#De Blasio has no excuse for the Rikers Island debacle

Friday, The Post ran exclusive photos from inside Rikers Island’s Otis Bantum jailhouse over the summer. They are horrific: dozens of men lying head-to-foot on the floor. Inmates napping near open toilets. Visiting the jail in September, Mayor de Blasio opted not to go in. Still, he said, “the whole thing upsets me.” 

Why? The overcrowding was planned. 

When confronted with Rikers, the mayor blames everyone and everything but himself. He blames his predecessors. “When I came into office, there were immense problems here,” he said last month. He blames COVID: “a massive, massive challenge.” 

Fact is, there’s no excuse. Last year, the jails had an average of 4,961 inmates each day, and 16,179 overall admissions. In the last year of the Bloomberg administration, the figures were 11,408 average daily inmates, and 77,141 overall admissions. 

This isn’t “mass incarceration.” And a competent administration would have no trouble managing this record-low population. 

The worst horrors of the summer were preventable. 

The city crammed inmates into a short-term “intake” center. Correction rules say inmates aren’t supposed to stay in intake for more than 24 hours. But dozens stayed nearly a week. One man, Isaabdul Karim, died of COVID after languishing there. 

Hmmm. Let’s go back to early 2020, before COVID. That month, de Blasio was doing a victory lap about shuttering jails. The Brooklyn Detention Complex closed in January 2020. The Eric M. Taylor Center, on Rikers, closed early that March. 

“These two closures show that we are making good on our promise to close Rikers,” the mayor said, “and create a correctional system that is fundamentally smaller, safer and fairer.” 

Smaller, yes. Safer, fairer, no. The closures crammed 1,250 more inmates into Rikers’ still-open buildings. The Taylor Center had an intake center, but when it shut, new inmates overwhelmed Bantum. 

Inmates would have been better off staying in Brooklyn and at Taylor — where the number of people jailed was at just half of capacity. 

Indeed, a desperate de Blasio bowed to reality last month, reopening Taylor. 

For too long before the reopening, the mayor preferred the “optics” to reality: sustaining the fiction that New York is closing Rikers. 

The city’s fantastical — and deadly — story extends to the bigger picture. 

We keep hearing about this “historic” commitment of $9 billion to shutter Rikers and build four jails — one in each borough except Staten Island. 

But this mayor has made no commitment. The jails plan is already two years late. The agency in charge of awarding the much-delayed contracts, the city’s Department of Design and Construction, has just lost its chief, Jamie Torres-Springer, to the MTA. 

What has the city done for Rikers, since inmates will be stuck there for another seven years? The city spends $1.3 billion a year in operating funds, up 14 percent since the final year of the Bloomberg administration. 

Yet that money goes to staff. What about physical conditions? 

Over the first seven years of the de Blasio administration, the city spent a total of $492.2 million on large-scale physical projects at the Department of Correction. 

That’s below what the Bloomberg administration spent in the previous seven years — $506.9 million, not accounting for inflation. 

De Blasio didn’t close Rikers, but he effectively abandoned it. 

Last year, the rate of inmate attacks on one another was 98.1 per 1,000 people. The rate of attacks on guards was 19.6. The last year of the Bloomberg administration, the numbers were 32.9 and 5.9, respectively. 

The problem isn’t a lack of staffing, either. It’s the type of staffing. In Bloomberg’s last year, the number of guards was 8,922; the number of civilian administrators was 1,397. By 2020, just before COVID, the figures were 9,237, with 1,803 administrators. 

Earlier this summer, with mass desertions, they were at 8,388 guards and 1,661 administrators. 

De Blasio would have had more room for error if he hadn’t padded the offices with executives to talk about “equity.” 

Still, the number of guards is nearly 1.7 per inmate, up from three-quarters of a guard per inmate in 2013. The number of call-outs and no-shows — up to one-third daily — is just plain mismanagement. 

Given a few months, however, de Blasio will be right, finally: It will be someone else’s problem. 

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.