During intake, an inmate performs the mundane tasks of making phone a call, getting his photo taken, showering and storing his personal property with jail officials. But he also undergoes critical medical and mental health screenings and answers questions that will help jail officials establish his risk for violence—including suicide—and strategically avert it.
Related Coverage
Report: NYC's Bail System Punishes The Poor 12.03.10
First Stop, Rikers.
Next Stop, Colombia?
11.06.09
News Topics
Justice
Health and Environment
Housing and Development
Author
Kelly Virella
About | RSS
So it's ironic that at the same time, jail officials have been saying since at least August that the intake process needs a major overhaul, one that involves the construction of a new $660 million, 1,500-bed jail.
Coming at a time when the city's crime rate is near an historic low and many say the city needs the money for other projects, the proposed new jail has some criminal justice advocates balking. Meanwhile, the Department of Correction (DOC) has recently revised its own projections of how many people the city is likely to put behind bars in the future.
An evolving plan
The city's jail system consists of a network of facilities, including two secure hospital wards, a floating jail anchored in the Bronx and borough lockups in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. The bulk of the city's prisoners—who are either awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less for misdemeanors—are housed in one of the 10 jails on Rikers Island.
A new jail has been in discussion since at least 2006, but the city's plans have evolved substantially since then. First, the city unveiled plans to build a new jail in the South Bronx and expand its use of the Brooklyn House of Detention, with the aim of replacing deteriorated jail space on Rikers Island and keeping prisoners closer to courthouses and families. When the proposed Bronx jail met stiff community resistance, the focus shifted to building a new facility on Rikers Island.
Throughout that process, part of the rationale for the jail has been replacing decaying jail infrastructure on Rikers Island. But DOC also sees the new facility as part of a revised approach to prisoner intake.
That overhaul, which is scheduled to begin this summer, will ultimately convert the jail's intake system from one run by corrections staff working at seven jails across the island to one run by corrections staff who are intake specialists operating at one central intake facility, inside the new jail, scheduled to open in 2017.
Department of Correction spokesman Sharman Stein says the changes will speed up the intake process and make it possible for the jail to collect more information about inmates, improving safety and easing the inmate's reentry into society after their jail term.
Commissioner Dora Schriro says the overhaul will also make the jail run more efficiently, but says the plans are too embryonic yet to quantify those efficiencies. "Because we don't have an architect yet and haven't begun any design, we have some general forecast of what the staffing of the new facility would be. But to give you those kinds of specifics, we're certainly a ways out from that," she says.
In a May interview with City Limits, Schriro added that while it's important for the city to invest in education and in community and economic development, it's also important to spend enough on jails. "Some segment of the population is always going to be incarcerated," Schriro said. "So the city also has a responsibility to confine that population in facilities that are safe and secure."
