Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A bit of breaking news this morning. Another young person detained at Rikers Island has died. Graham Rayman at the Daily News reports a detainee held on robbery and bail-jumping charges died in New York City's Rikers Island jail early today, just seven days after entering the system. Sources said the 27-year-old man is the ninth detainee to die in city jail so far this year, following 19 deaths in 2022 and 16 in 2021. 27 people have died in the jails during the Adams administration, that from the Daily News.

New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera is with us now. We had already planned to speak with her about the crisis in city jails and the work being done on City Council to mitigate that crisis before today's tragically relevant news. As chair of the Council's Committee on Criminal Justice, Council Member Rivera has introduced legislation that would set notification rules related to deaths of people held in New York City Department of Correction facilities. Last year, remember, was the deadliest on record at Rikers with a total of 19 deaths.

We'll talk about that and the push from City Council's Committee on Criminal Justice for a broader transparency throughout the Department of Correction and getting people to their court dates, which you think would be pretty basic, but doesn't seem to happen as regularly as it should, not nearly. Council Member Rivera represents District 2. That's Lower East Side up through around East 34th Street in Manhattan. Again, she also chairs the Council's Committee on Criminal Justice. Council Member Rivera, welcome back to WNYC. Always good to have you on.

Council Member Carlina Rivera: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Council Member Rivera, mostly on the New York City Department of Correction. If you're listening from Rikers or a correctional facility elsewhere in the city, we invite your calls. I know we've gotten calls from Rikers in the past, or if you're listening from Council Member Rivera's district on the East Side, now's your chance to speak with her or ask a question. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. Your reaction to this latest death at Rikers?

Council Member Rivera: This is just tragic and I just want to express my condolences to the person's family. This is unfortunately happening on somewhat of a regular basis. You gave these really startling and concerning numbers, 27 deaths. We're at nine people this year since the mayor took office. Really, the culture at Rikers of violence, of dysfunction, and the lack of transparency really does need a public accounting. We have to increase the transparency to get to true reform. It's been decades in the making and I just can't believe that people are in jail awaiting trial and dying. It's unacceptable.

Brian Lehrer: I'm not seeing a name or a cause of death for the detainee who died today. Do you have any information on that or if it is in any way attributable to negligence or worse on the part of staff?

Council Member Rivera: Well, it's breaking news as you mentioned. Right now, I think what's important is that the public knows that there are these deaths occurring on Rikers Island. The bill that we have to notify individuals of the deaths that occur is very, very sensitive to the information like names to ensure that there's a next of kin notified before the name is ever revealed to the public. We understand that it could take some time for us to get to know who this person was, but I think the importance here is that this was a human being who lost their life in the care and custody of the Department of Correction. That never should have happened.

The public should know when these deaths occur. We have legislation, legislation that I have in the council, to make it so that there are not just notifications but really codifying investigation and timelines for those investigations related to the circumstances, so we could know what surrounds these deaths and then require the Board of Correction, which is there to ensure DOC, the Department of Correction, meets minimum standards, make recommendations. We have to require reporting and we have to ensure that people know that these are human beings losing their lives in the custody of the city.

Brian Lehrer: I'm seeing a name now reported by the Daily News. In a case like this, I think it respects the deceased to say the name out loud. It is Manish Kunwar, 27-year-old detainee at Rikers. I saw that you wrote an op-ed in City & State a little while ago about the need for transparency and accountability in New York's criminal legal system generally. It begins with this absolutely staggering statistic that I will pass along to the listeners by just reading it from your piece.

"New York City spends more than $555,000 per person per year on incarceration." That figure I see comes from a 2021 report by then comptroller for New York City, Scott Stringer. The headline for your op-ed was Rikers is Richly Staffed. Without a Plan to Rightsize, It Will Cost Us Dearly. You were talking about transparency just now, but why does New York spend so much money per year per incarcerated person over $500,000 if this report is true? What would it mean to rightsize the city's correction system?

Council Member Rivera: With spending like that on incarceration, it really doesn't make a lot of sense when you also see the violence that is there and what is transpiring inside the jails themselves with spending levels of 350% more per incarcerated person than the two other largest jail systems in the country. That's Los Angeles and Cook County, which is in Illinois. Rikers is both the most expensive and seemingly the least-effective intervention our city has to offer.

More than 500,000 per person per year, even with high attrition rates over the last few years. Current staffing levels translate to just over one officer for every person in detention, which is actually a ratio that's vastly above the national average, which is usually one officer for maybe 3.6 people. There's been a few reasons why the staffing in and of itself is incredibly problematic. There's abuse of sick leave and modified duty that leads to staffing issues despite one of the highest ratios of corrections officers to incarcerated person of any jail system.

We're looking to close Rikers. That's a mandate by 2027. Smaller facilities will need fewer staff. Remaining COs, correction officers, they'll need retraining to really lead that dysfunction of Rikers Island behind. The costs, it's out of control. It's very much looking at, "What is this city doing to manage this disaster, this physical and humanitarian disaster?" The costs have just ballooned.

Brian Lehrer: Just one more thing on the transparency piece that you were talking before. Your proposed legislation comes a few months after the Department of Correction announced it would actually end the practice of notifying the public after deaths in its custody. That was despite a report from an independent monitor that, in part, detailed the death of Joshua Valles. This past May, city officials claimed Valles died of a heart attack, but an autopsy showed he had a fractured skull. What is the city policy as of right now and did that Daily News reporter have to find out about this death through unofficial means?

Council Member Rivera: Well, typically I will say the majority of times that I find out that there is a death on Rikers Island is through the media. Reporters who were typically alerted now have to essentially join a list of notifications. Many times, it's because they have relationships inside of the department itself. DOC announced they would stop that practice. We think the public deserves transparency about our jail system's failures.

We actually depend on the media quite a bit. That goes for not just when deaths occur but really the conditions inside. I remember last year, Gothamist released these never-before-seen photos of some of the conditions inside the jails themselves. These were people in soiled clothing, incarcerated people dragging other people to their medical appointments, people locked in shower cages. It's that sort of not just transparency within the department that we need.

The Board of Correction does need unfettered access to these videos and these photos as often as possible. Really, the public and the media should be able to report it as soon as possible. Again, being very, very sensitive to the families. We can only try to understand what they're going through with someone who's incarcerated when the average length of stay in Rikers is over 100 days now. Just getting them to court is such a challenge. There is no policy, except to maybe join a list. In order to ensure that we have a process that is clear, that is streamlined, that we think is right, and aligned with alerting the public, we have that bill.

Brian Lehrer: Terrence in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Council Member Carlina Rivera. Hi, Terrence, thanks so much for calling in. I see you're a former corrections officer.

Terrence: Yes, from the 1990s. We had less officers on post at that time and we didn't have the death rates that's going on now. The communication was always somewhat hostile, but there was some communication with the inmates there that there was a rapport. If you talk to anyone who lived in the streets or had that street life, there was codes and ethics between police and thieves.

To get away from that, there were programs like the IID program. We had programs where the department was back and forth with, "Should we have a program or we shouldn't have a program?" You had situations where the violence was so high. You needed to have someone who was put in segregation or put into what they call the box. The liberals didn't understand that.

They thought it was inhumane, so there was so much violence there sometimes. You had to have to put that person away. Then you had other people who had success stories through the IID program and other programs like that. You can't rule with an iron fist. It has to be a balancing. If we don't treat people like human beings, we're going to have problems. If you don't deal with those high levels of violence, you're still going to have a problem.

It has to be a good ingredient, a good mixture, just like cooking your food. If you put too much of anything, it's going to go wrong. The food is not going to be good. What I'm saying is that if the department stopped the high turnover to offices, even the overtime had more programs and then had more disciplinary actions. If an inmate cut someone, they should get charged for slicing another inmate or cutting another inmate. Sometimes those infractions would go to the wayside.

Sometimes the investigations about gang activity would be thrown to the wayside, or it was trumped up to be what it wasn't, or sometimes you had officers doing the wrong thing. All the corruption has to be done with. You have too many people in power who do too many favors for their friends. You have some new officers who have the integrity to do the right thing, but they get disenfranchised or they get discouraged to do the right thing because everything else is going back.

Brian Lehrer: Terrence, with your first-person experience as a corrections officer in the system, how do we get to that ideal place?

Terrence: First of all, with corrections officers coming through the academy, you have to bring in spirituality. You have to bring in family values. Then you have to talk about social and current events, having the insight and the foresight to deal with those things. Then you're dealing with a confined environment where everything is changed and blocked up. That psychologically does something bad to the inmate as well as the officer.

There has to be some pressure released from that environment, whether you wear a uniform or you're wearing a jumper. There is communication, but the communication gets ruined when you have the administration, "Well, we don't want these lawsuits to come on the department. We'll sue the officer instead or we're going to have them work overtime because someone's not coming in." There has to be a balancing.

Brian Lehrer: Terrence, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much for your contribution. Council Member Rivera, a lot on the table there. Any that you want to react to?

Council Member Rivera: Yes, I also want to thank Terrence for his service. I would say this is not an easy job. There is no doubt. Everyone on that island, in the city jail system, deserves to be safe. That includes corrections officers, that includes the people in New York City jails, most of whom are presumed innocent, and, of course, our communities. He said a few things that are important. Managing overtime, disciplinary measures being consistent, which is something that has been really questionable since the beginning of this administration.

With the firing of people in terms of taking on disciplinary records and not wanting to just get rid of them like really looking at what these corrections officers are doing within the facilities themselves. They also deserve to be safe. There has to be that balance. It's not easy. There are so many things that were mentioned there. Programming is one of them. Right now, we're planning on doing a hearing on education programming in detention facilities.

We're looking at young people and their access to school and getting their GED, their high school diploma. Right now, attendance is down. Average daily attendance is about 49%. That's up from the pandemic. Compared to pre-pandemic, those numbers are very, very low. We want to get to a few questions from the administration. How are people understanding? What is available to them? We want data. We want evaluation. We want to know, are there vocational tracks? Is there access to the law library?

We get a lot of pushback that there aren't enough escorts for people to make it to educational programs but also their medical appointments. We recently had cuts to the Department of Correction and the Department of Probation programmings with outside providers, non-profits who have decades of experience whose employees also include people with lived experiences inside the system themselves, having their contracts cut very suddenly.

That is really also not helpful and conducive to the term "rehabilitation." Those have all been subjects of hearings within the council exercising our charter-mandated responsibility of oversight and investigation, but we always, always make sure we talk about every single person on the island themselves. His comment about less officers and fewer deaths. Well, you just have to look at the data and make these evaluations. It's not going well. It's dangerous and people are dying right now.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take one more call for you, and I also want to ask you about one more piece of legislation. I'll do that first and then take the call. Another legislation coming out of your committee I see addresses the correction department's failure to bring people held in its custody to their court dates of all things, and the general lack of transparency department-wide about that.

Earlier this year in January, I see the Adams administration and the DOC stopped giving the Board of Correction unfettered access to video from Rikers Island. The Board of Correction or BOC is the watchdog agency tasked with providing oversight of the DOC, the Department of Correction, just to keep the listeners along with us on the alphabet soup, but tell us how often the DOC has failed to bring jailed New Yorkers to their court dates, and what can you do about that?

Council Member Rivera: Well, data provided to the council by DOC indicated that, earlier this year, they were bringing about 85% of people in custody who were scheduled to appear in court made it to the courthouse. This number sounds okay. What's happening to the 15%? I'll get to that in a second, but this also suggests that individuals are about as likely to return to court if they are released pending trial. That's without the significant harms caused by even short stays in jail. You're seeing the delay--

Brian Lehrer: Let me put a finer point, even a finer point on that perhaps from a comment that I saw, and maybe this was even attributed to you, I'm not sure, that, "Hello, the whole point of putting somebody at Rikers--" because that's a place where people who are accused go. That's not after you've been convicted of a crime. The whole point in our bail system is to put people there so that they show up for trial, and then the system itself is failing to bring them to their court dates in, I guess, you're saying 15% of the cases.

Council Member Rivera: Absolutely. That's definitely something I've said over and over again. The whole point is to get them to court. We have legislation that would ensure that we are recording refusals. This is to ensure accountability on both sides because we've heard from the Department of Correction that people have given reasons for why they didn't want to go to court that day. It could include that they're sick. We heard religious observance, which we didn't quite get any details about to explain.

We've also heard the other side, loved ones who are waiting in court for their family member who is incarcerated, public defenders who say the person's not showing up. We even heard a story of someone who was reportedly in the building but not in the courtroom. This legislation would ensure that defense attorneys receive videos in a timely fashion, that all the refusals are recorded, whether on body-worn or handheld video, and that we're reporting it in essentially real-time when people are going to court, what time, from what housing facility.

As I mentioned, people are languishing. Extending time in pretrial detention is bad for everyone. It increases the likelihood of conviction, subsequent recidivism. With the average length of stay, about 115 days, that's four times the national average of other jail facilities. It's essential that we expedite case delays. We had a hearing in May. We'll be passing the bill today, and it's just really important that people get to their court date.

Brian Lehrer: We have three minutes left in the segment, then we'll have the latest news, then we'll have Walter Isaacson with his biography of Elon Musk. We'll take one more call. Paula Whitney in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC with Council Member Rivera. Hello, Paula Whitney.

Paula Whitney: Good morning, Mr. Brian. Good morning, Council Member Rivera. Your show was sensational. I'll make two to three points. Number one, I'm a former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney. I was there for nearly four years. I'm completely incensed and scandalized that the DOC budget was cut with $17 million, $1 billion dollars, and all that money goes to Mayor Adams' police department. You want to see crime is going to bite us on the fanny because people are going to get out and become recidivists. Thanks to Mayor Adams' infinite wisdom.

Number two, I'm a violinist. I grew up in the Manhattan housing projects in the '60s and '70s. I went to public school. I played violin. I learned violin in the public school system. The second point is when I went to court each day in the district attorney's office, I look at the docket and I said, "If only these people had music and art in the public schools, they wouldn't be on that docket for the day." Third point, my violin teacher, she told me her conductor, who has run a music program for a zillion years, he has not had one student be involved in the criminal justice system.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to leave it there, Paula Whitney, because our time is going to expire in the segment. I want to give the council member to give a reaction. Council Member, give a reaction.

Council Member Rivera: I thought that was a good point. Everyone says programming works inside of the jails. These are people who just want access to resources, who want to ensure that they stay on track even while just awaiting their trial. Whether that's arts, that's a horticulture program, that is education around literacy, it should be available. It is. It's just not getting to folks. I think that her point is very well-received. Cutting those contracts for non-profit providers who have so much experience and understand the system better than anyone, that was, I thought, a misstep and it was a mistake. I hope that we could rectify that and ensure that we're treating people with the humanity that they deserve.

Brian Lehrer: Councilmember Carlina Rivera from City Council District 2. That's the Lower East Side up to around East 34th Street in Manhattan. We've been talking to her today in the context of being chair of the Council's Committee on Criminal Justice. Thank you so much.

Council Member Rivera: Thank you. Have a great day.

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