NEW YORK — A staff shortage at Rikers Island jail left two units without corrections officers for more than 24 hours Tuesday and Wednesday, a prisoner reported — and a city oversight board said the ongoing personnel problems factored in a wave of suicides in the jails since December.
Two Rikers units — known as 3 West and 3 North in the Otis Bantum Correction Center — were without corrections officers through at least through noon Wednesday, leaving inmates in the strange position of helping other inmates get to court transport and video conferences, said Terrence Ferguson, the hip-hop artist known as 2 Milly.
“We are really running the dorm by ourselves. I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ferguson, who is serving a sentence for gun possession.
Ferguson said Wednesday afternoon that there had been no officer on his floor since 6 a.m. Tuesday. “I’ve been answering the phones,” he said.
The two unmanned units Ferguson spoke of together house about 80 prisoners.
Department of Correction officials declined comment on whether parts of Rikers have gone unguarded for longer than 24 hours. But the department has acknowledged a personnel shortage, which it has blamed on a large number of sick or unavailable staff.
Correction officials have said that in July, about 3,500 of Rikers’ 8,500 officers either called in sick or were medically exempt from working with detainees. Another 2,300 simply didn’t come in to work at some point during the month.
“These gaps are a regular occurrence and it’s a prime reason why officers are being attacked and inmates aren’t getting the services they need,” a Correction Department source said of the 24-hour gap reported by Ferguson.
Rikers’ population has roughly doubled since July 2019. “You can’t expect the population to double with fewer people to provide those services, and this not happen,” said the source.
Meanwhile, the city’s Board of Correction noted in a statement Wednesday that Rikers went without any suicides at all in 2018, 2019 and 2020 up to December. Since December, five prisoners have taken their own lives.
Brandon Rodriguez, 25, hanged himself in an intake cell the Otis Bantum center on Aug. 10. Segundo Guallpa, 57, was found dead by suicide in his cell at the North Infirmary Command on Aug. 30. Previously, William Diaz-Guzman, 30, hanged himself Jan. 23; Tomas Carlo-Camacho, 48, died March 2, and Javier Velasco used a bedsheet to hang himself in his cell at the Anna M. Kross Center on March 19.
“Five suicides in nine months along with an alarming increase in attempted self-harm signals a crisis for persons in custody and for the New York City Department of Correction,” the board said.
The board called on the city to move fast to improve conditions, noting that absent or unavailable staff has created “unsafe conditions” for Rikers employees and detainees. But the board didn’t offer proposals to address the issues.
Roughly 35% of corrections officers were out sick or prevented from working with the jail population at the end of July, the board said.
The board also called for a reduction in the jail population, while law enforcement officials have blamed bail reform laws passed in 2020 for an increase in violent crime over the past year.
“As long as the population steadily rises and the staffing crisis continues, persons in custody and those who protect and work with them are in an impossible position,” the board said.
The situation at Rikers also drew a call for a reduction in the jail population by Akeem Browder, brother of Kalief Browder, who died by suicide at age 22 in 2015 after spending three years on Rikers as a teen, much of it in solitary confinement. He noted that counting the five reported suicides, nine people have died in the jails since December.
“No one in the city jails received a death sentence,” he said. “Since the city is unable to provide the most basic care to keep people healthy and alive, everyone in the city jails must be released and not one more person should be sent to this hellhole.”
DOC officials said they plan a news conference Thursday to address the staffing and other issues.
By Wednesday afternoon, Ferguson said, no additional staff had arrived in the units in OBCC. “We’re still here right now, still answering the phone, still sending guys to court, sending to video court,” he said.
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