By Benyamin Davidsons
New York City correction officers are so desperate to leave their jobs in city jails that hundreds have recently joined the NYPD. The latest class of 555 NYPD recruits sworn in during a ceremony on Thursday at the Police Academy already included 42 former correction officers, as per a law-enforcement source.
As reported by the NY Post, even the Department of Correction’s commissioner admitted that staff morale is “very low.” Asked about the correction officers fleeing their jobs, DOC head Vincent Schiraldi said Sunday that he has his work cut out for him in making his employees look forward to coming to work. “Morale at the Department of Correction is very low,” said Schiraldi, who was named commissioner just last month. “It’s been a month and I think I’m playing to reasonably good reviews. But there’s no switch you pull on the wall that all of a sudden makes people happy to come to work.”
Amid violent anti-cop protests and the liberal “defund the police” movement, correctional officers don’t feel safe. “The bad part about working at Rikers — I’ll be honest with you — it’s not the inmates,” said Tyliek Dyches, 28, who just left his DOC job at Rikers for the NYPD. “It’s the administration. They’re not backing us up and officers are getting hurt.” Dyches said: “We know that we can get hurt from inmates but it’s getting hurt from inmates and getting hurt from the administration that makes it such a tough job.”
Schiraldi told The Post on Sunday that he also thought the pandemic made a big impact on the low morale in his department. “We’re coming out of a pandemic and I think in all fairness [working] in a correction facility — in a forced proximity — with a lot of people who are medically vulnerable is a scary thing,” he said. “People did get sick and some people died. So I think that none of that helps.
“But we’re coming back. The department is going to come back,” Schiraldi asserted. “I think within the next months, you’re going to see more people coming back to work and people happier with their workplace. … There’s going to be some people, for sure, that their frustration runs pretty deep and it will take a while.” In Wednesday’s print edition of The Post, Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association President Benny Boscio Jr., accused the DOC of “gross mismanagement and sheer negligence” that he said led to over 1,700 jailers getting infected and nine casualties.
