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Opinion

Mayor Adams: Uphold the Working People's Agenda and Invest in Job Training as a Public Safety Solution


Mayor Adams speaks at a "hiring hall" (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


Mayor Adams’ 2023 State of the City address had a theme. He called it the Working People’s Agenda. Adams asserted that job development, especially for the Black community, would be a top priority. 

At Exodus Transitional Community, we’ve been putting the mayor’s agenda themes to work for years. Exodus is a preventative, reentry, and advocacy organization led and staffed by formerly incarcerated New Yorkers. We provide workforce development offerings, specifically job readiness programming and placement services. Our Employment Specialists support people in maintaining employment as well as in advancing their careers.

In 2022, we served over 900 justice-impacted people with career readiness services, placing 450 people in employment positions. As a result, families are now supported because their loved ones were able to secure jobs and become responsible tax-paying citizens. The payoff for the wider community in New York City also includes greater public safety.

In addition to providing direct services, Exodus advocates for a society in which all can achieve social, economic, and spiritual well-being. We co-chair the Employment and Entrepreneurial Subcommittee on the Commission for Community Investment and the Closure of Rikers Island. We have worked alongside activists for years in the fight to close the Rikers Island jail complex

The Commission has called for significant investments in employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for formerly and currently incarcerated New Yorkers. We know that ensuring people have stable housing and employment are the two greatest factors in reducing recidivism.

Roughly 95% of the people who are detained or incarcerated will be released back to our communities. To ensure community safety, we must invest in people and communities – job training and placement opportunities are key. What we see daily in our programs is backed up by extensive research that shows increased income and decreased unemployment have direct effects on reducing crime.

Unfortunately New York City has been behind many other large cities in bouncing back from the high rates of job loss and unemployment caused by covid. This calls for targeted action and scaling up the programs that work.

Our Employment Services Program is filled with inspiring success stories of people returning from incarceration. Vernon, for example, was unemployed with no marketable skills. By chance, he met the Office Manager at Exodus near his neighborhood park where they discussed potential employment opportunities. Vernon became involved with Exodus, attending and completing Walking through the Wilderness, our job readiness program. His job search reached a breakthrough with a national, full-service security firm based in New York, where he works as a licensed security guard and is regarded as a highly motivated individual. Vernon personifies what works.

Vanessa’s story is another example of Exodus’ workforce development program in action. She came to Exodus striving to work in the healthcare field. However, she struggled during interviews in communicating that she had the transferable skills needed to be an ideal job candidate. Our Employment Specialists stepped in and coached Vanessa through extensive mock interviewing sessions. Vanessa’s breakthrough came when she was hired as an Office Administrator in a medical facility. Her resilience has become an inspiration to others.

Vanessa, Vernon, and the many other people Exodus serves have at least one thing in common: a burning desire to put their talents and abilities to work and provide for themselves and their families.

You need good jobs and pathways to get those jobs,” Mayor Adams said — and we agree. The work Exodus and the Commission for Community Investment and the Closure of Rikers Island do is aligned with these goals, and it also serves another valuable function — investing in the lives of our most vulnerable New Yorkers. We don’t need a ‘Plan B’ for closing Rikers, we just need Mayor Adams’ budget priorities to line up with his professed intentions. Then we will see a reduction in incarceration alongside a more robust workforce.

Unfortunately, the Commission’s recommendations have not been taken seriously by Mayor Adams, and contracts for nonprofits that provide workforce development have been cut citywide. Yet Rikers continues to get paid for what doesn’t work – to the tune of over $550,000 per incarcerated person per year. Instead of investing in solutions to scale, such as workforce development programming and training, our City is languishing in debt from a mismanaged Department of Correction and our community members are literally dying on Rikers Island. We can and must do better as a city.

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Brittany Smith is Associate Vice President of Workforce Development and Kandra Clark is Vice President of Policy & Strategy at Exodus Transitional Community. On Twitter @etcnyorg.

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Ensuring Our City’s Landmarks Reflect Our City’s Diversity


 

The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary


New York is perhaps the most diverse city in the world. Few places on Earth can claim to be home to so many sites of important contributions to the history of groups as varied as African Americans, Latinos, women, LGBTQ+ people, and the disabled community, to name just a few.

But too few of our city’s officially designated landmarks reflect that wonderfully rich and diverse history, though preservationists and communities across the city have been laboring hard to change that. The City, however, has been slow to act — particularly when sites are endangered. 

One need look no further than 14th Street, one of New York’s defining thoroughfares, for evidence. On and just off what was once called “the poor man’s Fifth Avenue” are an incredible array of sites connected to these multifaceted histories New York embodies. Several are imminently endangered, and all are awaiting action by the City to recognize and preserve that precious history.

Starting from the west, the former Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at 229 West 14th Street was the very first New York church established for a Spanish-speaking congregation. Originally serving Spaniards, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latin Americans, the church’s congregation grew over the years as did New York’s Hispanic population — now encompassing about 30% of all New Yorkers. But less than a handful of New York City’s thousands of designated landmarks reflect the history of our rich and varied Latino community. The church has been closed, and may soon be sold for development.

Just east at 50 West 13th Street sits the Jacob Day house, once the home and place of business of one of 19th century New York’s most prominent and successful Black businessmen. Day was also a leading crusader for reform of New York’s racist voting laws (which placed unequal property requirements upon Black New Yorkers), and a prominent abolitionist whom evidence indicates helped the Underground Railroad. The recent death of a longtime owner who had pledged to preserve the house leaves its fate very much in doubt.

Footsteps away at 80 Fifth Avenue and 14th Street sits the former headquarters of the very first national LGBTQ+ rights organization in the country, then known as the National Gay Task Force. From there, between 1973 and 1986 the Task Force got the first national gay rights legislation introduced, homosexuality removed from the list of mental disorders, the ban on gay people working for the federal government lifted, and the first White House meeting for an LGBTQ+ group, all while combating HIV/AIDS, anti-LGBTQ+ violence, and workplace discrimination.

Across Fifth Avenue at 10 West 14th Street stands the former headquarters of the NYC Woman Suffrage League. Beginning 130 years ago, multiple campaigns were led here to extend the franchise to New York’s women. That decades-long struggle finally succeeded in 1917, just three years before the 19th Amendment made it the law of the land nationwide. 

And just a bit further east at 218 Second Avenue/301 East 13th Street sits the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary (NYEEI), founded in 1820 as the first specialized hospital in the Western Hemisphere, and New York’s second oldest hospital. Over two centuries, NYEEI offered groundbreaking care and services for people with visual and hearing disabilities. The existing building, the oldest part of which dates to 1856, is where Helen Keller spoke at the 1903 ribbon cutting for its final section. The historic structure is now endangered by a reorganization plan that staff and patients oppose, arguing it will destroy both the services and the building.

For years now, we have been urging the City to consider these sites for landmark designation, even as the clock has been urgently ticking on several of them. They are just a few examples of the underrepresented histories that are awaiting action by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Women, African Americans, Latino New Yorkers, the LGBTQ+ community, and disabled New Yorkers collectively make up the vast majority of our city’s residents. But only a tiny fraction of our city’s recognized and protected landmarks speak to their histories.

Progress has been slow, especially on endangered sites. Many sites representing diverse histories the LPC has designated, like the Stonewall Inn or the James Baldwin House, were previously landmarked for other reasons, and thus already protected and in no danger.

Others, like the former Colored School No. 4 in Chelsea, took years of relentless campaigning by the public, led by African American historians, to get the City to act, even though it was an empty, City-owned property with no other planned use.

Change in our city is inevitable. But too often the price for such change is the erasure of the histories of New Yorkers with the least power and privilege. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has the ability and the obligation to change that. These sites, on and just off 14th Street, along with others elsewhere across the five boroughs, present a critical opportunity for them to do so. Now is the time for the City to act, before it’s too late.

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Andrew Berman is Executive Director of Village Preservation. On Twitter @GVSHP.

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New York’s Compassionate Release Laws were Designed to Keep People from Dying Behind Bars; They’re Failing


On the inside (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


Even if he were younger than his age of 80, Diego’s health condition would be dire. A heart attack has left him with a weakened heartbeat. He cannot walk very far, and a physician has recommended that he not climb stairs and should only perform sedentary activities. He was recently rushed to the hospital because his ailing heart could not pump properly, and his lungs filled with fluid. It will likely happen again – if his heart does not completely give out in the meantime.

People with heart failure, like Diego, have poor odds of living for very long.

Diego is also a New York State prisoner. He has been incarcerated for 40 years. He will likely perish in prison despite a law allowing him to die at home, as his request for medical parole, like that of countless others, was summarily denied. This despite the existence in many jurisdictions of what is often referred to as compassionate release mechanisms ostensibly enacted to allow people to die surrounded by family and with some small measure of comfort and dignity. (We changed Diego’s real name to protect his privacy.)

In 1992, New York State adopted a medical parole statute in recognition that incarcerated individuals suffering from terminal disease spent their final days far from their families and at a significant cost to the state. In 2009, the law was expanded to grant incarcerated individuals release if they suffer from a non-terminal condition that renders them so debilitated, mentally or physically, as to be severely restricted in their ability to self-ambulate or to perform significant normal activities of daily living. As stated in the New York Board of Parole’s 2020 legislative report, the medical parole law represents a “compassionate and practical response to dying incarcerated individuals.”

The implementation has been neither compassionate nor practical.

In our experience, the application of the law is rarely compassionate. Despite the humane and moral impetus for the laws, from 2016 to 2020, only 60 people were released pursuant to medical parole. Meanwhile, a study from Columbia University’s Center for Justice found that nearly 1,300 people died inside New York State prisons from 2010 to 2020. Thus, a person dies behind the walls every three days. Surely, many of the 1,300 met the statutory requirements for medical parole. After all, numerous New York prisons have their own hospice units, and there are several Regional Medical Units (RMU) for the severely ill.

When someone submits a request for medical parole, the opaque process of eligibility often leads to unsubstantiated denials. Not long ago, we began working with Frank (not his real name), a middle-aged man with stage four pancreatic cancer. His cancer was incurable, and death was imminent.

Despite his grave illness, he received a three-sentence denial stating that he was not an “appropriate candidate” for medical parole. The bureaucratic official rejection letter he received was originally for someone else, had that person’s name crossed out, with Frank’s name scrawled in its place. Frank died in a New York prison several weeks later.

In the case of Diego, an independent physician provided a detailed report outlining how his conditions qualified him for medical parole. The physician was a volunteer with the Medical Justice Alliance (MJA), a network of over 200 medical professionals in 24 states who volunteer their time and medical expertise to protect the constitutional rights of those in carceral facilities. The New York Department of Corrections’ chief medical officer denied the request for medical parole without any written explanation of the reasons. The MJA volunteer reached out to better understand the medical basis for their decision. Two months later, he has yet to receive any response.

Neither has the implementation of the medical parole law been practical. Even if a person is deemed eligible for medical parole, the length of the process means that they often die in prison before they are released. People must complete a parole interview, which can take weeks to schedule. Furthermore, the process of testifying before the New York parole board significantly taxes people who are near death. One person we know was interviewed despite being unable to speak more than a few words before having to stop and gather his breath with the aid of an oxygen tank.

We agree with the parole board in seeking a “compassionate and practical response to dying incarcerated individuals.” However, the current failed implementation has allowed over a thousand people to perish in New York prisons despite many who should qualify for release under the law.

We advocate for simple reforms to improve implementation of the New York law – regularly referring people who qualify for hospice or RMUs; utilizing independent physicians to evaluate whether persons qualify for medical parole; increasing transparency by providing detailed explanations when a request for medical parole is denied; abandoning the parole board interview in favor of a brief review of the medical facts, release plan, and any public safety concerns; and studying every case where a person perishes in prison to determine why they were not granted release pursuant to medical parole. Such reforms would reduce the heavy emotional and financial burdens of keeping incarcerated those people near death.

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By William Weber, MD, MPH, Medical Justice Alliance; Brooks Walsh, MD, Yale-New Haven Health System; and Steven Zeidman, Professor, CUNY School of Law.

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