The Adams administration is preparing to reopen a jail facility on Rikers Island to add space for convicted people who should be moved to state custody but can’t right now because of post-strike chaos.
The city Department of Correction is set to once again house detainees inside a small section of the Anna M. Kross Center (AMKC) jail on Rikers, according to multiple jail sources.
City jail officials closed most of AMKC in July 2023. The jail, one of the largest facilities on Rikers with capacity for up to 2,300 people, was previously used to hold people with mental illness and other health ailments.
Overall, the city jail population has swelled to 7,106 people as of Wednesday, according to city records posted online. As previously reported by THE CITY, the island hasn’t held that many people since 2019.
Jail insiders say that total includes more than 500 “state ready” detainees who have been convicted and sentenced to more than a year in detention — and thus are supposed to be transferred to state prisons.
“The reality is we are running out of bed space,” said a top DOC supervisor who asked to remain anonymous because they were not given permission to speak to the press.
A DOC official confirmed that transfers to state prisons have not yet re-started but would not provide details on where people are being housed.
“As the number of people in our care continues to grow, we will look at all available options for how people can be safely accommodated. We’ll keep you posted on whether that includes utilizing AMKC,” said Rikers spokesperson Shayla Mulzac-Warner.
The state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision first stopped taking state ready transfers from city custody when thousands of guards across the system staged a wildcat strike in mid-February.
When the strike ended in mid-March, the state prison system initially said it would begin to take state ready detainees on April 1, city jail officials said during an oversight hearing last month.
But that date has now been extended to April 21, multiple jail sources told THE CITY.
Early Releases to Ease Pressure
On Monday, DOCCS commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III announced that the department would seek to release qualified prisoners up to 90 days early in order to alleviate staffing problems.
Those eligible are incarcerated individuals who have release dates already approved by either the parole board, time allowance committee, or have met their so-called maximum allowance date.
Martuscello said he wasn’t sure how many people were eligible or would likely be let out early.
“We don’t have a specific number that we are targeting,” he told reporters in Albany Wednesday. “We are scrubbing the list of people that would be eligible.”
The state prison commissioner has broad power to release additional prisoners, including people up to one year in advance of their scheduled date or six months prior to their parole eligibility date.
People convicted of violent felonies or sex crimes are not eligible, he said.
“We made it very narrowly focused to ensure public safety,” Martuscello said.
The prison strike dragged on for approximately three weeks and Gov. Kathy Hochul was forced to call up the New York National Guard to take over guard duties at some upstate prisons.
Hochul made a series of concessions, including pausing parts of the state law restricting the use of solitary confinement, to entice officers to return.
But she also fired approximately 2,000 officers who refused to come back to work and banned them from ever taking other state jobs.
That has exacerbated a pre-existing staffing shortage in the state prison system.
Before the strike, Martuscello enraged rank-and-file officers when he issued a memo to superintendents ordering them to “redefine” how they operate with fewer officers, noting that “70% of our original staffing model is the new 100%.”
Days after the memo, the union representing state correction officers took a vote of no confidence in Martuscello and some suggested formally going on strike, the Times Union reported.
Martuscello rescinded the memo as part of the deal to convince officers to come back to work.
But some National Guard members are still deployed at state prisons, Martuscello said Wednesday, noting there’s “no definite timeline” when they will be pulled back.
They are in place to alleviate the need for 12-hour shifts and excessive overtime for state correction officers, he said.
DOCCS is also looking into possibly closing up to five prisons, the commissioner added.
“It really comes down to the unknown of how many staff who were going to return to the workforce,” Martuscello said. “Luckily, we are down to 32,400 [people in state prisons]. We do have excess capacity where we can absorb people into other facilities.”
As for the city jail population, jail officials blame a host of factors: the prison strike logjam; lack of bed space in mental hospitals; and recent legal changes to court discovery procedures supposedly dragging court cases on for longer periods.
Criminal justice advocates contend Mayor Eric Adams should be doing more to transfer people out of Rikers, such as expand mental health programs and create additional secure facilities where they can get better treatment.
The new Independent Rikers Commission re-convened by the City Council in 2023 has urged City Hall to expand its pre-trial electronic monitoring capacity in order lower the jail population. The commission is also pushing city officials to expand a supervised release intensive case management pilot program citywide. That program connects people with serious mental illness and addiction issues to treatment and housing.
The commission noted that it costs approximately $400,000 per year to incarcerate someone on Rikers.
“Decrepit, dysfunctional and violent, Rikers is a crumbling, inordinately expensive incubator of misery and reoffending,” a 114-page report by the commission stated last month. “Every day its eight operating jails are open, incarcerated people and staff are at grave, unnecessary risk, and public safety is degraded.”
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