Comptroller Lander Remarks at Forum on How to End the Crises on Rikers Island at Columbia Law School
Comptroller Lander delivered remarks at a virtual forum titled “How to End the Crises on Rikers Island” hosted by Columbia Law School, Columbia Justice Lab, Vital City, Columbia School of Social Work, CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, and Campaign Zero on October 13, 2022. His remarks as prepared for delivery:
Thank you, Vinny, for the introduction, and thank you to all of the sponsors for bringing us together today to discuss this topic which is so urgent – but still so often out of people’s field of vision. In addition to so many great sponsors and other wise folks on this Zoom, I also feel like we’re being joined in spirit by our dear friend and mentor Herb Sturz, who left us last year after decades of working to close Rikers, a reminder of how simultaneously intractable and urgent this problem is. We miss you, Herb.
While our City faces many challenges at the moment, and indeed quite a few that can accurately be called crises, perhaps none tests the limits of government bureaucracy or reflect the shortsightedness of traditional policy responses more than what is happening in New York City’s jails. When I assumed office in January, the Comptroller’s Office had just released its annual report showing that the yearly cost to detain a single person in custody was now well over half a million dollars. And yet, conditions in the jails had deteriorated so badly that a state of emergency had been declared in response to excessive staff absenteeism and spiking violence. A nightmare that had been developing over decades had been exacerbated by the pandemic into a full-scale emergency. It was a top priority for me to understand exactly what was happening on Rikers Island and what could be done to address it.
Commissioner Molina was the first agency head that I met with as Comptroller, and to his and his team’s credit, we were able over some months to set up a data-sharing agreement that gave the Comptroller’s office access to staffing data on a weekly basis. Because of its public value, and my own commitment to greater public transparency around DOC operations, that data is now also available to everyone on the Comptroller’s website, where it will be updated so long as DOC provides the data to us – along with other key metrics related to the jail population, safety, and service provision.
What did we learn? While sick leave usage by staff fell for the first half of this year, the share of uniformed staff out each day remains double pre-pandemic levels, well above that for other uniformed agencies – and has remained unchanged the last three months. The latest monthly data, which my office will be releasing shortly, show no change in either the share of officers out sick or on restricted duty. During the month of September, 12% of officers were out sick per day on average, and 8% were out on medically restricted duty. Since January, uniformed staff have logged nearly 2 million hours of sick leave – more than double the total hours during the same period of 2019, when headcount was around 30% higher.
Meanwhile, even with a remarkably high officer-to-detainee ratio relative to other correctional systems, high rates of violence persist. Year to date, slashings and stabbings are up 34% compared to last year, and up 354% compared to the same period in 2019 – when there were 2,000 more people in custody. A total of 16 people in custody have died this year – the same number as lost there last year. As the report that the Board of Correction released last month revealed, in at least 10 of the 16 deaths in 2021, there was some type of Correction officer lapse or failure.
To be clear, and as the presence of so many of you here today attests to, there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis ongoing on Rikers Island. The purpose of data is to remind us every day, every week, every month that it is a crisis. But what matters most is what we do with that information. Data is not an end in itself.
While I know there are DOC staff at Rikers Island working in good faith to improve conditions for the people in their custody – I met some of them when I visited Rikers most recently in August – we must face the reality that violence has not abated. And the recent conduct of some correction officers toward sitting members of the City Council, in full view of the press, raises serious questions about the ability of any Commissioner to bring about the changes, and culture shift, that are necessary to keep everyone safe. A culture, as the federal monitor noted in June, characterized by “brutality and impunity.”
That is why, admittedly with some trepidation, I have come to the conclusion that to address the short-term crisis – which is rooted largely in deeply entrenched mismanagement of staff and union leadership recalcitrance – a receiver should be appointed.
A receiver will not be able to magically fix what has been broken at Rikers for decades. But a receiver would be empowered to make decisions that the City has failed to adequately contend with for many years, whether by lack of will or through inability due to legal, regulatory or other barriers. To change the systems for assigning staff to posts, to end the abuse of sick leave, to change some of the qualification for hiring, to procure repairs and services and goods more promptly.
We have to ask ourselves: How many people must die before we choose a different approach? How long can we wait? Since the City’s Jails Action Plan was ordered by the courts in June, 10 more people have died, while awaiting their day in court, in the City’s custody. It is unacceptable loss.
After so many years, and through the pandemic, the dysfunction has grown into an intractable emergency. There is little reason to believe that the current system can reform itself, and a receiver outside of many of those barriers holds the most chance of enacting the necessary changes for the basic safety of people incarcerated and staff.
I’m grateful to the folks at this conference who have led the way in pushing for this option, and for beginning to outline what would be necessary to make it work.
I also believe it’s critical for the City Council to pass Intro 549, to end all forms of solitary confinement. When I was last at Rikers a few weeks ago, I visited with individuals being held in “involuntary protective custody” in the NIC who had been in their small, dark cells, by themselves for 22 or 23 hours a day for weeks. The United Nations rightly considers it torture, and it is time for it to end in our city.
To conclude, though, I must come back to the longer-term view. Because receivership should not be confused as a “fix” for what is broken at Rikers. While we must address the immediate and inescapably real safety threats both to individuals in custody and to staff, we must not lose focus on the hard but necessary work to close Rikers Island.
That decision – which I solemnly voted for in the City Council, with Herb Sturz looking down from the balcony – did not come lightly. It was won through a years-long campaign of extensive organizing led by formerly incarcerated individuals, through the policy work of the Lippmann Commission, and through extensive deliberation by the Council and the Mayor. It was not easy for the City to reach the decision that substantial and continued decarceration was both possible and necessary, or to build new borough-based jails to replace Rikers. But it was the right decision then, and it remains the right decision now.
Unfortunately, there are few signs that the city is heading in that direction. We are not on a path of decarceration to reduce the jail population to 3,300. And we are not on the path to build the four borough-based jails by 2027.
The jail population (as of Tuesday) is over 5,900 – some 2,600 above the capacity of the planned borough-based jails and up 6% from last October. The City-sentenced population in custody is over 400 – up more than 400% compared to last October – while the pretrial population remains above 5,000.
As a report my office released in March showed, bail continues to lead to pre-trial incarceration, with little evidence to suggest that judges are considering defendants’ financial circumstances, as required by the law.
With enforcement of quality-of-life offenses increasing – the mayor established a new Citywide Crime and Quality of Life Enforcement Initiative back in March – it should come as no surprise that through the first six months of the year, arrests are up 26% year-to-date.
Meanwhile, after decades of insufficient investment in harm reduction and behavioral care, Rikers Island remains the largest de facto mental health care facility in the city. On an average day, there are more than 1,000 people in custody diagnosed with serious mental illness. We know they have little chance of getting adequate treatment in jail. We know that jail conditions are only likely to make their illness worse. Doing right by them, providing the treatment and services they need, and diverting as many people as possible from Rikers today, will help alleviate pressures on staff on the island and get us back on the path to reducing the population.
During our visit in August, I talked to dozens of women at Rosie’s, where 339 people were being held that day – and I don’t believe that a single one of the women I talked to needed to be in jail while awaiting trial. We don’t need to wait until 2027 to close Rosies and instead provide the supportive housing, paths to employment, drug treatment, and mental health services that people need to succeed in their communities.
Even as we hope that a receiver can cut through some of the personnel and management inertia that is driving the current crisis of safety on the island, we must remember that Rikers should not remain a place where New Yorkers are incarcerated. The jails there should be shuttered, once and for all.
We worked long and hard to develop the plan to do it. We should stick to that plan.
Thank you very much for this opportunity, and for your ongoing attention to a problem from which we must not look away.
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