THE FORTUNE SOCIETY STATEMENT ON THE HANDSHAKE AGREEMENT FOR NEW YORK CITY’S FY2024 BUDGET

(June 29, 2023, New York, N.Y.)–The Fortune Society issued the following statement today after Mayor Adams and the New York City Council announced a handshake deal for the 2024 fiscal year.

“Today, a simple handshake has upended the lives of thousands of people detained in our city jails, whose hopes for a better future rested in crucial programs that—up until June 30—supported our most vulnerable and marginalized communities. The $17 million cuts to the Department of Corrections have ended funding for six community-based organizations—including The Fortune Society—providing supportive programming for incarcerated people at Rikers Island and the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center (“The Boat”). These vital, life-saving services included reentry planning, nonviolent conflict resolution, hard skills training and certifications, and cognitive behavioral interventions. To say the ending of this funding is short-sighted and cruel is an understatement—it threatens to cause generational damage and trauma for decades to come and portends a decline in public safety.

The Department of Corrections has dangerously overestimated their ability to take on these programs. Not only do they lack the expertise to step in for the experienced professionals from the nonprofits, they also lack access to the critical services that detainees need upon their release. Fortune and its partner nonprofits working in city jails have provided quality programs that are critical in offering hope and mitigating the damage that the current landscape of mass incarceration creates for all the people in our city. Without these programs, we risk returning to a time when our jail population was almost quadruple what it is today and 100,000 people cycled through our courts and local precincts. These cuts risk making city jails more dangerous and set us up for increased recidivism rates and community devastation.

We are not done fighting: the money is there to fund these programs; it just needs to be reallocated from a bloated personnel budget. We know the harms that our carceral system causes—let’s not eliminate programs that function to repair and prevent. We are grateful for the elected officials who have fought these cuts, including Council Member Carlina Rivera, Chair of the Committee on Criminal Justice; Council Member Julie Won, Chair of the Committee on Contracts; Public Advocate Jumaane Williams; Representative Jerry Nadler; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Representative Nydia Velazquez; and Representative Jamaal Bowman. We are also grateful to the more than 115 organizations in the legal, reentry, mental health, substance use, employment, and housing fields that have signed letters of support for these programs to continue.”

About The Fortune Society

Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society has advocated on criminal justice issues for over five decades and is nationally recognized for developing model programs that help people with criminal justice histories to be assets to their communities. Fortune offers a holistic and integrated “one-stop-shopping” model of service provision. Among the services offered are discharge planning, licensed outpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment, alternatives to incarceration, HIV/AIDS services, career development and job retention, education, family services, drop-in services, and supportive housing as well as lifetime access to aftercare. For more information, visit rwww.fortunesociety.org.