LONG ISLAND CITY — Officials announced a plan Wednesday to boost social services programs in the city's jail system, including a new initiative that would guarantee short-term jobs for sentenced inmates upon their release.
The $10 million program, called Jails to Jobs, will provide people sentenced to serve time in the city's jail facilities — primarily at Rikers Island — with offers of paid "transitional" employment for up to two months after they leave.
The initiative is expected to be in place by the end of the year, and would impact about 8,500 people annually who serve sentences in the city's jails, as opposed to those awaiting trial. The city's sentenced population is generally made up of people convicted on lesser offenses who are serving less than a year, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
Officials also pledged that by the end of 2017, every incarcerated person will be provided with re-entry counseling starting from their first day in jail, and will receive a guaranteed five hours of education or vocational training a day.
The proposals are part of a push to help curb recidivism and lower the city's overall inmate population, according to de Blasio.
"The message will be, literally on the first day: this is a temporary reality, this does not need to be your future. We're going to help you turn it around," the mayor said during the announcement at the offices of The Fortune Society, a nonprofit in Long Island City that provides reentry services.
The Jails to Jobs program will cost $10 million a year, funding that will come out of the executive budget, officials said. It will be voluntary, and apply only to inmates serving out sentences as opposed to those awaiting trial.
Under the plan, participants would be paired with a "peer navigator" to assist them upon their release from jail, and connect them with up to eight weeks of paid work in one of a number of fields, including construction, hospitality and food services.
"We believe this is part of what will make us safer," de Blasio said.
The mayor's announcement comes at a time when the city's inmate population has declined in recent years, shrinking from 11,478 in December 2013 to 9,362 in March 2017.
It also comes amid repeated calls from criminal justice advocates to close the city's largest jail complex at Rikers Island, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo blasted earlier this month as "intolerable."
But de Blasio has defended the city's efforts to improve conditions at Rikers and the city's other jails, something this latest initiative will help do, he said.
"For those 8,500 people I mentioned who are sentenced every year, they need help now," he said. "We need to break that cycle now."
