As an advocate for closing Rikers Island, I encounter a common assumption: that correction officers are our main opposition. But when we look beyond the badges, we see that many officers are people of color from the same communities as those in the jails. Could we, together, envision good jobs that aren’t dependent on mass incarceration?
When I graduated from high school, a lot of my classmates applied to work for the city — whether in the Correction Department, the Police Department, Transit or Sanitation. We envisioned a decent-paying job with benefits that we could retire from with a pension. As young adults, most of us weren’t thinking a lot about social conditions or unfair practices.
There are also some of us, myself included, who maybe took a wrong turn, got diverted from life’s track, or were wrongly accused, and wound up on Rikers Island. The people who are working there and doing time there come from the same communities and sometimes the same households. We attend the same churches, grew up and shop on the same streets. When I was locked up on Rikers, my family friend worked there as a correction officer. Many women I was incarcerated with had relatives and friends who worked there. I think at some level most of us knew that we were each other’s societal mirrors — the same folks, just in different circumstances, doing time together.
So when and how do we break the cycle? Correction officers can directly see ways the system is failing all of us. They spend their days guarding people who should clearly be receiving mental health treatment, quality drug treatment, domestic violence services, or just stable housing. They also work in the same miserable conditions that are deemed acceptable for incarcerated people — bitter cold in the winter, suffocating heat in the summer, the putrid smell from the landfill the Rikers jails are built on. They know that when a toilet floods in the dorm, they can’t escape the stench either.
Thanks to the organizing of formerly incarcerated people, Rikers will close by 2027. With that, NYC’s jail capacity will shrink by 75%. The correction officer’s union campaigned to keep Rikers open, but some individual officers were brave enough to say closing Rikers sounded like a good thing. Maybe they thought about working in buildings that weren’t isolated, toxic and falling down. Maybe they hoped their children, mostly Black and Brown, would never witness the atrocities of Rikers, either as staff or in custody. Maybe they thought about the investments our communities — their communities — could have if we free up some of the $447,000 we are spending now to keep a person in Rikers for one year.
To shift that money, we need to eliminate jobs in DOC that aren’t needed. The city’s Department of Correction employs about eight times the national average of officers per person in custody, but it hasn’t made the jail environment any better for people held there or working there. People who try to delay this inevitable transition demonstrate how pervasive the dehumanization of this system is: correction officers are seen as one-dimensional and incapable of change, just like those who are incarcerated.
I know from my experience that people are not their circumstance. When I was incarcerated, there was one officer who was really helpful to me. We had conversations about life circumstances that lead people down a path that wind up in jails and institutions. As my release date drew closer, he showed concern for my discharge plans and even said, “Let’s not meet here again.” That officer could have worked in human services, maybe in public health or in a community-based organization, providing the type of support that could keep people out of jail. But our mayor at that time (and so many before him, and after) lacked vision and courage to invest in a different vision of safety.
That was in the 1980s. Since then, millions more New Yorkers have experienced the trauma of Rikers, on both sides of the bars. It no longer has to be this way.
I invite correction officers to put aside badges and uniforms, and instead connect with your humanity to consider: What kind of work would you really like to do? What kind of jobs does our city need to address the root causes of incarceration? What kind of training, and maybe healing, would you need to qualify for one of those jobs? What kind of society do you want to live in?
I know I want to live in a society built on innovation, collaboration, healing, love and care, and the time to act is now. DOC’s budget should be redirected back into the communities most harmed by incarceration, and in the process, we can create opportunities for everyone to have meaningful, living-wage work.
Rodriguez is a formerly incarcerated organizer and a member of Freedom Agenda.
