����������

���������� Note: ���������� City approved its $107 Billion budget for the year last week. While there were many things to be happy about, such as restoration of library funding, the push for departmental cuts had the effect of greatly reducing necessary mental health and re-entry services for those in NYC jails. NYC’s Department of Correction, which spends nearly $500,000 a year per individual in custody, has terminated six contracts with nonprofits providing services including training on nonviolent conflict resolution, cognitive behavioral therapy, and employment services. These services are essential to helping people successfully re-integrate into their communities and reducing recidivism. We cannot claim to be focused on improving mental health outcomes and reducing violence while also reducing the services we know lead to both. We must improve services in jails like Rikers, which has seen the percentage of individuals with serious mental health diagnoses since the current administration took over, in order to address the prevalence of mental health challenges and help people get to the most appropriate settings. We need to increase services in jails, including peer support, or people will continue to cycle between jails and hospitals without hope of real recovery and community inclusion. Read below for more information on the City’s budget and the cuts to services as Rikers.

Op-ed: Gutting Essential Services Will Endanger Lives Further on Rikers
By Michael Jacobson and Dana Kaplan | Crain’s ���������� | June 26, 2023

Rikers Island remains in a state of crisis.  from a federal monitor have raised deeply worrying concerns about ���������� City’s ability to protect incarcerated people and jail staff. Unfortunately, looming cuts to re-entry and therapeutic programs in the jails threaten to further destabilize the profoundly troubled jails.

Last month, the ���������� City Department of Correction announced it is terminating the contracts of six nonprofit service providers by July 1. This would effectively eliminate programs that serve over 1,500 people daily in the city’s jails. The programs on the chopping block cover 179 housing units, including units for people with mental illness and those in protective custody.

The Department has emphasized that these contracts are not being ended because of performance, but rather are the consequence of the mayoral directive that . The cuts were made alongside the unrealistic pledge that several dozen DOC programming staff, who already have full-time responsibilities, will somehow absorb the workload of almost 100 nonprofit employees who provide thousands of hours of programming each week. 

If the Adams administration is serious about cost savings, the best path is to  altogether. While delays threaten the timeline for closure, the costs—both human and fiscal—of staying open are painfully clear.

According to the Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and the Institute for State and Local Governance, the city will save $1.3 billion annually by closing Rikers, even when accounting for inflation and the cost of building and operating the borough-based jails that, along with secure hospital beds, will replace Rikers.

But we hardly have to wait until Rikers closes to realize smart savings.

A first step would be right-sizing the city’s jails, starting with the correctional workforce. The DOC is budgeted for over 7,000 uniformed staff and almost 9,000 total staff for a jail population of just over 6,000. No other jail system in the country even comes close to this kind of staffing ratio. There are hundreds of vacant uniformed positions that could be eliminated, saving over $100 million. Controlling overtime should also be a top priority, which last year cost $260 million.

Hanging cost savings on cuts to nonprofit contracts—part of the 5% of DOC’s budget spent on programming, services and nutrition—is short-sighted.  

The city can also safely lower the jail population, allowing DOC to close jails and consolidate operations. This is a vital element of the City Council’s adopted plan to close Rikers. Special attention should be paid to the 53% of the jail population with a mental illness and the 40% of people entering jail who say they actively use illicit drugs and/or excessively drink. People whom Mayor Adams has said need treatment, not jail. 

Fortunately, we have excellent programs in ���������� City that we can scale up to increase safety. 

By removing barriers to access, we can  opportunities for the more than 2,500 people annually who cycle into Rikers with serious mental illness, addiction issues and no stable housing. Supportive housing—affordable housing with wrap-around services—has been proven to cut incarceration among individuals who cycle in and out of jail frequently by 40%.

Enhancing pre-trial supervised release will allow case-management providers to better serve thousands of program participants with high needs who are repeatedly arrested. The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice estimates that enhancing supervised release can cut recidivism among this population by 30% to 50%. 

All justice system stakeholders have to move cases more quickly. It is shameful—and puts a ridiculous burden on DOC—that criminal cases in ���������� City take three times the national average to resolve. It certainly doesn’t serve victims. The Independent Commission projects that speeding up cases to align with ���������� state standards would mean about 1,400 fewer people in jail today—with absolutely zero detriment to public safety.  

DOC’s budget is bloated, with an annual spending level of almost $500,000 for every person in custody. That’s five to 10 times the amount spent by the other largest jail systems in the country. 

But there are better approaches to reducing these massive costs than taking a hatchet to the nonprofit providers who provide conflict resolution, discharge planning, employment readiness, cognitive behavioral therapy and other critical re-entry-focused programs.

To save lives, ���������� City must restore the cuts to programming in city jails and commit to smart investments that reduce the jail population and advance the closure of Rikers Island altogether. That is the only path to a safe, just and equitable city, and the only path that makes fiscal sense.  

Michael Jacobson is executive director of the Institute of State and Local Governance, and a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously ���������� City correction commissioner, probation commissioner and a deputy budget director in the ���������� City Office of Management and Budget. Dana Kaplan is a senior advisor to the Independent Commission on ���������� City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and a recent Art for Justice Fellow.

Libraries Spared but Rikers Suffers in $107 Billion N.Y.C. Budget Deal
By Dana Rubinstein and Emma G Fitzsimmons | ���������� Times | June 29,2023

Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, said on Thursday that they had reached agreement on a $107 billion budget for ���������� City that would restore funding to several Council priorities that the mayor had initially sought to cut.

The budget negotiations were particularly fraught this year, with City Council members running for re-election while they were pushing the mayor to reverse cuts to libraries, schools and education services at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail.

“We can talk for hours about the things that were not accomplished in this budget,” Ms. Adams said. “This is a bittersweet moment for this Council.”

The mayor praised the budget for fiscal year 2024 as a “strong and fiscally responsible” agreement that was on time and prioritized the city’s most pressing issues.

Library leaders had warned that the mayor’s $36 million in proposed cuts would force them to close many branches on weekends, but the .

Leaders of organizations that help detainees at Rikers  that the mayor’s desire to eliminate their programs, some decades old, would make it harder for those who leave Rikers to successfully reintegrate into society. Though the mayor and City Council have yet to release formal budget documents, the mayor confirmed on Thursday that those cuts stand.

“All of those services we can do internally,” said Mayor Adams, speaking to reporters on Thursday at City Hall. He called it “an insult” to Correction Department staff to suggest otherwise.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, argued that broad spending cuts were necessary because the city is facing major financial challenges, including the migrant crisis, costs for labor deals with city employees and concerns about the vibrancy of commercial real estate. The city’s revenue for the 2023 fiscal year was roughly $2 billion higher than expected, which helped fend off some of the deeper cuts.

Still, a budget deficit of $5 billion is expected in the 2025 fiscal year, growing to nearly $7 billion and nearly $8 billion in the two years after, and budget watchdogs warned that the mayor and City Council had not done enough to prepare for uncertain times ahead.

“It is essentially a one-year budget that again unfortunately delays the wise but hard choices needed to stabilize the city’s fiscal future,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

City Council leaders had pushed for more funding for affordable housing, universal prekindergarten, the City University of ����������, parks, discount MetroCards for low-income ����������ers, free legal services and home delivery meals for seniors, along with a restoration of the programming cuts at Rikers. They were successful on many fronts, though in some cases won less funding than they had requested.

Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker, highlighted the tense tone of the budget negotiations, calling it a “difficult process” and saying that the talks were “uniquely challenging because of how much they focused on restoring cuts to so many important programs.”

A Democrat from Queens who was not the mayor’s first choice for speaker, Ms. Adams has taken an increasingly combative stance toward him, , as required by law, after Mr. Adams raised doubts about that timeline. On Thursday, Ms. Adams said she was disappointed that the Council was not able to restore some cuts, including to homeless services.

“We got some fantastic wins for the people of the city, but some were left out,” she said.

Nonprofits have for decades provided services at Rikers. The Fortune Society, for example, has worked with detainees on nonviolent conflict resolution and employment skills training; the bulk of its programs at city jails have now been eliminated, the society said.

The Department of Correction has argued that it will continue to provide those services using its own staff. Stanley Richards, formerly a commissioner in the department and now deputy chief executive at the Fortune Society, said that was impractical.

“There’s a role for the department; this just happens not to be their role,” said Mr. Richards.

“We come in there, and we provide a bit of light in a very dark place,” Mr. Richards added.

The cuts reinforce the impression that the mayor and his Correction Department would like to avoid outside scrutiny of Rikers, according to Carlina Rivera, who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice. In recent months, the administration has eliminated an oversight board’s unfettered access to video camera footage on Rikers and  alerting reporters when detainees die.

“This administration is trying to eliminate eyes and ears from the jails,” Ms. Rivera said.

Public schools have also faced painful budget cuts under Mr. Adams after enrollment dropped during the pandemic. But roughly $20 million was included in this year’s budget for a plan, , to keep individual school budgets flat next school year, even if enrollment drops.

The Council pushed for $60 million to expand the popular , which provides half-price MetroCards for low-income ����������ers; the budget included an additional $20 million for the program, which has already enrolled more than 290,000 ����������ers.

The mayor and the City Council have disagreed about how best to address the city’s housing crisis. Mr. Adams has faced criticism for not moving quickly enough to create affordable housing and for supporting rent increases for the roughly two million people who live in rent-stabilized apartments. Under pressure from the Council, he recently removed a requirement that homeless people stay in shelters for 90 days before they can move into permanent housing.

But in the final weeks of negotiations,  that would have expanded the city’s rental housing voucher program, a move that contributed to tension with the Council. Ms. Adams called his veto a “harmful act of useless political theater” and said that the Council was prepared to override it.

On Thursday, Mr. Adams lamented the fact that providing services to more than 80,000 migrants took such a large chunk of the city’s budget; he estimated the cost at $1.4 billion this year.

“I just think it’s unfair — $1.4 billion that could have gone into some of the priorities that we all share,” he said.