An average person in city custody is spending more than nine months in jail, 88 more days than the pre-pandemic average. Those long periods of detention are one of the main drivers of the recent population increase on Rikers, which is exacerbating staffing issues and overcrowding, according to a new report from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
The report comes on the heels of two more deaths of detainees in city custody — one man who died from COVID and another man who hung himself — bringing the death toll so far this year to at least 14 people, the highest number of lives lost since 2016. While the city’s jail population decreased to 3,800 at the height of COVID, it has crept up to more than 5,500 people, about the same as before the pandemic hit.
Speaking at a Board of Correction hearing Tuesday morning, the office’s director, Marcos Soler, pointed to other findings in it’s October report, like a drop in the number of felony sentences this year; and an 82 percent increase in the number of days it takes for cases to be resolved, resulting in up to more than a year and a half of waiting for a single case on average.
The city's jail population now includes 30 percent of people who've been on Rikers for over a year.
More than 1,600 people, or thirty percent of all detainees in city jails, have been there for more than a year, a 75 percent increase from January of 2020, the report found.
“Cases are not being processed,” Soler said, echoing a common complaint from Mayor Bill de Blasio who has repeatedly faulted the state courts when asked about issues on Rikers Island. “[We have to have] the case processing delays addressed. We need that first and foremost.”
Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the state court system, said certain COVID precautions are restricting the court’s capacity to hold trials, but even so they’re resolving about 2,000 misdemeanor and felony cases a week.
“What’s not working is the current administration constantly attempting to shift the blame for a generational unraveling of order in New York City based on a complex number of factors,” Chalfen said. “But blaming the courts..is like the captain of the Titanic blaming the iceberg.”
Just around 100 people detained by the city make it to court each day, down from around 500 before the pandemic.
Chalfen pointed to the Department of Corrections' recent trouble getting defendants to court as another source of delays. The city’s MOCJ report found corrections officers are producing just over 100 people a day to court appearances, down from around 500 people a day before COVID. The statistic enraged Board of Corrections Commissioner Dr. Robert Cohen.
“The only reason for bail is to assure that people come to court,” Cohen said. “[Putting] people in jail for enormous amounts of bails and not even letting them get to court is a tragedy.”
Chalfen provided additional data confirming a dramatic slowdown in cases completed by state courts across the five boroughs. Just 7,657 criminal cases in the State Supreme Court have been closed so far this year, while more than 21,000 were closed in 2019. In 2019, the court conducted 859 trials; now that’s down to just 82 trials so far this year.
Because of COVID precautions still in place there's still a dramatic decrease in the number of cases courts are handling.
Department of Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said the long periods of time people are detained at Rikers are making facilities less safe, pointing to a higher rate of violent incidents committed by people who’d been held for 400 days or more.
“We got one guy here nine years, another seven or eight people here more than five years, or some crazy numbers,” he said, adding the jail doesn’t have programming, classes or facilities designed for long stays, the way state prisons do. “It’s just not a place meant to be that long and so they get frustrated. They get nuts after a while and they act out and staff suffer the consequences of that.”
Violent incidents in city jails surged to their highest rates since 2017, according to city tallies. People in detention suffering from serious injuries quadrupled between fiscal years 2017 and 2021. The rate of staffers who were seriously injured on the job doubled in that time.
Public defenders at the Board of Corrections hearing pushed back on the city’s characterization that the courts were to blame for the slowdown in cases and thus the increase in time people spend on Rikers.
“As a public defender I know exactly why cases are not moving forward in the courts,” said Martha Greico of Bronx Defenders. She described not being able to meet with her Rikers-detained client and thus being unable to prepare his trial defense. “I have attempted to visit him seven times over the last three months and was turned away after waiting five, six, seven hours.”
Sometimes corrections officers offer her brutal honesty about why she can’t see her client.
“Nobody feels like going to get him because he’s in a unit that is just too rowdy,” she said. “They’re on their second or third tour and they just don’t have the will or the energy to go get him for a counsel visit.”
