What I Learned Running the Nation’s Most Notorious Jail

When Mayor Bill de Blasio chose me to run New York City’s Department of Correction for the final seven months of his term, I immersed myself in Rikers Island so I could quickly come up to speed. I moved myself and my team’s offices onto Rikers and began touring seven days a week, at all hours.

Editor’s Note: Rikers Island, one of the world’s largest correctional institutions and mental health facilities, houses an average daily population of 10,000 inmates, the majority of whom are pretrial detainees. With a reputation for violence and inmate abuse, it has been targeted for eventual closure by city authorities.

On the Friday before Father’s Day, I showed up at the George R. Vierno Center (GRVC) on Rikers at around midnight and was surprised to see Warden Jean Rene — a gentle giant of a man — still at work (I later learned that Rene could almost always be found there). We entered a living area where a young correctional officer (CO) was working her second triple shift of the week, monitoring twice as many units as she was supposed to.

She was thoroughly exhausted and started unloading when she saw us, relating story after story about indignities that incarcerated people and staff suffered.

One that stuck with me was about a guy on her unit who had a visit scheduled with his daughter. As visiting time approached, she warned him that it would likely be canceled because staff shortages had left the unit with no escorts. He broke down in tears when she confirmed that the visit was off. She gathered everyone in the unit and asked them to “be good” while she left to take the man to see his daughter.

Thankfully, nothing bad happened when she “abandoned her post.” But she knew that if it had—or by telling the Commissioner and the Warden of her humane insubordination—she would be in trouble.

This story is emblematic of the indignities and the kindness that never made the papers. I’d often enter living units and have incarcerated people tell me to send a CO home because they were working a triple shift.

By the time I became DOC Commissioner in June 2021, things were spiraling out of control. More than a quarter of my staff were either out sick or on light duty. Hundreds more were working in plum positions, far from incarcerated people. Staff “AWOLed”—skipped work without calling—5,000 times in July and August. Hundreds more were on unpaid, medical, and military leave or out because of personal emergencies.

Warden Rene showed me a staffing spreadsheet where only 46 percent of staff were available to work that day. The result: dozens of unstaffed posts with available staff working triple shifts while violence spiked.

Some people were surely sick. But some were just as surely faking it. People “out sick” sometimes posted pictures of themselves in the Bahamas or throwing house parties. There were nearly three times as many people “sick” on the July 4th holiday as on June 4th.

This level of chaos fed itself. The more people feigned illness, the more their colleagues were beleaguered, causing them to AWOL or call in sick too. Or they just quit, which more than 800 staff did in the five months from August through January.

My colleagues and I felt that we needed a combination of discipline and success to wrench Rikers out of its nose-dive. When we disciplined people for AWOLing and faking sick leave, more people came to work and violence declined to a better but still unacceptable level.

But we also needed to give people hope.

Violence among young adults at Rikers was three times that of the general population. So, in November we created model young adult units by sitting down with young people and COs, examining data and other jurisdictions’ approaches, and codesigning units where programming was robust and COs and young people would “circle up” to discuss problems as they arose.

By the end of January, there were zero fights and assaults on staff in those four units. I hoped to take that approach systemwide, but Mayor Eric Adams had another Commissioner in mind. I truly wish the new Commissioner all the best in his difficult job.

Vincent Schiraldi

There are hopeful lessons to be garnered from these experiences: listen to incarcerated people and staff; provide robust programming; start small and blow on the embers of success; ultimately, treat incarcerated people and staff the way you’d want your own child treated if they were in the same circumstances.

Vincent Schiraldi is Senior Fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab and Senior Research Scientist at the Columbia School of Social Work. He was formerly Commissioner of New York City’s Departments of Correction and Probation. This essay previously appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of  The Fortune News: Prison Conditions Inside and Out and is reproduced with permission. To access other articles in the edition, please click here.