Rikers Still ‘Unstable and Unsafe’ Under New Jails Chief, Watchdog Says

Despite New York City’s claims to have made progress in remedying the crisis on Rikers Island, the jail complex remains awash in violence and disorder fed by chronic staff absenteeism, according to a report filed Wednesday in federal court.

As of late January, roughly one in three jailers had failed to show up to work, according to the report, issued by a federal monitor appointed to oversee reforms at the jail complex. That is roughly the same rate of absences as at the height of the crisis on Rikers Island last year, when rates of violence soared, more than a dozen people died and many detainees were left to fend for themselves.

The report also found that rates of violence remained high at Rikers, with January ranking as the second most violent month — measured by stabbings and slashings in the jails — since the monitor, Steve J. Martin, was appointed to oversee the complex. In many cases, Mr. Martin found that staff absenteeism created the conditions for the violence.

Violent incidents, the report noted, “have become normalized and have seemingly lost their power to instill a sense of urgency among those with the power to make change,” adding in bolded text that the high rates of violence and use of force by correction officers “are not typical, they are not expected, they are not normal.”

The report said that the rate of violence in the city’s jails was “seven to eight times higher” than rates observed in other correctional systems.

The report was the first issued by the monitor since Mayor Eric Adams took office. It found that under the leadership of his newly appointed correction commissioner, Louis Molina, the department remained “trapped in a state of persistent dysfunctionality,” and that the Rikers complex was “unstable and unsafe.” It also noted that transparency has become a serious issue in the department’s communications with the monitoring team.

In January, Mr. Molina issued a news release announcing that 1,000 officers — many of whom had become ill during the Omicron wave — had returned to work, which he said marked “a significant shift in the right direction.” Last month, he gave an interview in which he credited increased communication with the work force for having restored some semblance of order within the jail system.

But the monitor’s findings challenged that assessment, noting that, despite the staff members who returned to work at the end of January, more than 2,000 remained unavailable, “a level that had already been established as a significant crisis.”

Mr. Molina took over the department during one of its worst crises in decades. Sixteen people died in New York City’s jail system in 2021, the most since 2013; gang members have gained control of some housing areas; and some detainees have been forced to go without food or health care.

The department has reported that one person, Tarz Youngblood, 38, has died so far this year at Rikers. As of this time last year, two detainees had died.

Mr. Molina has forged a close alliance with the union that represents correction officers, rolling back restrictions on a departmental sick leave policy that his predecessor had instituted and firing an internal investigator after asking her to “get rid of” 2,000 discipline cases against officers within 100 days.

The investigator, Sarena Townsend, had long been at odds with the union. The monitor’s report called her removal “troubling,” and said it had not been alerted to her termination.

Mr. Molina did not respond directly to a request for comment about the monitor’s findings, but appeared to acknowledge the report in a news release on Wednesday. In the release, the Department of Correction said that assaults on staffers had dropped since the previous year.

“Even before joining D.O.C. in January, I was well aware of the history of problems facing the department,” Mr. Molina said in a statement included in the release. “We must do better, and we can do better.”

A spokesman for the largest jailers’ union, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report noted that the staffing issues in the city jails were all the more perplexing given the vast resources of the Correction Department. In fiscal year 2021, the department had a $1.25 billion budget and spent more than half a million dollars on each detainee, a cost the report called “unparalleled.” It said that amount was more than three times higher than the amount spent on those detained in jails in Los Angeles or Chicago.

The report took special issue with the conditions in one Rikers jail, the Robert N. Davoren Complex, where many young adults are detained, and detailed a number of violent incidents in January alone. They included an assault on an officer by a group of detainees who used his own can of pepper spray to attack him and a stabbing of an incarcerated person by another detainee who faced no repercussions for more than 48 hours. The report added that a number of the violent episodes had occurred when staff members were away from their posts.

Mr. Molina faced criticism recently after The New York Times revealed the department’s failure to document brutal beatings that occurred on Rikers Island before he took over the agency. He acknowledged the failures, saying, “Transparency is very important to me.”

But the monitor’s report described what it called a “deeply troubling” lack of open and transparent communication between the Correction Department and the monitoring team. It said that, in late January, the department had stopped specifically tracking data on absenteeism and later noted that the department in the last few months had refused to provide the monitor with that data.

“The monitoring team is incredibly disappointed to report that it has lost confidence that it has access to all of the relevant and reliable information necessary to perform its duties,” the report said.

The monitor acknowledged several other issues related to the lack of transparency, pointing to the serious injury of Khaled Eltahan, 41, whose brutal beating by another detainee went completely unrecorded by the Correction Department. The attack left Mr. Eltahan paralyzed from the neck down and confined to a nursing home bed.

The monitor also said it had found what looked to be unreported sex misconduct in the jail complex, with a detainee engaging in sexual misconduct with several people. None of the activity was detected by staff or recorded in official documents.

The report was the latest in a series of similar filings from Mr. Martin and his team, in which their frustration with the jails leadership and the worsening conditions has become increasingly clear. In this report, they called for a change in approach, saying that more in-depth reporting was necessary.

With every change in administration, the report said, “the department restarts the clock of reform, and initiatives built on solid correctional practice are revised or abandoned before benefits are ever realized.”