Hundreds 'stuck' on Rikers Island due to state prison dysfunction, officials said

Some 350 convicted people are crowded onto Rikers Island awaiting transfer to prisons upstate due to continued ripple effects from the state prison strike, according to jail officials.

The backlog has led city jailers to seek permission to house more people in dorms than regulations allow — a situation advocates say will exacerbate conditions at the already notorious city jail complex.

Rikers is meant to detain people accused of crimes but not yet tried and convicted. In a letter to the city Board of Correction, jails commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie said her department expects Rikers' population to continue increasing in the coming weeks as more people are sentenced to prison and the state system doesn't have the staff to accept them.

Even though the illegal strike ended this week, the state fired some 2,000 guards who refused to return to work and is operating with about 75% of its normal staff.

State prison officials said they will re-evaluate accepting new prisoners at the end of the month, while advocates said incarcerated people are desperate to get off Rikers Island. The complex is already under the threat of a federal takeover due to perennially unsafe conditions, violence, sexual harassment and rape allegations leveled at officers and a string of inmates who have died in custody.

A bottleneck of people convicted of crimes due to capacity issues at state prisons will likely exacerbate those conditions.

State correction officers first walked off the job on Feb. 17 because of what they called dangerous working conditions. Under state law, public workers are not allowed to strike and the officers’ union did not condone the “wildcat” strike.

The city Department of Correction sent a letter to regulators dated Feb. 27 warning of population spikes on Rikers.

"[This] will likely create a strain on our ability to create bed space for new admissions and transfer [people in custody] to other commands following acts of violence," Maginley-Liddie wrote in a letter to regulators in late February.

Since then, the backlog has nearly doubled, according to Annais Morales, a correction department spokesperson.

“As of earlier this week, there were about 350 people in NYC DOC custody who are DOCCS-ready but stuck here,” she wrote in an email, referring to the city and state prison systems.

On Tuesday, jail officials asked the city’s Board of Correction — the regulatory body that governs city jails — to waive minimum space requirements and allow the Otis Bantum Correctional Center dormitories to increase capacity from 50 to 60 beds in each dorm. The full Rikers complex currently houses about 6,800 people.

"This number will continue to grow until DOCCS begins accepting new admissions,” Maginley-Liddie wrote, adding that it’s unknown if the state will start accepting people all at once or in smaller increments.

Darren Mack, co-founder of the advocacy group Freedom Agenda, criticized the proposal to add more beds.

"You could touch the person right next to you and right behind you if you reach your hand out,” he said.

He blamed mismanagement rather than true space limitations in preventing Rikers from opening more dormitories that are currently empty.

At its peak, Rikers held more than 20,000 people in jail, but several dormitories have since been closed. Maginley-Liddie told the Board of Corrections this week she expects the backlog to last until the end of the month.

“A lot of times people plead guilty because they're so desperate to get off Rikers,” Mack said. “The strike, it's preventing people from being transferred.”

This story has been updated to include comment from state prison officials.