Drop In Violent Inmates Raises Concern About Rising Use Of Force

NEW YORK — Officials contend a smaller but more violent set of inmates is leading New York City jail guards to use force more often. But there may be more factors behind the trend, as the number of people locked up for violent crimes has actually dropped with the total jail population.

The Department of Correction recorded a 10.7 percent spike in use of force last fiscal year across the city's jail system even though the number of inmates continued to shrink. The DOC attributed the rise to an "increasingly challenging" jail population with a "higher density of violent charges and gang affiliations."

As evidence, the DOC pointed to an increase in the proportion of jail admissions with violent felony charges — 22.7 percent in the 2018 fiscal year versus 16.6 percent in the 2014 fiscal year.

But the raw number of people locked up for violent crimes has dropped in recent years.

As of Jan. 1, 3,346 of the roughly 8,700 detainees in the jail system — which includes the infamous Rikers Island complex — were jailed for violent felonies, a 16 percent drop from the same day in 2014, according to the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

That group represented about 38.4 percent of the total population this January, the figures show, an increase of about 2.6 percentage points from January 2014. That increase isn't commensurate with the recent rise in uses of force.

"I think it runs counter to common sense that as you lower the jail population you would see a higher rate of violence in the jails," said City Councilman Keith Powers (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Council's Criminal Justice Committee.

A similar picture emerges from the Department of Correction's census of the most serious charges against its detainees.

The average daily jail population of people charged with violent offenses in the 2018 fiscal year was 4,021, down from 4,227 in 2017. Those numbers include people charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, robbery, burglary, felony and misdemeanor assault, rape, attempted rape and other sexual offenses.

Those inmates accounted for essentially the same proportion of the population in both years — 44.8 percent in 2018 versus 44.3 percent in 2017.

The only growing portion of the jail population comprises not violent offenders but rather people who weren't initially locked up for committing a crime, figures show.

The number of technical parole violators in city jails climbed 15 percent to 600 from Jan. 1, 2014 to the same day in 2018, according to the Office of Criminal Justice. These are parolees accused of breaking a condition of their release from prison, such as missing a check-in with a parole officer.

The increased presence of gangs in the jails may play a role in the increased use of force, but so could the way that correction officers approach tense situations.

More than 15 percent of the average daily jail population had a gang affiliation last fiscal year, nearly double the 8.2 percent rate in the 2014 fiscal year, the DOC said.

Such inmates can carry their street rivalries into the jails and start fights that guards have to break up, said Martin F. Horn, a former DOC commissioner and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. More attacks against guards can also drive up use of force, he said.

"If there was an increase of predicate acts that justified the use of force, then the increase in the use of force is justifiable and explainable," Horn said.

DOC figures suggest such an increase. The monthly rate of inmate assaults on jail staff climbed in the last fiscal year, as did the rate of violent inmate-on-inmate incidents. The number of fight and assault infractions dropped slightly, though.

An April report from a federal court-appointed monitor tracking violence and use of force in the jails also somewhat bolsters the DOC's argument.

Officers were responding to violence 54 percent of the time they used force from July through December 2017 — up from 46 percent in the previous six months — while 45 percent of incidents stemmed from "inmate management issues," the report says.

But the monitor blamed correction officers for failing to keep the use of force in check. The jail staff's performance "often creates or contributes to the need to use force," as officers fail to "de-escalate" situations and continue to use over-the-top tactics such as blows to the head, the report says.

"(T)here are times that the situation leading to a use of force could have been prevented had the Staff been better-equipped with skills for de-escalation, mediating conflict, and avoiding security lapses," the report says. "Furthermore, even when force is ostensibly necessary, the way in which it is applied may be excessive or malicious."

The city should work to rein in these sometimes violent interactions whatever their cause, Powers said.

"We ... want to see our city jails safe without high amounts of use of force and to be on a pathway to be reducing violence as a category all across the board," he said.

(A man enters the road to Rikers Island in March 2017. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)