By Jacob Kaye
More than two years after city jail officials cut off nonprofit-led social services at Rikers Island, several organizations are set to return this month to provide new programming inside the troubled jail complex.
The four nonprofits will offer educational, reentry, therapeutic, and substance misuse programming to the more than 6,800 detainees on Rikers Island. The programming is designed to reduce recidivism and slim the jail’s population, which is nearly 3,000 people too large for the borough-based jails expected to replace Rikers in the coming decade.
For the past several years, similar services have been facilitated by the Department of Correction, which took over programming duties after Mayor Eric Adams and his former DOC commissioner, Louis Molina, ended a $17 million contract with five social service nonprofits working in the jails in 2023. Though the DOC said the controversial switch would have no effect on detainees, data suggested otherwise. Program participation plummeted, and jail officials said that, a year after the cuts, they were unable to provide detainees with the legally required five hours of programming a day.
The new programming, created through a pitch-driven city contracting process, nearly restores the $17 million cut, which at the time accounted for less than one percent of the DOC’s $1 billion budget. Together, the new contracts, which were registered with the city in December, will cost the agency $42.29 million over three years, or around $14 million per year. Adams first announced the city would attempt to revive the programming in March 2024.
The nonprofits will resume their programming throughout February.
The programming will undoubtedly be welcomed by the new head of the DOC, Stanley Richards, who was appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to serve as DOC commissioner on Saturday. Before taking the top DOC role, Richards worked as the president and CEO of The Fortune Society, one of the providers returning to Rikers.
Richards was critical of the cuts when they were made in 2023.
“Having an outside provider coming in to provide services is a way for people to stay connected to what happens in the outside world,” Richards told the Eagle at the time. “When they eliminated all of the nonprofit service providers, they eliminated that contact.”
“That cannot be replaced by DOC because [detainees] are going to see DOC as the people who are responsible for their detention,” he added. “And that’s a problem.”
The nonprofits’ return was supported by Richards’ predecessor, former DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, who was appointed to the role by Adams in December 2023. Several months after Maginley-Liddie first began her work as commissioner, she urged several nonprofits to bring their programs back to Rikers – a request they obliged for free.