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Dear New Yorkers,
It’s not often that the Office of the Comptroller refuses to register a contract submitted to us by a City agency. (As you may recall, one of the last times my Office did this was when we returned the City’s contract with Aetna to avoid forcing City retirees onto inferior Medicare Advantage health plans.)
It’s not up to us to decide whether a contract is a good idea, but it is our responsibility to make sure that City agencies follow procurement rules – for example, rules around getting competitive bids.
Last week, after careful review, I declined to register another contract, this one between the Department of Correction (DOC) and a for-profit company called Securus Technologies. The contract would essentially award Securus a monopoly to sell internet services to people incarcerated in New York City’s jails.
DOC did not bother to get bids for the contract, even though bidding should have been required. Why not? Because Securus told them they were the only company that could provide the service. That's not true, but DOC simply took Securus’ word for it.
And that’s not all: DOC’s sole-source contract provides Securus with discretion to increase prices every year without approval from DOC or anyone else. That means the company could jack up prices on their services every year, squeezing out a profit from incarcerated people with no other options.
What’s more, Securus has a history of data privacy violations. In 2021, the company accidentally allowed more than 1,500 confidential phone calls between detainees and their lawyers to be wrongly recorded by the Correction Department.
From this dubious contract with Securus, to monthly jails statistics indicating the need for a federal receivership on Riker’s Island, it’s clear that stronger management is needed at the Department of Correction to address the humanitarian crisis in New York City jails.
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