The number of assaults - against incarcerated people and staff alike - is going up. On many housing units, there are no officers on the floor. Corrections officers increasingly work double, triple, and even quadruple shifts. On September 15, according to New York City officials, 789 jail employees called in sick, 68 were out for a “personal emergency,” and 93 were simply absent without leave.Īs guards sick out, their colleagues find their own working conditions declining even further. By the city government’s estimates, on any given day, fully 35 percent of staff are unavailable to work. In recent weeks, accounts circulated of housing units going whole days without any guards at all. Much of the coverage of the crisis on Rikers has focused on a cascading staffing crisis. Attorney Preet Bharara issued a scathing report describing Rikers as a place “more inspired by ‘Lord of the Flies’ than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention.”īharara’s report helped buttress the movement to close Rikers once and for all, a movement to which Mayor Bill de Blasio was a late joiner in 2017, during his reelection campaign. Periodically, a snapshot of conditions inside will escape the island’s event horizon, as in 2014 when then-U.S. Cut off from the rest of the city by water on all sides and accessible only by a long causeway, New York’s island gulag has always been out of sight and out of mind. Rikers has been a festering wound in New York City for about as long as it has existed as a jail complex. And they’re sitting in the cells with their own bodily waste locked into these conditions.” This is unlike anything that has ever happened here.” “They’ve given them plastic bags to use for feces and urine. I’ve been coming to this jail since 2008. This is the most horrific thing I’ve seen in my life. And they’re sitting in the cells with their own bodily waste locked into these conditions. They’ve given them plastic bags to use for feces and urine. “There’s a segregated intake unit that we walked through where they have people held in showers,” said Alice Fontier, managing director for Neighborhood Defender Services, who toured one Rikers building, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, with lawmakers. Lawmakers and the people who accompanied them returned from their visit visibly shaken. But if they made any effort to disguise the degree of degradation and danger that pervades New York City’s jail complex, it didn’t show. Jail officials knew that state legislators were going to be touring Rikers Island on September 13.
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