De-occupying jails & prisons, wisely
It was just a coincidence that when Gov. Hochul signed the Less Is More Act on Friday she did so on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, but it was a happy coincidence. It was no coincidence at all that Hochul got around to signing the bill that Andrew Cuomo had left waiting on her desk days after a group of lefty state lawmakers drew headlines after defying an attempt from Mayor de Blasio, who hasn’t so much as visited Rikers Island since 2017, to stop them from going there and confirming with their own eyes what a house of horrors the jail has become, with inmates left for days or weeks in overcrowded and understaffed intake facilities full of piss and puke. One inmate tried to hang himself in front of two horrified legislators.
A staggering 40% of all the people incarcerated in New York are locked up on parole violations — the most of any state, according to the Columbia University Justice Lab. And six out of every seven of the parolees sent back to prison were there for a “technical violation” like missing a curfew or failing a drug or alcohol test, according to a report published in March and co-written by Vincent Schiraldi, who was then the Lab’s co-director and is now de Blasio’s beleaguered correction commissioner. In 2019, New York State paid $319 million to imprison parolees for rules violations, while New York City paid $273 million more to jail others.
When it takes effect next year, the Less Is More Act should put an end to that while also vesting city judges with new discretion by ending the practice of automatically locking parolees back up if they face new criminal charges, no matter how small.
Hochul said at the bill signing that the new law is a matter of “protecting human life” and “protecting human decency” as she directed the state Parole Board to immediately release 191 Rikers detainees while transferring another 200 to state facilities to relieve overcrowding on the Island, where suicide and self-harm attempts have exploded this year.
Of course, the problems at Rikers hardly started this year. They’re as old as the jail itself, which is built on an island literally made up for the most part of New Yorkers’ old garbage and that was long plagued by rats as such — the inevitable result of not caring so much about the conditions that inmates are held in and that are much easier to look past when they’re confined to an island.
But the Occupy protests — which began as a way for people to give voice to their fury about banks getting a free pass while Americans paid the price for Wall Street’s role in nearly collapsing the world’s economy — gave many New Yorkers who hadn’t previously experienced it, along with others who had, a taste of how punitive the state could be as the NYPD aggressively made mass arrests there. Occupiers, in turn, started bail funds and turned more of their attention to the police and the criminal justice system by the time that Mayor Bloomberg had the occupiers violently evicted from Zuccotti Park under the cover of night.
That happened two weeks after I’d reported for The News that the NYPD had started bringing emotionally disturbed people to the park and telling them “you’ve got a right to express yourself” there to help make the protest feel as chaotic and unruly as possible.
While the occupation itself lasted only two months, the legal cases that came out of Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s arrest-everyone-first-and-sort-it-outlater approach to mass protests, which dated back to the RNC in 2004, took years to sort out. And Occupy Wall Street’s political impact is still being felt, as it drew a new set of actors into our politics to answer the oftasked question about “what do they want?”
It turns out that what they want includes more judicious use of the hammer of incarceration, more decent conditions for people who are nonetheless incarcerated and consequences for leaders who fail to deliver on that.
It includes an end to “the day-in, dayout degradation and neglect” of inmates described by Cecily McMillan, who was arrested as police cleared Zuccotti Park at a six-month anniversary event for the occupation and eventually spent 58 days at Rikers just after de Blasio became mayor.
“It’s too amorphous,” then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said as the occupation was ongoing back in 2011, opining in his windy way that “there has to be an actual program, an actual set of ideas that they’re trying to pursue.”
A decade later, that program is here and its elected representatives are starting to hold our self-identified progressive mayor and other leaders to account for the horrific conditions inside New York’s jails and prisons on their watch.