“What became apparent was that the issues that end up at Rikers start well before they get there,” Glazer said. “In order to address the array of problems here, we really had to look at the system as a whole.”
The new reforms will begin with on-the-street tracking of encounters police have with people with behavioral disorders and will also include a 36-hour police training course on how to identify and interact with them.
The city will also contract with service providers, one in Manhattan and the other in either the Bronx or Brooklyn, that will operate drop-off centers beginning next fall where low-level offenders can get a range of services from withdrawal detox to therapeutic services instead of being placed in handcuffs.
To reduce the roughly 80,000 annual jail admissions, the task force recommended that judges be allowed to send those same offenders to supervised release programs where they are monitored and required to stay clean and get therapy, an approach that has seen success with juveniles in New York and in other cities. That would make judges less reliant on monetary bail, which advocates have long decried as overly punitive for the poor.
The task force report also recommends expanding therapeutic services inside jail, creating more homeless housing beds, targeting veterans and making sure discharged inmates get reconnected to Medicaid after their release.
All of the proposed pilot programs will be evaluated and tracked regularly in a system similar to the statistical CompStat program used by the New York Police Department to measure crime.
The mayor’s proposed reforms will be funded by $40 million in asset forfeiture money from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and another $90 million from the city’s budget.
Experts say diverting inmates could also save the city money since housing an inmate currently costs the city more than $160,000 annually.
Jenifer Parish, an attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Mental Health Project, said the mayor’s proposals, particularly the drop-off centers, represented an encouraging step in the right direction.
The mother of a mentally ill and homeless former Marine named Jerome Murdough (pictured) — who died in February after being locked in the overheated cell on a misdemeanor trespassing charge — said she took solace in reforms that might keep men like her son out of Rikers altogether.
“It means a lot to me,” Alma Murdough said, “knowing that Jerome’s death was not in vain.
