemic, DAs are taking advantage of it. Jack says one of her clients missed a pandemic-delayed court date for having outstanding tickets on his driver’s license. Her client says he never received notice of the new date.
“I spent days litigating whether or not his lack of appearances was willful and persistent when he had no notice of these court dates,” she says. “It's maddening.”
The high staff ratio is driving NYC’s bloated corrections budget. It costs $438,000 to lock up one person for a year on Rikers, the highest per person cost in the nation. About $379,000 of that is estimated to be personnel costs.
The overstaffing and high costs of guards on Rikers came up during a budget hearing held by the City Council in May 2021. Council members probed corrections officials on the staffing ratio as the DOC requested even more staff. DOC officials provided unsatisfying answers, including social distancing and an outdated jail design that made it hard for guards to see incarcerated people.
There are other measures the city could take to reduce the population on Rikers, like continue to provide hotels to unhoused people and people released from the jail as it was doing until recently. A report from City Limits found that judges have been sending people to Rikers who would otherwise have been in the community if not for a lack of housing.
Any local jail population is the result of myriad place-specific disinvestments and failures of imagination, and the current crisis on Rikers is no different. Mostly this crisis is the story of a city that took coordinated measures to reduce its jail population and then, out of fear, tried to return to business as usual while a pandemic is still raging. But it was not caused by underfunding a corrections budget that is extravagant by any measure.
*Note: a long bio of Khadu by Felipe De La Hoz has since been published here
Updates:
For Dwell, I wrote about eviction defense and how tenant organizing in NYC is the only thing keeping people in their homes amid government failures. At my regular gig at Next City, I wrote about a 20 year old self-governed village of unhoused people in Portland, Oregon. In April, I wrote about infrastructure, racism, and how Robert Moses is dead for The Baffler.
If you are in or near Brooklyn on Sunday, November 20, (which is either tomorrow, today, or last week depending on when you are reading this) consider coming to this writing workshop I’m hosting at a lovely community garden called Farmer’s Garden in Ocean Hill. It’s from 3pm to 5pm and will involve some hopefully generative sci fi writing prompts. My intent is that they are useful to people regardless of whether they identify as writers. It’s also part of my effort to cultivate a writing community as I stretch my limbs into fiction.
If you’ve read previous iterations of this newsletter, maybe you’re wondering where all the music recommendations are. Don’t fret, because there’s an end of year list of music reccs coming soon.
Stay beautiful.
-Roshan