NEW YORK – Responding to an escalating crisis inside New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday signed a measure that will lead to the release of about 200 detainees, many of them held for parole violations.
The law, known as the Less is More Act, is intended to ease jail crowding at a time when severe staffing shortages at the city's Department of Correction have led to unsafe and unsanitary conditions for detainees and guards. Ten people have died at Rikers since December, several by suicide.
Even though the law does not go into effect until next March, Hochul said she is directing the parole board to immediately release from Rikers 191 people who qualify.
Hochul said the legislation's focus on stopping reimprisonment of individuals for technical parole violations was a crucial step in ending one of the largest drivers of mass incarceration in New York.
"Parole in this state often becomes a ticket back into jail because of technical violations," the governor said. "Someone was caught with a drink or using a substance or missing an appointment."
Hochul also said an additional 200 people serving sentences would be moved from Rikers to state prisons over the next five days to ease the burden on the city jail.
But the legislation will still leave Rikers far more crowded than it was last spring, when a wave of releases amid the pandemic dropped the population below 4,000. As of Friday, more than 6,000 people were held at the jail.
At the same time, coronavirus rates inside the jail appear to be climbing. Correctional health officials first reported an uptick in the prevalence of the virus in mid-August, followed by a spike in cases later that month. After active cases and rates in the jail dropped to near zero in June and July, the seven-day average positive test rate among detainees — 4.36% as of this week — is now higher than the city's 3.92% rate at large.
During a City Council hearing this week to address the conditions at Rikers, officials described a two-pronged catastrophe in the making. About 2,700 staff members — roughly one-third of the entire workforce — are absent or unable to work on any given day for myriad reasons, leading to a lack of supervision that has caused violence among detainees; and crowding in unsanitary conditions is paving the way for a new surge in virus infections. As of this week, the city said there were 65 active virus cases at the jail.
Only 36% of detainees at the jail are fully vaccinated.
"The current conditions are resulting in a rapid increase in COVID-19 infection rate in the jails, [and] previously effective control mechanisms such as isolation and quarantine will not be possible because of the department's dysfunction and overcrowding," said Robert Cohen, a member of the Board of Correction, an independent body that monitors the jail system.
