Many people express concern for inmates in our jails and prisons these days.  If the concern were genuine, one would expect it would include calls for sufficient discipline to protect inmates from assault.  Yet I don't hear that expressed often; more often we hear the opposite.

Rafael Mangual has this article in the City Journal with the above title.  The subtitle is "Mayor de Blasio's soft-on-crime approach is backfiring."

Beginning in December 2014, Bill de Blasio's mayoral administration placed significant restrictions on how New York City corrections officers can penalize and restrain violent criminals in city jails, ostensibly to ensure the safety and well-being of inmates and guards alike. But the mayor's policies seem to have made jails less safe for all concerned, as an examination of the data regarding inmate violence reveals. In 1998, when more than 17,500 prisoners were packed into New York City jails on any given day, inmates committed 6,458 violent assaults. By 2017, the average daily inmate population had dropped to just 9,500--yet the behind-bars violent-assault total nearly doubled, to 12,650.  Much of that rise happened over the last three years, during which violent assaults jumped 43 percent, even as, during that same period, the number of corrections officers increased, from 8,922 to 10,862.

In a jail system with fewer inmates and more guards, what explains the spike in inmate violence? Part of it, anyway, can be attributed to de Blasio's "focus on equity"--a phrase that appears in the 2017 Mayor's Management Report more than two dozen times, including at the top of the section covering the city's Department of Correction (DOC). Equity concerns apparently guided the implementation of reforms regarding punitive segregation (known commonly as "solitary confinement") and guards' use of force.