Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming today. My name's Vinnie Shiraldi, senior research scientist for the Columbia School of Social Work and senior fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab. I'd like to welcome you to today's forum on behalf of the Lab, the School of Social Work and co-sponsors, the Columbia Law School, CUNY's Institute for State and Local Governance, and Vital City.
Before I go any further, I'd like to observe a moment of silence on behalf of correctional officer Edward Roman, who committed suicide last weekend, and five incarcerated people who have died in custody this year: Tarz Youngblood, George Pagan, Herman Diaz, Dashawn Carter, and most recently, Mary Yehudah, who died just yesterday.
Thank you. I'm going to do three things briefly right now. I want to go over logistics, I want to provide some background on the state of Rikers Island for context on why we're having today's forum, and then I'm going to briefly introduce opening speaker, Sara Norman. We anticipate the forum running approximately two hours. To save time, all introductions will be brief. We also will not directly take questions during the event, but if you have a question, please use the question function on Zoom.
We're going to take those answers to those questions and put them up online in about a week on the websites of the Vital City and the Columbia Justice Lab. Vital City, I'll read it out, but I'll put up a slide, is vitalcitynyc.org, and the Columbia Justice Lab is justice.columbia.edu. We'll put the answers to those questions, along with a video of today's event, a short explainer on receiverships that Miss Norman wrote, a brief on Cook County's transitional administrator, and bios of all the speakers. We'll also email the links to our websites to everyone who has registered or been invited to this event when the video and question synopsis are available. All right. That's it for logistics.
During the final seven months of Mayor de Blasio's administration in 2021, I was commissioner of New York City's Department of Correction. There has been, appropriately, an enormous amount of media coverage of the violence and chaos at Rikers Island before, during, and since that time. What many of you heard about the awful conditions there, from union members, staff, incarcerated people, advocates, the board of corrections, the monitor, and the media, is by and large true and accurate.
The city is under a federal consent decree in Nunez versus The City of New York, filed to address the unconstitutional culture of violence in city jails. But even with a strong and experienced monitoring team led by Steve Martin, since 2015, things have steadily and then rapidly, after the advent of the pandemic, deteriorated. As recently as March, the monitor wrote that the city's jails are, quote, "trapped in a state of persistent dysfunctionality," end quote, with, quote, "imminent risk to harm to incarcerated individuals and staff." Or maybe not so imminent, maybe already realized.
For example, in 2020, there were 121 stabbings and slashings, something the monitor described then as a high number compared to national rates of violence. Then, last year, there were 420 slashings and stabbings, more than three times as many as the previous year. So far, through April of this year, there have been 190 more slashings and stabbings, which if it annualizes at this rate, means there would be 500 slashings and stabbings this year, nearly five times the extraordinary 2020 number and four times the 2020 rate. I'll say a few words about why this chaos and violence is growing so much. Whether deeper federal intervention like a receivership could help resolve this crisis will occupy the rest of the forum.
When I got to Rikers, I was astonished by how many staff we had, around 8,000 uniformed staff, compared to around 5,500 incarcerated people, a ratio many times higher than under other correctional systems. And yet every weekend and many weekdays, we had dozens of staff working triple shifts and dozens of unstaffed posts, meaning there were either exhausted floor officers or no floor officers on dozens and dozens of living units.
When I toured those unstaffed units, incarcerated people were often armed with homemade shanks fashioned from pieces of metal and plexiglass, too readily available in the city's decrepit jails. When I spoke to incarcerated people about this, they told me they were armed to protect themselves because there was no officer to do so. That meant that every unintentional bump on the way to the bathroom turned into a potential knife fight. Over the past year and a half, 21 people have died in Rikers, many as a direct or indirect result of not having a floor officer or having an exhausted floor officer who is not up to the difficult job she has to do.
Two of the four incarcerated people, of the five incarcerated people who died this year, Herman Diaz and George Pagan, died in units with no floor officer. Mr. Diaz died from choking on an orange with no officer to provide first aid. In his case, his fellow incarcerated people took him to the medical clinic after insisting that the officer in the control room allow them out of their living unit to do so.
This isn't an isolated case of neglect. For example, Rikers CEOs had failed to take Mr. Pagan to nine medical appointments before he died with no officer present, despite the fact that he was hallucinating, vomiting on himself, and barely able to walk. In a different lawsuit that the city is entangled in, in which the judge found them in contempt this week, the city's lawyers, quote, "freely acknowledged deficiencies in its ability to escort individuals in custody to clinic appointments due to insufficient staff presence," end quote.
There are a maze of reasons why, with the richest staffing ratios and highest cost of any jail system in the country, our city doesn't have enough people available to staff its jails. That's because over the past several decades, an overlapping raft of laws, regulations, contracts, and practices that have the force of precedent have accumulated that make it nearly impossible for the city to conventionally manage its way out of this dilemma. These include unlimited sick leave, the inability to hire qualified supervisory staff outside of the city's correction department, excessively long disciplinary proceedings, restrictions on redeploying correctional staff as needed, and the inability to terminate staff who AWOL. That is, those people who don't come to work and don't call, which happened 5,000 times last July and August.
All of this stems from the undue influence of correctional officers' unions and the willingness of elected officials to hand out excessively generous benefits that render the department a nightmare to run and reform. These amount to an internecine web of laws and rules and stultifying red tape that, in my opinion, makes it impossible to resolve the chaos and violence in Rikers in time to saves today's incarcerated people from harm, or even worse, death. That is not because today's mayor or commissioner have failed. They've barely gotten started. This was my position for the seven months I was commissioner and I advocated for it with City Hall, even if it meant that receiver would've replaced me.
This forum's co-organizer, Liz Glazer, who was director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice under Mayor de Blasio, also reluctantly came to believe that the problem is a structural one that can only be solved at a different kind of power. Both of us, along with Mayor Giuliani's correction commissioner, Mike Jacobson, who's on the second panel, continue to urge the current occupants of City Hall to do so now.
Receivers can cut through much of that stultifying red tape, because the requirement to run a constitutional jail can trump a contract or state or local law. Receivers don't abrogate contracts or laws willy-nilly, but if those regulations, laws, or contractual obligations hamper the running of a safe and constitutional jail, as they have for the duration of the Nunez consent decree, then a judicious receiver may, under certain circumstances, abrogate them or request that the court do so.
If my son or daughter worked on Rikers or was incarcerated there, because make no mistake about it, staff and incarcerated people alike are suffering there, I'd want the city to work with the federal court, the monitor and the plaintiffs to agree to a brand of receivership, details to be negotiated by the lawyers, like they were able to do in Chicago. The tragedy of daily violence and failure to provide safe and decent jails requires nothing less.
I thank our colleagues from Chicago for generously giving of their valuable time today to discuss how their negotiated transitional administrator may serve as an example for our city leaders to follow at this critical juncture. I also thank our speakers, moderators, and esteemed panel of knowledgeable New York leaders for their willingness to participate in today's event. The moderators will introduce both panels when it's their turn to speak.
For now, I'd like to turn the mic over to Sara Norman, managing attorney of the Prison Law Office in San Quentin, California. Sara and her colleagues brought the landmark case over constitutionally inadequate medical care that had been producing a death in California's prisons every six to seven days. Upon their motion, the court implemented a receiver, with dramatically improved conditions. We're grateful to have Sara's long experience with us today to explain what receivers are and how California's receiver has improved healthcare for people incarcerated there.