Rikers Island’s Defenders

The campaign to shut down Rikers has accelerated in recent months, winning powerful allies like Governor Andrew Cuomo and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. Bolstered by the tragic death of Kalief Browder — a young Bronx man who committed suicide after a traumatic three-year stint awaiting trial there — the campaign has successfully brought the barbarity of New York City’s island prison into public view.

Cuomo and Mark-Viverito, along with several other elected officials, have responded positively to the campaign, adopting some of its demands as their own. Mark-Viverito recently called for the closure of the prison in a State of the City speech entitled “More Justice.” Even President Barack Obama has allied himself with sections of the campaign, invoking Browder’s experience to call for an end to the solitary confinement of minors.

But while activists and elected officials worked to gain support for their vision of inmate-centered reform, COBA’s membership of fifteen thousand current and retired correction officers capitalized on its recent contract negotiation with the city to advance its own vision — a Rikers Island where officers enjoy even greater power.

Like many other public-sector unions, COBA members worked without a contract during the last years of the Bloomberg administration. But at the end of 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a tentative agreement with the union. In January, COBA’s membership ratified the new contract with 95 percent support.

COBA, like the city’s police, firefighter, and sanitation unions, had to make concessions — a meager wage increase of 11 percent over seven years, plus increased worker contributions to the shared health care fund. But the contract still garnered near-unanimous support because it laid out workplace changes that enhance correction officers’ power over inmates while simultaneously insulating officers from civilian legal intervention.

The new contract establishes a review procedure for correction officers who receive thirty-day unpaid suspensions for use-of-force violations, allowing guards to appeal to officer-friendly review boards comprised of union reps, Department of Corrections (DOC) officials, and jail wardens.

Since the contract was approved, seven correction officers who were suspended in 2013 following the brutal beating of inmate Jamal Lightfoot have been reinstated at full pay, despite the fact that they are currently standing trial on criminal charges for their role in the attack.

The contract also includes a mandate for the Bronx district attorney to work with the union to establish the Rikers Island Central Arrest Unit — a special police force that will operate inside the prison to arrest inmates accused of assaulting guards.

In a public statement about the contract, de Blasio boasted that more than a year after he took office in January 2014 “inmate arrests have more than doubled,” suggesting that the new contract will pave the way for more of the same. During the first half of 2015 there were between 50 and 60 monthly inmate arrests at Rikers. That number climbed to between 100 and 150 monthly arrests during the second half of the year.

COBA and the DOC maintain that the increase in inmate arrests and use-of-force incidents is a direct response to a surge in violence, but the numbers tell a different story. While officials claim that inmate assaults on guards are rising by as much as 50 percent a year, slashings — once the most infamous feature of life at Rikers — have decreased dramatically, from 1,552 in 1990 to only 90 in 2014. Despite this decline, in 2014 there were 4,047 use-of-force incidents at Rikers — up more than 300 percent from 2011.

The union’s push for greater power and less accountability has nothing to do with officers needing to protect themselves from violent inmates — it’s backlash against increasing political pressure to reform the way Rikers operates.

COBA’s reactionary agenda, combined with its history as an unabashedly conservative institution, has led the union to try to gain traction for its views in the political arena as well — as the anticipated Trump endorsement attests. Both Seabrook and his union have a long history of backing tough-on-crime but anti-union candidates. COBA often joins forces with other law enforcement unions, which then pit themselves against other organized workers, like teachers and hospital employees.

Seabrook and COBA were instrumental in building support for Rudy Giuliani’s reelection bid in 1997, a decision that set them apart from other public-sector unions. Seabrook was even the only labor leader in the city to endorse Michael Bloomberg, the infamous union-busting mayor whose intransigence at the bargaining table forced public sector-workers in New York City to go years without a contract.

In all these cases, each candidate’s unwavering allegiance to law enforcement — not their support for organized labor — motivated Seabrook’s endorsement decision. COBA and its police union allies are more interested in leveraging the legal and institutional gains of labor to serve conservative interests than in strengthening the labor movement as a whole.

And COBA doesn’t hesitate to deploy illegal and unscrupulous tactics in pursuit of its goals.

Dissatisfied with the Bronx district attorney’s reluctance to aggressively prosecute inmates involved in altercations with guards, COBA muscled a bill through the state legislature in Albany in 2014, aiming to reassign Rikers Island to the more hardline Queens DA. According to the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the proposed bill was “a thinly veiled effort to … find the most friendly district attorney’s office and shut out any other ones.” But COBA, of course, had a different take. An article entitled “COBA’s Rikers Island Bill” in COBA’s magazine described it as “the most important piece of legislation” of the year. It was later vetoed by Governor Cuomo.

But the union’s reach goes beyond legislative battles. In 2013, COBA effectively shut down New York City’s entire court system for a day to prevent an inmate from testifying in criminal proceedings against two correction officers who were accused of abusing him. Correction officers claimed that every single bus or van authorized to transport inmates to court was either out of service or could not be moved. More than 750 inmates — including the one scheduled to testify against the abusive correction officers — failed to make it to court that day.

Seabrook himself has been unable to avoid personal scandal — he is currently under federal investigation for embezzling and misusing union funds. And earlier this year, while appearing on a panel with black clergy in the Bronx, he confirmed many people’s worst fears by suggesting that he thinks it’s the union’s responsibility to lie to protect correction officers after use-of-force incidents.

COBA’s positions, not surprisingly, consistently put it at odds with most other public-sector unions, as well as the rest of the labor movement. And in a country where mass incarceration disproportionately affects people of color, overwhelmingly black and brown unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) may soon recognize that they have more to gain from isolating unions like COBA than from appeasing them.

While public-sector unions continue to battle for their very survival, COBA actively works against the interests of other workers, campaigning for anti-union candidates and advocating an expansion of the carceral state that already persecutes working people at an alarming rate.

It deserves no place in the labor movement.