The city’s Department of Correction hired a telemarketing firm to ring up late retired people and convince them to return to work in the midst of generally low staffing levels at Rikers Island, Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said Tuesday.
“We have a rundown [of resigned officers] and we’re going down the rundown. Not robocalls. We hired phone salesperson type people, we’ve hired a firm to settle on the decisions,” Schiraldi told columnists at a question and answer session at the beleagured jail.
“So we are actively connecting with those people attempting to get them back, offer them a few impetuses, purchasing their uniforms for instance,” he continued.
“We are likewise actively recruiting for reinstatement of formally dressed staff who left service in the department on favorable terms inside the most recent four years. They will begin training in October also yet will just require fourteen days training.”
The newly printed commissioner, who assumed control of the department recently, likewise said there are plans to employ 200 new officers, who’ll start a three-to four-month training program come October 1.
The DOC is attempting to build up the positions in the midst of a staffing crunch that has constrained correction officers and captains to work triple and fourfold moves since scores of workers are phoning in debilitated, going AWOL, stopping or resigning ahead of schedule as the inmate population keeps on rising.
The workers have said they’re battling with “coldhearted” conditions, the most exceedingly terrible found in the notorious jail’s history, and experience difficulty working the long moves without enough breaks in the middle.
“Our 19-percent debilitated rate is in excess of multiple times higher than [the] NYPD wiped out pace of three percent and multiple occasions higher than the local group of fire-fighters’ wiped out rate,” Schiraldi grumbled to journalists.
He conceded that conditions at the jail have been troublesome and the high level of violent offenders is essential for the explanation staff would prefer not to come to work.
“In the event that you took a gander at the present population, around 4,000 of the 6,000 people here today are in for violent crimes,” Schiraldi said.
“That is only one among numerous different components that I believe is making it somewhat frightening for people to come to work. I’m doing whatever it takes not to minimize the way that these are sincerely trying occasions.”
All things considered, the commissioner, who was selected the new head of city jails in May, said “people who are needed to come here need to move forward and really come here.”
“I can’t simply say it’s OK not to come to work and say you’re wiped out when you’re not yet I could never briefly say there’s not a ton of reasons why people are worried about coming in,” he said, adding that COs have boldly posted vacation pictures via web-based media while out wiped out.
Accordingly, the president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association Benny Boscio Jr. blamed Schiraldi for “demonizing” officers.
“Commissioner Schiraldi is disgracefully demonizing our officers when inmate assaults against us are at an unsurpassed high and City Hall’s negligence has made the emergency we currently face. Actually triple movements are occurring in light of the fact that in only one year, the inmate population has almost multiplied and Mayor de Blasio has wouldn’t employ a solitary Correction Officer for almost three years,” Boscio Jr. railed in an assertion.
“The Commissioner and the Mayor need to take a B Post in a group subsidiary lodging region, while being dwarfed 50-1 and work 25 hours in addition to without dinners and bathroom breaks prior to addressing us about our service to the city. This is a shame!”
Schiraldi’s public interview came hours after a Rikers inmate was discovered dead of an apparent drug overdose — the 10th inmate to kick the bucket at the jail this year.