NEW YORK—At a Thursday press briefing on the Department of Correction’s planned reforms of jail conditions at Rikers Island, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte expressed that their biggest challenge is how to provide for mentally ill inmates.
The mayor said the high proportion of inmates with a mental illness—at 40 percent of the total population at Rikers Island—was a reality that the Corrections Department failed to address, and was at times unwilling to. Half of all violent incidents reported at Rikers involved mentally ill inmates.
“There was no public acknowledgement that the problems on Rikers Island were first and foremost a mental health problem,” the mayor said. “We literally as a city, didn’t diagnose the problem until now.”
He added that a “culture change” was necessary to bring about effective reform in an agency where there existed “practices that were shockingly outmoded, things that went unsaid, things that went unaddressed.”
To that effect, Ponte replaced over 90 percent of the top leadership, or 25 to 30 staff, including uniformed and civilian positions.
The department is also establishing a new housing unit where the most violent inmates will be kept. Just over 2 percent of inmates at Rikers are responsible for the most serious acts of violence, said Ponte. At the new “enhanced supervision housing” unit, the officer-to-inmate ratio will be increased, and inmates will spend seven hours of the day out of their cells.
The department had previously relied on solitary confinement—referred to as “punitive segregation”—to punish inmates who violated jail rules. There, inmates spend 23 hours-a-day in isolation. Ponte said the new unit will allow corrections officers to keep jails safe without having to use solitary confinement as a means to discipline inmates.
