NYC Comptroller: Despite Bloated Budget, Department of Correction Remains in Crisis As Services and Safety Have Deteriorated

Budget Analysis Finds Spending, Staff Absenteeism, and Rates of Violence Rising.

City Needs to Reduce Jail Population By Over 40% To Close Rikers. 

 Ahead of a New York City Council hearing on the Department of Correction budget, City Comptroller Brad Lander released a budget analysis of the skyrocketing costs per person, staff absenteeism, and rates of violence plaguing the City’s jail system.

New York City spends more than half a million dollars to incarcerate one person for a year, nearly four times the amount spent 10 years ago. Yet despite these ballooning resources, city jails are in crisis. At least 19 people have died in custody since the start of 2021. Staff absenteeism skyrocketed to 27% in the beginning of FY 2022, nearly double the rates of other uniformed agencies. 

 

“New York City spends far more per person detained than other jail systems in the country, yet the Department of Correction consistently fails to keep the people incarcerated and its own staff safe,” said Comptroller Brad Lander. “DOC spends half a million dollars a year per person but cannot even keep them alive–19 people have died in custody in the last 15 months. The agency cannot keep its house in order when it is paying nearly a third of its staff not to work. The Department of Correction doesn’t need more resources, it needs fundamental reform.”

The Department of Correction is on the Comptroller’s Watch List and has been closely monitored by the Comptroller’s Office since 2014. The Department has been under a court-appointed federal monitor’s supervision since 2015. In September 2021, Mayor de Blasio issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency over the persistent staff absenteeism, which remains in effect under Mayor Adams. This analysis looks at spending and performance data, including at budget and personnel data, jail population trends, reports of violence in City jails, and other data on services to people in custody to assess the DOC’s operations.

 

Highlights of the Comptroller’s analysis of the current state of the Department of Correction include:

• DOC budget is expected to rise in the current year. The City adopted a 6% reduction in DOC’s budget for FY 2022 last June, but revisions have pushed the forecast for the current year up to $1.34 billion, or 7% higher than FY 2021. In the first seven months of FY 2022 (July-January), uniformed overtime at DOC totaled $132 million, 71% higher than pre-pandemic levels in FY 2020. The Comptroller’s Office projects that uniformed overtime costs at DOC will exceed the City’s current assumptions by $67 million in FY 2022 and $49 million in FY 2023.
• High rates of staff absenteeism continue to impede operations: DOC’s paid, uniformed absentee rate due to illness or line of duty injuries skyrocketed to 27% in the beginning of FY 2022, far surpassing the pre-pandemic absence rates at DOC (5 to 7%) and more than double current absence rates at other uniformed agencies (10% at FDNY, 11% at DSNY). As of early February 2022, approximately a quarter of staff were calling out sick each week.
• Indicators of jail violence rose over the last year: Violence by, between and against people in custody has risen. The absolute number of slashings and stabbings has more than tripled for FY 2022 to-date, rising to 317 in the first eight months of FY 2022, up from 97 in the same period last fiscal year. The rate of use of force incidents and allegations in the fourth quarter of FY 2021, adjusted for the jail population, was up 81% from 2019. The monthly number of assaults on staff has generally trended down after peaking in May 2021, but the year-to-date total was still 10% higher than the same period in the prior year.
• Access to medical services and court appointments has decreased: The number of people who were not produced to medical appointments hit a peak of 15,201 in July 2021, coinciding with the period during which a progressively higher share of uniformed officers were reported as “new sick.” Despite the resumption of court proceedings in March 2021, the share of the jail population produced in court each month remains dramatically low (2%) as of August 2021.
• After 14 years of steady declines, the jail population has risen back to pre-pandemic levels. The New York City jail population was 7,822 when the New York State Legislature passed the 2019 bail reforms. Implementation of bail reforms in 2020 lowered the daily population to 5,473 as of March 1, 2020. And the population subsequently dropped below 4,000 due to COVID-19 prevention measures. However, the number of people incarcerated daily has risen back to about 5,700 as of mid-March 2022, driven by increased gun arrests, delays in court proceedings, and bail reform rollbacks.
• The City will need to reduce the current jail population by over 40% in order to close Rikers Island. In 2019, the City adopted a plan to build four borough-based jails, with a capacity of 3,300 beds, as part of its plan to close all of the jails on Rikers Island

“Advancing the vision of a smaller, safer and fairer jail system remains one of the City’s most pressing challenges and will necessitate collective action on the part of all criminal legal system stakeholders,” the report states. “Achieving those goals requires both immediate reform to address conditions that contribute to violence in the City jails, and policy change to further reduce the jail population, in particular the significant share of people in custody being detained pretrial, at least to the levels needed to close Rikers.”

The full analysis report can be viewed here.