NYC Won’t Spend Money Recommended To Keep People Out Of Jail

NEW YORK — New York City's planned $71 million investment into programs meant to keep people out of jail is just a fraction of the amount recommended in the landmark report that helped convince Mayor Bill de Blasio to shutter Rikers Island.

The de Blasio administration will add $54 million in funding next fiscal year to expand so-called alternatives to detention, which provide pretrial supervision and other services for New Yorkers charged with crimes.

Another $17 million in new funding will help provide alternatives to incarceration, which aim to further drive down the number of people serving sentences in Rikers's notorious jails, for at least 7,300 people a year, officials say.

These programs have kept thousands of people out of Rikers's cells since their inception, city officials say, making them a key component of de Blasio's plan to close the island's remaining facilities and reduce the jail population to about 3,300 by 2026. A funding agreement with the City Council puts their total cost at $93.6 million in the 2021 fiscal year, which starts next July.

But the 2017 report from a blue-ribbon panel chaired by former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman suggested it would take far more money to fully implement them.

The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform originally put the cost of alternatives to incarceration and detention necessary to close Rikers at about $260 million a year.

Asked about the discrepancy at a news conference last week, de Blasio said the expansion of those alternatives is just one piece of a broader criminal-justice reform agenda he has implemented that is "very consistent with the ideas of the Lippman report." Lippman, seated next to the mayor, nodded in agreement.

"There's been six years of spending that's been growing, growing, growing, very consistent with the same values — then a whole lot of more spending in this plan to take us further, and an open door to go farther beyond that as much as our resources will allow," the Democratic mayor said Oct. 17.

The alternatives are part of a $391 million spending package attached to the plans to replace Rikers with four new borough-based jails, which the City Council approved last Thursday.

The money — of which about $126 million was already budgeted — will also fund a wide range of programs and projects meant to help jailed people transition back into their lives, prevent neighborhood violence and build new facilities such as community centers.

Lawmakers and advocates have criticized the investments as insufficient, given the $8.7 billion cost of building the new jails. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams argues the city should look beyond alternatives to incarceration and tackle "the fundamental structures that are causing people to go in there to begin with."

"Whether it's mental health issues, whether it's lack of supportive and affordable housing — we need the tune of $10 billion now invested into that," Williams, a Democrat, said on NY1 Tuesday.

But the de Blasio administration argues the new package will build on a groundwork of reforms and investments that the mayor has been laying since he took office.

Asked for details of the broader spending to which de Blasio referred last week, Alacia Lauer, a spokesperson for the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, said the administration has spent $353 million on alterantives to incarceration and detention since 2014. That averages out to about $59 million annually over six years.

The city's Supervised Release program alone has kept more than 14,000 people from going to jail since its inception, Lauer said. She also pointed to the $332 million spent since 2014 on the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety focusing on security in public housing, and more than $100 million for a "Crisis Management System" that has placed "violence intervention and support systems" in 22 communities.

"Since the start of the Administration, the Mayor’s Office has invested an unprecedented hundreds of millions of dollars in reducing crime and lightening the touch of enforcement, and decreasing the number of people who experience jail," Lauer said in an email.

To some reformers, the package puts too much emphasis on assisting people after they get caught up in the criminal system rather than preventing those entanglements by funding community programs. "Of the investments that are truly community-oriented, they are piecemeal and inadequate," Alyssa Aguilera, the co-executive director of the activist group VOCAL-NY, said in a statement last week.

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson has defended the investment package as a major step toward reforming the jail system on which city officials will build further.

He said the money goes "far beyond" the $260 million called for in the Lippman report — even though that figure initially related only to alternatives to incarceration and detention. A new report the Lippman commission released this month calls the number an "annual investment in community services."

"Do I think that this is fair compensation? I would not say that you could say it’s proper or fair compensation," Johnson, a Democrat, told reporters last week. "But the investments and policy changes secured as part of these negotiations I think are giant steps forward in the city’s criminal justice reform efforts, as is closing Rikers Island."