The Fortune Society Testifies at New York City Council Committee on Criminal Justice on Reducing Violence Among Young Adults in City Jails

The Fortune Society Testifies at New York City Council Committee on Criminal Justice on Reducing Violence Among Young Adults in City Jails 

(March 28, 2022 – New York, NY) – Andre Ward, Associate Vice President at the David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy at The Fortune Society (Fortune), testified before the New York City Council Committee on Criminal Justice on March 28, 2022 at a hearing on reducing violence among young adults in City jails. 

My name is Andre Ward and I am the Associate Vice President of The David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy at the Fortune Society. The Fortune Society is a 54-year-old organization that supports successful reentry from incarceration and promotes alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities. We do this by believing in the power of people to change; building lives through service programs shaped by the experiences of our participants; and changing minds through education and advocacy to promote the creation of a fair, humane, and truly rehabilitative correctional system. 

 I am a formerly incarcerated Black man who spent three and a half years on Rikers Island, from 1988 to 1992, as both an adolescent and adult. During this period, I experienced and witnessed countless episodes of abuse and neglect, including frequent medical and mental health neglect, and the inadequacy of programming which properly prepares those detained for community reentry. 

Now I sit here, 30 years later, and conditions for young adults on Rikers are even worse, as the practice of leaving posts unstaffed has spread like an unchecked disease.  The topic of this hearing is reducing violence among young adults in city jails.  But we must start with the adults who are responsible for their custody, safety, and well-being, because it is the behavior of the adults in charge that set the stage for this ongoing crisis.  DOC is leaving posts unstaffed, setting the stage for dysfunction, disorder, and danger to the people who work there and the people held in custody there.  Young adults were of particular concern in the federal lawsuit that was finally settled in 2015, and I want to quote from the original Nunez consent decree: “Young Inmates shall be supervised at all times in a manner that protects them from an unreasonable risk of harm. Staff shall intervene in a timely manner to prevent inmate-on-inmate fights and assaults, and to de-escalate inmate-on-inmate confrontations, as soon as it is practicable and reasonably safe to do so.”  DOC has yet to live up to this. 

Council Member Rivera, thank you for asking the Commissioner to provide you with information about staffing at last week’s budget hearing.  We urge the City Council, and we urge the Board of Correction, to continue to demand accountability, because lives are at stake. We have to remember this: lives are at stake. 

I want to highlight four key issues about the dangerous conditions faced by young adults, based on the special report issued by the Nunez monitor on March 16, and information that was revealed at the Board of Corrections public hearing on March 8. 

First, the Nunez report notes that almost half of staff assigned to RNDC are not available to be assigned to a post engaging with people in custody, for a host of reasons, many of which speak to complete mismanagement. Of that remaining allegedly available half, people still call out sick, attend training, and go on scheduled vacations. How do we have a jail facility where over half of the staff cannot be assigned to work with the people detained in that facility?  Particularly when the needs of the people in Rikers have become more acute, with over half of the jail population being diagnosed with a mental illness. That insults our common sense and it does not explain the over half-million-dollar cost of detaining a single human being at Rikers, a cost that quadrupled over ten years as the average daily population fell by 61 percent.  During that same time period, violence also skyrocketed at alarming rates, against staff and against people in custody, with use of force incidents rising a shocking 779 percent. 

Second, the Nunez Monitor Special Report describes multiple sickening incidents of violence in RNDC for the single month of January 2022.  Many of these incidents occurred when staff were not at their assigned posts – either off post or the posts were not filled.  As the Monitor points out, this also means that we do not actually know how many incidents of violence there were – because staff were not there to report them. At least one of the reported incidents involved multiple detained young people sustaining Class A injuries, one of whom faced a 16-hour delay in receiving medical care. As the report noted about this mayhem, “while commonplace in New York City jails, these incidents would be considered major events in any other jail system.” (emphasis in original). 

Third, at the BOC hearing, we heard that DOC is continuing the unacceptable practice of co-mingling young people with adults. This is a dangerous step backwards and it is not best practice. DOC was asked to provide data on this issue. I urge this Committee to ask DOC to provide information about the numbers of young people being housed with adults and for information about alternative means employed before DOC resorted to this contraindicated practice. 

Finally, there is a lack of transparency and accountability by DOC to the bodies that are lawfully empowered to provide oversight and review data.  We heard at the BOC hearing that DOC had stopped providing information on staffing in January. We read in the special Nunez report that DOC had stopped providing that information to the Monitor.8 And we heard at the budget hearing before this committee last week that Chair Rivera has also been requesting this information.  We hope that this Committee will continue to exercise its authority and be vigilant in demanding information about the numbers of unstaffed posts, at RNDC and across all city jail facilities.  The core failure to properly staff posts is at the root of the escalated, current violence that threatens DOC staff and people in custody.  

RNDC, and Rikers, are a blight on the great city of New York. We must continue to demand answers from the adults in charge, to protect the adults who do show up to work and the young people under their watch. 

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