It seems like they are waisting time and resources with dreams while neglecting basic needs.
1. There's a severe shortage of guards. Anything that could make working in the jails more attractive will help, and a 2-hour commute is not attractive.
2. Getting medical service, prisoners with court dates, lawyers, etc. on and off the island is really really slow.
3. The jail has insourced a lot of services (for example they run a large bakery). These get staffed by corrections officers. This both makes staffing harder, and the existence of these plum positions has weird effects on the politics of the corrections union (people with power in the union are not actually working as guards and are out of touch with the reality of the jail)
Moving to a model like the Tombs, with the jail directly above the courthouse, makes way more sense.
In addition, the buildings on the island need a serious revamp (e.g. there is no automatic access control, so every major door needs a guard physically standing there to let people through and climate control is broken). As long as you need to seriously renovate anyway, might as well just build a new jail where it should have been put in the first place.
Source: I read a lot of blogposts.
> A 1972 study on visitation that followed 843 people on parole from California prisons found that those who had no visitors during their incarceration were six times more likely to be reincarcerated than people with three or more visitors.
> In Travis County, Texas, there was an escalation of violence and contraband after that jail switched from offering both video calls and visitation for a few years, to banning in-person visitation altogether.
There are also behavioral changes generated by a pending visit:
> According to one study, misconduct tended to decrease in the three weeks before a visit. This may explain why more frequent visits lead to more consistent good behavior, better overall outcomes and post-release success.
[0] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-co...
That stood out to me.
Which is still an incredibly high staffing ratio.
We are seeing the triumph of the unions here.
Incidentally this is what I meant above, about the union being out of touch: unlimited sick leave makes staffing unpredictable, which makes work unpredictable and frankly dangerous, which makes guards take more sick leave in a vicious cycle. The union has weaker-than-expected motivations to fix this, because everyone with seniority does not actually work in the housing blocks.
"designed" is a bit generous... It's a hodge-podge of facilities built over time as need arose with little consideration of long-term planning or a comprehensive strategy for the complex.
Rikers was opened in 1932. It's seen far higher crime rates than this year's.
Murders, for example, are 1/4 what they were in the '90s: https://twitter.com/brianpmangan/status/1588275665350012928
Coverage of crime, though, disproportionately spiked, which is likely why folks think crime is high: https://twitter.com/brianpmangan/status/1588277958556274688
> It's hard to understand why you would want to close one jail and open 4 smaller jails further away.
Further away from what?
The intent (https://rikers.cityofnewyork.us/) is to bring prisoners into newer facilities closer to their families.
However, if we look at the NYPD data [0], you can see that rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and car theft are all up by 14.4%, 34.4%, 25%, 2.2%, 45.3%, and 52.7% respectively over the last 2 years. Over the last 12 years, rape is up 22%, felony assault is over 50%, grand larceny up 37% and car theft up 30%.
How can you look at this data and say this is just a media narrative?
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statisti...
Of particular note, your data shows that all of the city's current crime numbers are still lower than 2001's, which was Giuliani's final and best year in office.
Like is your argument really "Well crime still isn't as bad as it was in the 90s so it's ok"?
I'm a huge proponent of criminal justice reform. I hate cash bail, the drug war, over criminalization, and militarized policing. That said, NYPD needs to get off its collective ass on go solve murders, assaults, rapes, and grand larceny cases. The best deterrent for crime that we know of is the assurance that you will be caught.
There is simultaneously no reason that the NYPD should have a foreign intelligence unit and crime labs are underfunded.
Why are we talking about crime in the early 90s? The original discussion started with nonethewiser saying "Not to mention crime has been increasing..." This statement doesn't have anything to do with crime in the 90s. ceejayoz then replied that rising crime is a media narrative and brought up crime in the 90s. This is a total straw man argument. No one is asserting that crime is as bad as it was in the 90s.
Because that's when violent crime peaked, and there's ongoing discussion now about moving back to criminal justice policies from that era. It's useful to compare current data to that time period to the uptick of the last 3 years and ask ourselves if we really want or need the same response today.
My point of view is that there are lessons to be drawn from the past.
Analyzing crime rates over a couple of years is fraught with sampling bias. E.g. there was an 83% decrease in mass shootings between 2018 and 2020, does that mean those aren't a problem anymore?
This makes my point. Rykers has almost double the capacity of the 4 proposed jails combined.
Rikers was sufficient when crime was 4x as high.
Multiple issues come to my mind:
- the larger the facility, the greater the chance of riots or unrest escalating
- it is more difficult to maintain different standards of imprisoning (low, middle and high security) in one complex
- it may be infeasible to renovate an existing building to current code and requirements while it's still being occupied, if it is at all possible (e.g. floor plan layout changes tend to be difficult to modify in prisons as the walls are very thick)
- smaller prisons spread across the country can make it easier for prisoners' relatives across the state to visit them, which usually leads to lower recidivism as prisoners can still keep contact with family
This is a solved problem. It's really not hard to segregate the various populations. We do this every day.
> it may be infeasible to renovate an existing building
Likely true.
> smaller prisons spread across the country can make it easier for prisoners' relatives across the state to visit them
Arguably true. Tablet-based video visits have changed the workload on family members. That said, the reduced burden on friends & family that don't want to engage in video visits is significant.
* the court systems are at the county level, not city, and so everyone being at Rikers means that you have to transport people to court, lawyers and families have to travel far from their homes, etc. The county courthouses for each borough are much more centrally located than Rikers
* Rikers is simultaneously not near anything and also on prime land. LGA has really bad capacity constraints, Rikers is the next closest piece of land available and the East River between it is very shallow
As to transporting people to court they should switch to Zoom instead.
It can easily take an hour to drive from Rikers to Downtown Brooklyn or Jamaica, where two of the five courthouses are.
This is happening. Same with video visits. The reform movement for Riker's started well before these were realities for the majority of inmates.
Rikers is down about 50%-75% in occupancy since 1991 and there's a similar big dip in crime.
Distributed jails just make financial sense, though there's lots of other "progressive" reasons to make the change too.
Opening new facilities makes it easier to deal with the union and fix the administrative processes. The management can transfer people and be slightly more selective to encourage and punish. Also, they can hire actual administrative staff instead of having COs working as clerks, etc.
Hard to manage also means hard to scrutinize.
Some of them get to vote, too. https://www.nyclu.org/en/know-your-rights/voting-criminal-re...
"Misdemeanors do not impact your right to vote. You may still register and vote if you are in jail for a misdemeanor or are awaiting trial..."