Rikers Island nurses say Hochul-ordered inmate release not making a dent; COVID cases climbing

More than one-third of the inmates imprisoned in Rikers Island’s urgent care unit have tested positive for COVID after completing the intake process there, according to the union that represents nurses at the jail complex.

“After admission, they’ll come in negative,” said Gene Thomas, a registered nurse who’s worked at Rikers for the past 29 years. “Then five or six days later, they’ll come in with symptoms and then they’ll test positive.”

Carl Ginsburg, a spokesman for the New York State Nurses Association, said, based on estimates offered by the union’s members, approximately three out of eight, or about 37%, of inmates in Rikers’ urgent care unit who tested negative for COVID later test positive after they’d been put through the crowded intake process there.

He also noted that some inmates aren’t even receiving medical screens upon intake and said the situation there has descended into “chaos.”

The de Blasio administration pushed back on the numbers Ginsburg shared, though. Jeanette Merrill, spokeswoman for the city’s Correctional Health Services division, said that as of Sunday, the COVID positivity rate throughout Rikers averaged over seven days stood at 5.17%.

“This includes patients who test positive at intake and post-intake, representing both community-acquired infections and in-jail transmission,” she said. She also said that Rikers does not have an urgent care unit and that the division does not “produce positivity rates for specific housing areas.”

The notorious jail complex has come under intense scrutiny over the past several weeks. Eleven inmates have died there in the past year, cells are swelling with prisoners and correction officers often work 24 hours straight. Criticisms over those conditions and the city’s handling of the situation led Mayor de Blasio to announce last week that the NYPD would offer some relief and that correction officers would be suspended without pay for a month if they don’t show up for work.

But Thomas said inmates are still packed into cells — often 20 to 25 of them in enclosures that are about 14 feet by 15 feet.

“They give them masks, but they don’t use it. No social distance. No mask-wearing,” she said. “All of the cells are overcrowded.”

Last week, in an effort to reduce the number of people housed at Rikers, de Blasio also pushed Gov. Hochul to sign off on the Less is More Act, which limits the types of parole violations someone can be jailed for. Hochul signed the law, which goes into effect in March, and also issued an executive order allowing the immediate release of 191 Rikers inmates.

On Monday, de Blasio said that so far 161 of those 191 inmates have been released, and most of those who haven’t been are still locked up due to outstanding warrants in jurisdictions outside New York City or for charges separate from what they’re being jailed at Rikers for.

“They will not be released until that is appropriately addressed,” he said. “But 161 are out so far.”

Thomas suggested their release hasn’t yet made a dent in the overcrowding at the jail.

“I was there last night,” she said Monday morning. “I heard they were doing a lot of discharge, but the cells were still overcrowded.”

Nadyne Pressley, a nursing supervisor who’s worked at Rikers for 13 years, said she doesn’t expect the release of 191 inmates to help much because, by her estimate, about 100 new inmates are coming in each day.

“If you’re releasing 190, and the buses are bringing in 100 every day, that’s not helping,” she said. “That’s like putting a Band-Aid on a balloon. It’s going to pop.”

She blamed the fact that the Correction Department is now only using one building on Rikers, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, as an intake facility, although a second, the Eric M. Taylor Center, is set to resume intake Monday evening.

Both the Taylor Center and the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center had been handling intake before plans to close Rikers started going into effect.

The pleas to move faster to relieve the pressure at Rikers came as another inmate, Isa Abdul-Karim, 42, died there on Sunday.

“We are investigating everything related to that tragedy. It’s horrible. We want to know what happened here and why,” de Blasio said. “We need a full investigation to understand.”

Hizzoner said Karim was not on Hochul’s list of inmates to be released.

De Blasio estimated that the city would no longer have correction officers pulling triple shifts at Rikers in October thanks to new hires and NYPD officers coming on to handle the duties correction officers usually perform in courthouses.

But Pressley remained skeptical of whether that would help, either. Working in the courts is viewed as a plum gig and is usually reserved for veteran correction officers, she said. And many who now perform it might be more inclined to retire than return to Rikers after they’re relieved by the NYPD.

“They don’t want to come back from their cushiony jobs,” she said. “There’s a lot of officers getting hurt at Rikers.”