Why is New York City adding more correction officers?

While several prominent New York City and state politicians are leading a vocal charge to close the toxic Rikers Island prison, a more reasonable (and politically feasible) scenario – one outlined by The Marshall Project’s Neil Barsky and the NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman on The Slant Podcast last week – involves reducing the overcrowded inmate population at Rikers to such a low number that the prison becomes an afterthought.

The question then becomes how the city will accomplish that goal when it continues to pour money into the hiring of correction officers at Rikers, even after the city Department of Investigation last year found that the Department of Correction failed to properly screen applicants, ignoring gang affiliations, criminal histories and psychological issues.

The city seems to think that improving the hiring practices and screening of applicants for the more than 1,500 correction officer positions it plans to fill in the next year will be enough to weed out the bad apples who have been presiding over pervasive violence at Rikers Island and other prisons. Currently there are over 10,000 correction officers at Rikers to guard fewer than 9,900 inmates, an astonishingly lopsided ratio.

In an interview with City & State’s Jon Lentz, Mark Peters, the commissioner of the Department of Investigation, hoped that the new officers would help lead a more humane transformation in the policing practices at Rikers, but even he acknowledged that it could take years to fully retrain or root out and replace offending personnel.

A follow-up statement from the Department of Investigation echoed Peters’ sentiment

“The Department of Corrections has agreed to adopt improved vetting procedures and improve training. Part of these improved procedures must include making sure that new officers do not pick up any poor practices that already exist. However, that challenge cannot prevent moving forward with hiring. Having a pool of 1,500 new officers who will be backgrounded under improved procedures, who will have the benefit of better training, who will be immersed in the ongoing reforms under a DOC administration supportive of that reform should not be underestimated.”

And despite a litany of reforms instituted at Rikers, which includes a federal monitor, officers wearing body cameras and new guidelines for identifying guards with a pattern of violence, those reforms will only go as far as Correction Officers Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook will allow.

Seabrook has long toed the line of vehemently defending his membership and outright intimidation of any politician who dares to broach the topic of reform. The Department of Investigation report on the hiring of correction officers suggested that Seabrook was at least partially complicit in turning a blind eye to unqualified officers, with several applicants referencing prior relationships with Seabrook as a qualification for the job.

Seabrook has repeatedly blanched at any reform efforts, and even months after Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted changes at Rikers, Seabrook continues to insist that the media is demonizing his officers.

As it turns out, after years of repeatedly taking aim at the Bronx district attorney’s office for being too aggressive in pursuing cases against violent correction officers as opposed to violent inmates, Seabrook might now have a sympathetic ear running that shop. During a Rikers-related forum last Tuesday, new Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark noted that while the city has 80 investigators looking into prisoner abuse claims, there are just 30 investigators looking into abuse against correction officers.

“You’re never really going to have a safe Rikers Island when you’re concentrating on one side and not the other,” Clark said.

Whether the new district attorney was giving lip service to this idea to placate Seabrook – who contributed $5,000 to Clark’s campaign – remains to be seen, but there is a clear disparity between Clark’s framing of correction officers as victims and the de Blasio administration’s ultimate goal of weeding out the bad apples. If the prosecutor tasked with making Rikers a safe, humane facility doesn’t stand up to Seabrook and demand increased accountability from his members, it won’t matter how many better-trained correction officers number the ranks – the culture of violence will remain.