Jails offer small-time facilities for short-term prisoners

By Michael Dobie | Staff Writer

July 11, 2004

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No intramural leagues. No all-star teams. No competition against outside squads. No three-hour rec sessions. No baseball diamonds. No quarter-mile tracks. No rec supervisors.

Local jails do have sports but few of the frills offered by prisons. An hour a day, minimal facilities. That's all.

"We do not have organized sports and recreation programs. Most of the people are transients, they don't spend too much time here," said Chief Alan Otto of the Suffolk County Jail. "There's constant movement every day ... You couldn't have teams. They come and go."

Jails house two types of prisoners: inmates who have been sentenced typically to one year or less and do their time in jail rather than in a prison, and detainees who have been arrested and are awaiting bail or trial. Suffolk County's facilities in Riverhead and Yaphank hold a combined 1,500 to 1,600 prisoners daily and receive as many as 200 new prisoners each day. The turnover is even more dramatic in the city, which holds about 14,500 people daily in its 12 facilities. Twenty nine percent of those entering the system are released within two days, 52 percent within seven days.

Some of the superintendents of the 10 jails on Rikers Island occasionally stage basketball tournaments, deputy commissioner of public information Tom Antonen said, with the winner earning something like extra television or recreation time.

Most inmates in most jails, however, get one hour of recreation per day -- in the yard if the weather is good, in the gym if it is not. Otto said prisoners in Suffolk sometimes lose indoor rec even in bad weather; when the jail's population exceeds capacity, officials are forced to put cots in the gym.

Unless it is snowing or raining, however, jails try to send their prisoners out to the yard.

"The individual housing areas kind of go separately, not like the massive yard where hundreds of guys are out there all day," Nassau County Jail Sgt. Eric Jorgensen said. "We have multiple yards, small yards, in this building that are meant to hold approximately 40 inmates, like a full-size basketball court but square. Other yards are probably double that size."

Inmates and detainees usually play basketball or handball in the yard. A few prisoners will run or jog, Jorgensen said. The Nassau jail, whose population averages more than 1,600 per day, has basketball, weight machines and table tennis in the gym and isometric-type exercise machines back in the housing areas.

Suffolk County Jail has similar facilities but no longer has either weights or weight machines.

"We had too many problems," Otto said. "One inmate would attempt to harm another inmate, or smuggle [the weights] up to their rooms."

Suffolk has what it calls "static equipment" -- chin-up and pull-up bars cemented to walls.

Rikers Island still has weights in its yards but they are fixed -- that is, plates are welded onto bars so they cannot be removed.

Rikers Island used to stage its own Olympic Games in the mid-1980s, Antonen said, where prisoners from the 10 jails competed against one another primarily in track-and- field events.

"It lasted a few years," Antonen said. "It kind of like faded away because the time and effort to plan something of that nature involving hundreds of inmates and hundreds of visitors became too time-consuming."

Jorgensen said Nassau's sports and recreation program also used to be more varied.

"Years and years ago they used to do more campy-type things, tournaments," Jorgen.sen said. "We had weightlifting contests. Now, with the size of the facility, that's not feasible anymore."

One similarity between sports in jails and sports in prisons is that each offers similar benefits.

"The inmates really look forward to it because that's the time they get to let off steam," Jorgensen said. "When they're in the housing area it's always, 'Don't run, don't yell, don't do this or that.' In the yard they have a lot more freedom. It's also good for the officers, too, because they can blow off steam ...

"Without the rec, there'd be a lot of trouble."