A little over a year ago, the commissioner in charge of city jails, Louis Molina, told local lawmakers that his staff believed the incarcerated population would spike to 7,000 this year.
That was somewhat surprising to criminal justice watchers after nearly two decades of a steady decline driven in part by reforms like the added use of supervised release.
Vital City, a nonprofit focused on civic well-being, wanted to know what calculations Molina used to come up with the 7,000 figure, so it filed a Freedom of Information Law request. The Department of Correction finally supplied the reasoning last month.
Molina’s projection was based on an internal seven-page department analysis that begins with a section entitled “Napkin Math for Jail Population Estimation,” a report Vital City obtained via the request shows.
The report’s title, “Jail Forecasting Preliminaries and a Commentary on Closing Rikers,” references the the effort to close Rikers Island jails by 2027 and construct four, smaller, borough-based detention facilities holding 4,160 jail beds, along with 363 hospital beds.
The document used complex math and cited rollbacks to the state bail reform law and delays in court cases for the projected increase.
“Rikers can be seen mostly as an enormous waiting room while the court and law administration agencies process cases,” the review, completed in November 2022, said, adding that only speeding up the courts or changing bail laws could bring the jail population down significantly.
Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly said that the close-Rikers agenda is in jeopardy, largely because the jail population continues to grow. Some 6,207 people were in jail as of Feb. 11. “So you’re going to build four more jails, that is not going to fit the population,” Adams said last summer.
But critics of the Adams administration noted the Department of Correction’s population forecast did not account for the ways the city itself could help reduce the population. Those avenues include pushing prosecutors and judges to speed up some cases, and expanding the use of alternatives to incarceration and supervised release programs.
“This is sort of like someone trying to forecast the weather, but not thinking that they can actually control it,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City and former head of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The average length of stay in Rikers has ballooned to 104 days since January 2022 when Adams took office, according to statistics posted online by city Comptroller Brad Lander. By contrast, that average was 91 days during the last two de Blasio years and 48 days in 2005 during the Bloomberg administration, records show.
The length of time it takes for a case to be concluded — either moving a convicted defendant to a long-term prison upstate, or sending an innocent person home — is tied to multiple factors such as the number of criminal court judges and prosecutors available to tackle cases. Some defendants have also been known to repeatedly switch defense lawyers or refuse to come to court as a delay tactic.
Still, former city criminal justice officials questioned why the Adams administration appears to be just accepting the status quo — a shift from the past active involvement of City Hall in addressing delays in the administration of justice.
“We know that the length of stays have deteriorated substantially in the last several years,” said Michael Jacobson, who served as Correction commissioner during the administrations of former Mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani.
“So why would you just project that forward?” he asked. “I mean, why do we want a system that has those kinds of length of stays?”
Planned Shrinkage
During the early days of the pandemic, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, known as MOCJ, collaborated with prosecutors, defense attorneys and court officials to identify detainees in city jails who could be let out early under supervised release.
In April, 2020, the detainee population in city jails dropped to below 4,000 for the first time since 1946.
Over the prior two administrations, MOC-J has produced reports detailing the tally of people behind bars. Those reports have also included plans to reduce that number moving forward.
But the Adams administration has drastically reduced the broad role MOCJ has in addressing jail issues and systemic crime issues.
Instead, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, a longtime ally of Adams, has taken on the role of interfacing with the jails and justice system, according to multiple government insiders. Molina left his role as head of DOC in December to work under Banks.
Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the new independent Close Rikers commission convened by the City Council, urged Adams and his team and other power brokers involved in the process to take measures to reduce pretrial detention.
“It’s really critical that all parties here that are involved from the city, the state, everyone that’s got the ability to influence this tries to bring the jail population down swiftly and safely, because the reality is that Rikers is really harming the safety of people,” he told THE CITY.
For No Eyes Only
As for the 7,000 report, much mystery surrounds it — such as who wrote it.
“The analysis was prepared internally by our operations team,” said DOC spokesperson Annais Morales.
“Predictive models are less accurate the further they project into the future,” she added, noting it “assumed there would be no changes to bail reform and court case processing.”
The report uses a relatively new math theorem known as Little’s Law.
The law is based on a 1945 paper written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor John Little. It was used for private business to calculate potential customers and how that figure would vary based on advertising and marketing.
But at least one math expert called the DOC’s analysis “gobbledygook” and described the math it used as impossible to fully understand.
“I don’t think it was written with an intent that anybody would actually read it,” said Bruce Bukiet, an applied mathematics professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
“It wasn’t well explained and things weren’t defined,” he said, calling the figures “gobbledygook.”
Morales defended the document, saying it “was meant for internal use, hence the technical language.”
The analysis also marked a major shift in how the city forecasts its jail population and tries to keep it down.
Jacobson, who is also on the new independent commission that previously created the blueprint to close Rikers, questioned DOC’s role in the population prediction report.
“What doesn’t make sense to me is that the agency that is the most risk averse and has the biggest self interest in having the maximum number of jail beds possible seems to be taking the lead on jail population projections for the city,” he said.
Early Releases Stalled
The city’s jail population — while on the rise over the past two years — is still far below the 22,000 people locked up on an average day in 1991.
Back then, jail officers would sometimes randomly drive detainees around the city until a bed opened up. The city is required by law to house new detainees within 24 hours but that clock doesn’t start until they are formally brought through intake.
During the Bloomberg administration, the average daily population dropped from 14,490 in 2001 to 11,827 in 2013, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.
The population fell slightly below 4,000 during the de Blasio administration in April 2020 shortly after the pandemic broke out. Many of the people let out at that time were people serving less than a year.
But the figures have steadily increased since then despite lobbying efforts from criminal justice advocates.
At the same time, the city’s Local Conditional Release Commission remains stalled, the Daily News reported. Adams has left two spots on the commission open and the group has not made any release recommendations.
The commission was created in 2020 based on a law passed by the City Council.
Additionally, Molina initially used the so-called 6A early release program to release 62 people shortly after he took over in early 2022. The program lets jail commissioners release people serving less than a year to be sent home early. Some 474 people are currently in that category, according to Katznelson.
Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the oversight Board of Correction, said the city is unable to properly care for the 6,190 people currently in custody.
“It’s also absolutely necessary to cut the population to 3,000 because the department has no capacity to deal with the current population,” he said. “The 6,000 people in custody don’t receive necessary medical care, and are kept in solitary, and the equivalent of solitary confinement through constant and prolonged lockdowns.”
He noted more than 10,000 scheduled medical visits are not provided each month.
“The department, although over-staffed, cannot provide basic constitutional care for the men and women living on Rikers Island,” he said. “Violence is rampant and increasing, and the DOC is unable to protect people in custody.”