![]() Officers told reporters they feared the place more than 90 percent of the staff at Rikers are people of color, and nearly half are women, who endure harassment and assault. In July, the correction-officers union sued the city over working conditions. Banging their heads against walls, slashing their wrists, attempting suicide - detainees were harming themselves at the highest rate in five years. Emergency “probe teams,” with officers dressed in riot gear and wielding batons and pepper spray, regularly burst in to suppress disturbances. Violence was rife, inflicted by inmates and guards alike. Men were sleeping on the floor of intake cells and defecating in plastic bags. ![]() Later that month, the Department of Correction commissioner resigned hours before a federal monitor assigned to oversee Rikers issued a scathing report. Kross Center, which houses those with mental illness, because too many posts were unmanned. In May, officials were forced to lock down the island’s largest jail, the Anna M. But the staff shortages, he predicted, would lead to chaos. “We’re trying to point out to upper management and to additional people like you that we’re doing our best and we’re trying to make this work,” said Hodges. On March 17, an officer named Timothy Hodges testified to the Board of Correction, the body that oversees Rikers, that the jail was facing a personnel crisis and could not provide a basic standard of care. The city spends an annual $550,000 per incarcerated person, compared with $28,000 per student in its public schools, for conditions that a court-ordered monitor described as “rife with violence and disorder.” They are innocent until proven guilty, though no one treats them that way. Their alleged offenses range from graffiti and shoplifting to rape and murder. ![]() Many are there because they can’t make bail. A small number of people are serving short sentences for misdemeanors or parole violations, but the vast majority are waiting for trial. Rikers is a complex of jails, not a prison. The people incarcerated at Rikers continued to die at such a steady rate that the agency charged with investigating deaths in custody couldn’t keep up. A gruesome incident followed in early March, then another suicide, then an overdose. After nearly two years without a suicide at the facility, a man hanged himself before the month was out. In January, its population rose above 5,000 - an increase of more than 25 percent from the spring of 2020. ![]() The staff was depleted, and the jail was getting more crowded. 2021 began with Rikers Island in a miserable state, with every indication that conditions would soon get much worse. ![]()
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