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Nearly 100 female and transgender inmates who were forced to move to an upstate prison amid a staffing crisis on Rikers Island will be returning to the troubled jail complex, the Department of Correction announced Monday.
Approximately 83 detainees from Rikers’ Rose M. Singer Center, who’ve been in custody at the state Bedford Hills Correctional Facility since the fall, will head back to the five boroughs starting Wednesday, the DOC said.
The department, working in conjunction with Gov. Kathy Hochul, originally planned to transfer 230 inmates to the prison to help alleviate staffing shortages on Rikers but only 118 were ultimately brought to Bedford Hills, the DOC said.
The move was widely panned by public defenders and correction unions alike who said the transfers would do little to alleviate the crisis and came at a huge cost to the detainees, who were forced to be hours away from the courts and their families.
Ultimately, the transfers did very little to improve operations, jailhouse sources said.
“I feel like it was a whole publicity stunt [by the DOC],” Benny Boscio Jr., the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, told The Post Monday.
“The reality is the Rose M. Singer Center is probably one of the better run jails on the island … it was a pretty good-running facility that had staffing levels up to par so it didn’t really make sense.”
The pending transfers come after 1,000 officers — or 13 percent of DOC’s total uniformed workforce — returned to work this month, giving the struggling jail the staff necessary to bring back the female and transgender detainees, the DOC said.
“Both our employees and people in custody have had to endure so much throughout this pandemic, and while we are by no means out of the woods, having 1,000 of our staff members return to work marks a significant shift in the right direction,” Louis Molina, the DOC’s newly minted commissioner, said in a statement.
“Our uniform workforce did not have a choice to telework these last two years. They have struggled to cope with the pandemic within their own families, while often having to work triple shifts in facilities and trying to keep themselves safe from contracting the disease. We are welcoming them back with open arms.”
Many of the officers had been out sick with COVID-19, said Boscio.
The department noted that an additional 1,500 officers, or about 20 percent of the uniformed workforce, remain out sick.
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