de Blasio's boondoggle COVID hotel inmate shelter security contract deemed antiquated by elected officials

 

THE CITY

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,700 inmates released from city jails and state prisons have stayed in hotel rooms at taxpayers’ expense, including more than 200 who have been checked in for more than a year, according to new data obtained by THE CITY.

THE CITY previously reported on the dramatic expansion of the program run by Exodus Transitional Community, including at a Fresh Meadows, Queens, hotel where a former inmate alleged she was sexually assaulted by an Exodus employee. THE CITY also found that the security firm hired by Exodus operated without the required state license.

Now, Queens elected officials are demanding that Mayor Eric Adams pull the plug on Exodus, which has run the hotel-release program since 2020 and which recently scored a new $40 million deal.

U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, Assemblymember Nily Rozic and Councilmember Linda Lee — all Democrats — wrote to Adams Monday demanding that he reevaluate the effort, which began in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID.

“It has been nearly two years now, COVID-19 rates are at the lowest they have been since last summer and these disturbing reports by THE CITY make it imperative that the contract be terminated immediately,” they wrote.

Last week, two years after the program started, there were still 800 former inmates staying in six hotels scattered across the city, and the mayor’s office could not say how much money has been spent to date on hotel rooms alone.

 peaking with THE CITY Tuesday, Rozic stated, “Our understanding is the housing situation was always intended to be temporary and always contingent on there being a pandemic. Because there’s no metric, they’ve been able to extend and extend no matter how many times we ask them to provide us with an end date.”

Rozic noted that “this state of emergency narrative is what the city hid behind for the hotel to be used,” and added: “We’re ending all sorts of other [pandemic-related] protocols and for one reason or another this one hasn’t ended.”

And though city officials said the hotel program would end once the state of emergency was over, Adams aims to keep it going, even as it’s no longer designated as pandemic related.

The Queens officials pointed to an August 2020 letter to them from Elizabeth Glazer, then-director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, who wrote, speaking of the Wyndham hotel in Fresh Meadows: “There are no future plans for use of this hotel beyond the COVID-19 response.”

THE CITY found that the initial COVID contract with the non-profit Exodus Transitional Community to run the program expired in December, but Mayor Eric Adams awarded a second contract in January as a way of “keeping 800 people from flooding the homeless system,” according to mayoral spokesperson Jonah Allon.

That decision contrasts with an effort that began nine months ago in the de Blasio administration to begin moving homeless shelter residents out of hotels where they’d been placed during the pandemic back into shelters as part of the effort to re-open the city.

This falls right in line with Adams keeping mask mandates for toddlers and allowing employers to extort their employees into getting vaccinated. But they are saying nothing about those systems that also abuse pandemic protocols.

Rikers Island Blues

 

NY Post 

Inmates are running wild on Rikers Island amid an ongoing staffing crunch that’s left charges free to stab each other, answer the phones and run through corridors destroying maintenance equipment, The Post has learned. 

On Sunday morning, three inmates from the Folk Nation gang jumped a Bloods member and slashed him in the face inside of an unmanned housing area at the Anne M. Kross Center, the jail’s largest facility, internal records obtained by The Post show. 

At the time, 26 corrections officers were working quadruple shifts, 35 were on triple shifts and 30 patrol posts across the AMKC were unmanned as the jail grapples with an ongoing staff shortage, internal communications show. 

A day earlier at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, another Rikers facility, a group of inmates ran wild through the corridors and destroyed a slew of fire safety equipment before officers could stop them, according to an internal email seeking “emergency maintenance.” 

“Numerous inmates were running through the corridors. They [sic] inmates broke the fire cabinets and numerous exit signs throughout the corridors. They also removed the hoses and nozzles from the cabinets,” the email, sent by an assistant deputy warden, states. 

On Monday, the chaos continued, according to Patrick Ferraiuolo, the president of the Correction Captains’ Association.  

“One of my captains in AMKC called a housing area and the inmates answered the phone,” Ferraiuolo recounted. 

“[The inmate] said ‘Hey how you doing captain? The officer went home, he was tired, he was going into his triple or fourth tour and he left, he left us here alone.’ So it’s a housing area with no correctional officer watching over them… this is an everyday occurrence,” he continued. 

NY Daily News

For five grueling days, hip-hop artist 2 Milly says he found himself in a fetid, overcrowded bullpen on Rikers Island — and then he was transferred to a quarantine unit that seems worse, where he gets no outdoor time and prisoners are often left unguarded.

“They treat us like we’re animals,” said 2 Milly, whose 2014 track “Milly Rock” has been played more than 25 million times on Spotify, and who is doing Rikers time on a gun charge under his birth name, Terrance Ferguson.

Ferguson, his fellow detainees and correction officers are thrown together in Rikers Island’s summer of hell — a staff shortage during the pandemic that has broken down basic services at the city’s giant prison complex and brought misery to everyone there.

 It’s so bad that Ferguson and other Rikers detainees have a grudging sympathy for the officers, who suffer stifling heat amid broken-down air conditioning and not enough rest during too-long work shifts.

“The officers are losing their minds,” Ferguson told the Daily News. “It’s the same guard for 24 hours. They’re sweating bullets, not getting meal breaks. I start feeling bad for them after a while.”

In turn, Rikers officers also offered some sympathy for the detainees’ living conditions. “For the most part, the inmates have been sympathetic,” said a veteran correction officer who asked for anonymity fearing Correction Department reprisals.

“They’ve actually offered me food when I’m working a triple,” the officer said. “The officers recognize the conditions are bad for the inmates and the inmates feel for the officers.”

Another detainee, Herman Williams, 37, convicted of attempted burglary, agreed. “They do them just as bad as us,” he said in a phone interview during which he was watched over by an officer.

“The lady [officer] sitting here right now, [is] sweating to death,” Williams said. “They say no one wants to do nothing.”

DOC officials acknowledged the problems have become more concerning in recent weeks, attributing them to a large volume of sick or unavailable staff. Of 8,500 officers, they said, roughly 3,500 either called in sick in July or were medically exempt from working with detainees. Another 2,300 simply didn’t come in at some point in July.

“We agree with many of the issues raised here,” DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said. “We have been taking extensive measures to encourage staff to return to work, to relieve those who have been heroically working extra shifts to compensate, and to make this an environment where any parent would feel like their own son or daughter was safe working or living here.”

This Schiraldi guy is another willfully oblivious ghoul. Just like the scumbag that hired him 

 

Kew Gardens jail requires zoning change

From the Forest Hills Post:

The mayor’s office has released the first details about plans for four borough-based jails, which includes the redevelopment and expansion of the former Queens Detention Complex in Kew Gardens.

The overhaul would significantly expand the size of the facility at 126-01 82nd Ave., which closed in 2002. The existing building is 497,600 square feet and housed about 500 inmates; the new facility would be 1,910,000 square feet and house 1,510 inmates.

The jail reopening is part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to close the troubled Rikers Island jail facility and shift the city’s jail inmates to smaller jail facilities. The mayor’s office plans for the four facilities to offer 6,040 beds, which would accommodate the roughly 5,000 people in detention daily.

The mayor’s office says that the smaller facilities would be safer and enable inmates to maintain contact with their families and communities, and to have better access to their legal representatives and the court system. The new facilities would also give inmates increased access to rehabilitative and reentry services, as well as to more sunlight and outdoor space.

The Kew Gardens facility would also offer a centralized care area for inmates with an infirmary and a maternity ward.

The new development would offer parking for visitors to the jail and for the general public. A total of 429 parking spaces would be available within the detention facility, and the public would have access to an adjacent above-ground parking lot with 676 public spaces at the northwest of the property.

A community space would also be constructed along 126th Street, the mayor’s office said.

The city has not yet an anticipated a completion date or an estimate of the length of the construction period, but it would need to seek zoning changes in order to expand the existing facility.

The mayor’s office said that the city would need to make an amendment to the zoning text to modify the “requirements for bulk” such as the floor area, height and setback, as well as the parking requirement. The city would seek a special permit to de-map 82nd Ave. between 126th Street and 132nd Street.