[galimaufry]

Riker's island is very poorly designed. A big part of the problem is that it is quite inaccessible from the rest of the city. This has a ton of knock-on effects:

1. There's a severe shortage of guards. Anything that could make working in the jails more attractive will help, and a 2-hour commute is not attractive.

2. Getting medical service, prisoners with court dates, lawyers, etc. on and off the island is really really slow.

3. The jail has insourced a lot of services (for example they run a large bakery). These get staffed by corrections officers. This both makes staffing harder, and the existence of these plum positions has weird effects on the politics of the corrections union (people with power in the union are not actually working as guards and are out of touch with the reality of the jail)

Moving to a model like the Tombs, with the jail directly above the courthouse, makes way more sense.

In addition, the buildings on the island need a serious revamp (e.g. there is no automatic access control, so every major door needs a guard physically standing there to let people through and climate control is broken). As long as you need to seriously renovate anyway, might as well just build a new jail where it should have been put in the first place.

Source: I read a lot of blogposts.

[ruddct]

4. Running the jail is incredibly expensive. The cost to jail one person for a year in NYC is >$550k[0], ~4x what it was in 2011.

[0] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-co...

[ErikVandeWater]

> DOC has employed more guards than the average daily population, with the department employing 1.7 guards per incarcerated person in FY 2021.

That stood out to me.

[galimaufry]

Corrections staff at Riker's island get unlimited, unauthenticated sick leave, which may partly explain the large number here, along with their employment as clerks, bakers, door control, etc.

Incidentally this is what I meant above, about the union being out of touch: unlimited sick leave makes staffing unpredictable, which makes work unpredictable and frankly dangerous, which makes guards take more sick leave in a vicious cycle. The union has weaker-than-expected motivations to fix this, because everyone with seniority does not actually work in the housing blocks.

[PaywallBuster]

probably not that bad considering shifts, holidays, etc

[MichaelZuo]

I can’t see how the number, even after factoring all those, would be any more than 1 guard per 3 prisoners.

Which is still an incredibly high staffing ratio.

[aerostable_slug]

I work in the industry. It's an insanely high staffing count. Even at the most secure facilities (e.g. Pelican Bay in California).

We are seeing the triumph of the unions here.

[ceejayoz]

4. #2 means family visits are often impractical and time consuming, which leads to fewer visits, which leads to more crime. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/12/21/family_contact/

> A 1972 study on visitation that followed 843 people on parole from California prisons found that those who had no visitors during their incarceration were six times more likely to be reincarcerated than people with three or more visitors.

[willcipriano]

That's almost certainly correlation and not causation. Most families will probably visit you the first time you end up in prison, by the 5th time they will have written you off.

[ceejayoz]

You should read the article; that's addressed by using prisons that ended in-person visitation and saw changes as a result.

> In Travis County, Texas, there was an escalation of violence and contraband after that jail switched from offering both video calls and visitation for a few years, to banning in-person visitation altogether.

There are also behavioral changes generated by a pending visit:

> According to one study, misconduct tended to decrease in the three weeks before a visit. This may explain why more frequent visits lead to more consistent good behavior, better overall outcomes and post-release success.

[ch4s3]

You'd probably be surprised then. Familial attachments can be quite strong and most people will eventually end up out of prison and reunited with family.

[FateOfNations]

> Riker's island is very poorly designed

"designed" is a bit generous... It's a hodge-podge of facilities built over time as need arose with little consideration of long-term planning or a comprehensive strategy for the complex.