The city’s reform-minded corrections commissioner, who introduced therapeutic programs for guards and detainees, is leaving.
On Tuesday afternoon, two rival gang members held on serious charges sat in a common room near their cell blocks at Rikers Island and delivered a glimmer of hope in a place where it is largely impossible to find. As part of an experimental unit meant to reduce violence both among people in custody and between guards and their charges, they were beneficiaries of a program that seemed to be working. Guards who had toured the unit from other wings remarked on the sense of comparative calm. Brutality was in decline.
It’s hard to think of another institution that has suffered as much conflict, crisis and persistent despair over the past year as Rikers, where 16 detainees have died since January and where, on any given day, close to 30 percent of the uniformed staff — about 2,300 people — do not show up for work, aggravating existing tensions. The fear and upheaval, made worse by Covid, has left some guards so avoidant, the city’s outgoing corrections commissioner told me recently, that they have faked heart attacks to stay off the job.
The commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi, is a cerebral reformer who has spent an illustrious career in a public life trying to end mass incarceration, a tenure that has included oversight of juvenile corrections in Washington and positions both at Columbia and Harvard. He arrived late in the game, in June, installed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to fix a crisis that has been escalating for years. Unlike doctrinaire progressives or hard-line law-and-order adherents, Mr. Schiraldi remains deeply sympathetic both to guards who are exhausted, scared and quick to go on the offensive, and toward detainees who are often ignored, debased, violated and easily triggered.
“I wish I could say that people are exaggerating on either side,” he said. “But they’re not.” The staff shortage has left many guards working 17 hours straight. “People were getting in car accidents after triple shifts,” Mr. Schiraldi said. He began sending them home in cabs.
(On Thursday morning, Eric Adams announced he would be replacing Mr. Schiraldi with Louis Molina, someone who has been in law enforcement for 20 years.)
Understand the Crisis at Rikers Island
Amid the pandemic and a staffing emergency, New York City’s main jail complex has been embroiled in a continuing crisis.
- What to Know: Rikers has long been characterized by dysfunction and violence, but recently the situation has spun out of control.
- Inside Rikers: With staffing shortages and the basic functions of the jail disrupted, detainees had free rein inside the complex.
- A Deadly Year for N.Y.C. Jails: There have been 15 deaths in New York City’s jail system in 2021, including several people incarcerated at Rikers.
- Oversight Failure: The city’s Board of Correction is meant to serve as an independent check on the jail system. Its inaction has been conspicuous.
Contrary to popular perception, most correction officers at Rikers are not white men — the overwhelming majority, 84 percent, are Black and Hispanic, and are often from the same communities as the jail population itself. Sixty percent of captains and 63 percent of deputy wardens are women. Recently, I attended a training session at what is known as Rikers’s PEACE Center, a convening that functioned as a kind of group therapy and would be followed later in the week by another session in which guards and those in custody would be sitting down together.
In one exercise, the 20 or so correction officers participating were asked by the facilitator to come up with adjectives that might describe the home lives the detainees were coming from. Dividing into groups, they made lists, calling out words and writing them down on large sheets of paper. The words that emerged first — poor, broken, dysfunctional, system-involved, unpredictable, absent — were words that, as one young officer pointed out, could also describe their own backgrounds.
Two officers told me that they had brothers who had served time at Rikers before they started working there. One of them, a young Black woman named T. Robinson, had been at Rikers for three years after working in private security. Not long ago, someone in custody began to masturbate in front of her. She thinks about quitting a lot, she told me. The sexual harassment of female guards from detainees was constant, the women in the group said, and the only way to survive was to create a wall around yourself. Nearly everyone agreed that the city should provide guards with more and better access to therapy. One of the greatest hardships, another female officer said, was coming home so anxious and strung out that it was impossible to be present for her children.
The training program is part of an initiative started by Mr. Schiraldi of which the new housing unit is a part. The idea has been to build better relationships between officers and detainees — and among detainees themselves — but also to fulfill some of the basic needs those in custody have, the absence of which easily and often leads to rage and incidents of assault.When I asked the correction officers at the training session what kinds of deprivations are most likely to provoke detainees, they immediately mentioned haircuts. Fear about Covid has kept barbers from coming to Rikers. When someone showed up at a court date with unkempt long hair, Mr. Schiraldi told me, the judge canceled his proceeding.
In an experiment that began on the first of November, 14 offenders, most facing violent charges, ranging in age from 18 to 22 were put in a unit where they were given liberties and advantages not typically available. They were allowed, for example, to paint their cells bright colors, to get a Ping-Pong table in a common room, to get more time with their families and more programming, job training and education. Among this cohort at Rikers, the rate of fighting among people in custody is close to three times higher than it is in the older population. Since the program began there has not been a single instance of assault among detainees in the unit, and this even though members of rival gangs have been placed together, typically a major instigator of violence.
On Tuesday afternoon, I sat down with two men in the unit, both of whom were at Rikers on charges of second-degree murder, one of them a member of the Bloods and another a Crip. R.J., as he chose to identify himself, grew up in Canarsie in Brooklyn; R.E., who came to Rikers three years ago at the age of 17, was from the South Bronx. Both spoke about how they had tried to avoid gang life but how the pressures — and frequent muggings at the hands of older gang members — ultimately made that impossible. “I’d walk to school and get beat up, so I thought I’d join for safety,” R.E. told me.
In previous housing units, R.E. had punched correction officers. “A C.O. had told me that I was never going home and that really got to me,” he said of one occasion. “So I said ‘I’m going to show you what someone who is never going home can do.’” R.J. set fire to his cell just to be let outside; no one was coming around to check on him and he hadn’t seen sunlight in ages and lost it. This is, shockingly, a common occurrence at Rikers: guards refusing to come around and detainees lighting fires in response.
A lot of job training and many classes were put on hiatus during Covid, increasing stress and despondency. But now R.J. and R.E. are both scheduled for most of the day. “All of these other housing units are about gang banging,” R.E. said. “But now instead of a higher rank in gang life, I’m thinking about a higher rank in life.”
The city has committed to closing Rikers in five years as it moves to a system of smaller, more humane jails built near courthouses in the various boroughs. But five years is a long time to leave things as they are, given that the status quo is a constant state of emergency. Mr. Schiraldi’s program is small but promising and suggests the way that big bureaucracies often lose sight of the obvious. But it seems unlikely to remain in an Adams administration. On Thursday the mayor-elect said that the reprieve from “punitive segregation,’' or solitary confinement, would end on Jan. 1st. The outgoing commissioner, Mr. Adams said, was someone with “a good heart.” But his own approach would be different.