Stanley Richards, New York City’s newly appointed Department of Correction commissioner, testified at a recent City Council hearing that Rikers Island was under acute strain and badly in need of an overhaul. In addition to the decaying physical structure, Richards highlighted a decrease in correction officer staffing levels such that people inside do not feel safe.
Rather than adopt the kneejerk suggestion of adding more COs, Richards noted that recruitment alone will not solve the crisis. Instead, he advocated shrinking the jail population, recognizing that if there are too few COs to supervise the jail population, then it is necessary to think about releasing people who present no threat to public safety.
Richards knows what he is talking about. As someone who was formerly incarcerated, he has firsthand knowledge that there are many people on Rikers who need not be there.
The state Department of Corrections is in strikingly similar dire straits with dilapidated prisons and a decreasing number of COs.
Rikers Island, which opened in 1935, is young compared to several of New York State’s prisons like Auburn (1818) or Clinton Dannemora (1845). Even Attica (1931) predates Rikers. These antiquated institutions barely provide heat in the winter and cannot cool down in the summer.
In February 2025, thousands of state COs engaged in an illegal strike that lasted 22 days. In the aftermath, there are about 4,800 fewer COs in the state’s 42 prisons.
The governor’s response to the strike was to send 3,000 National Guardsmen, none of whom received any training about working in a prison, at a cost of $700 million. Many Guardsmen remain in prisons at a cost of another $535 million. The governor proposed other ill-advised and dangerous solutions, including reducing the age requirement for COs from 21 to 18, but the crisis persists, and staffing levels are well below previous years.
In the meantime, visits have been reduced from seven days a week to just two days at most of the state’s maximum security prisons as officials claim there are not enough staff members to supervise the visits. Legal visits and phone calls have also been reduced as prison administrators claim they lack staff to escort people to the visits or the phone calls.
Medical appointments, educational classes, and myriad programs have been curtailed or shut down and people spend fewer hours outside their cells. The inevitable result of this isolation is tension, frustration, and despair, heightened by the specter of the murders of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi at the hands of COs.
The governor should take a page from Richards and the commonsense solution of responsibly reducing the prison population. With 33,000 people in prison, it is inconceivable that there are not thousands who could be safely returned to their families and communities.
Unlike people on Rikers Island who might have been there for a few weeks, there are people in state prisons who have been incarcerated for decades and have demonstrable evidence of profound rehabilitation; people who on any measure present no threat to public safety and have much to offer on the outside.
A solution to the staffing crisis is already teed up. The state Constitution explicitly gives the governor the power to grant clemency and commute prison sentences. There are more than 1,000 robust clemency applications pending in her office that have been vetted and analyzed by members of the governor’s clemency staff. Surely, among those applications are numerous people who could and should be released. All that is needed is some sensible leadership of the sort being put on display in New York City.
Zeidman is a professor at CUNY Law School and founder and co-director of the Second Look Project NY.