Documents Show NYC Correction Officers Skipped Work for 4-8 Months At a Time –

Last summer Pariesh Steele, a New York City correction officer assigned to the Anna M. Kross jail on Rikers Island mysteriously stopped coming to work.

Department of Correction investigators placed phone calls to his Brooklyn home. He didn’t answer. Steele’s attendance record at Rikers was already less than stellar. In 2018 and 2019 he had been labeled “chronic absent” after calling out sick 103 days in a single year. But in the summer of 2021, DOC records show he didn’t even call to tell anyone he was feeling ill. He just stopped showing up for his shifts. After he missed about four months’ of work – without providing any explanation – Sarena Townsend, the former top DOC internal affairs investigator, signed off on disciplinary charges.

Steele was deemed Absent Without Leave – AWOL.

“It’s an embarrassment,” Townsend said in an interview with the I-Team. “This is a culture of game-playing. It has been happening but only now that the staffing crisis has exploded to what it was has it become more publicized.”

Pariesh Steele is one of 25 correction officers facing the most egregious departmental charges for skipping work in the last two years. The News 4 I-Team used New York’s public records law to uncover documents outlining the allegations against him and two dozen more of the city’s no-show C.O.’s.

The magnitude of their collective absenteeism is breathtaking.

One jail officer stands accused of being AWOL for 170 shifts in nine months between September of 2020 and June of 2021. When he did show up to work, records indicate he routinely arrived two hours late.

Another correction officer is accused of using 197 sick days in a single year. A staff member assigned to one of the infirmaries on Rikers Island is accused of calling in sick 325 days in just over 2 and a half years. When an investigator visited her home, she wasn’t there.

New York city’s correction officers, along with other uniformed public safety workers, have the right to nearly unlimited sick days because their jobs carry unique physical dangers. But Townsend said she believes hundreds of jail staff members began abusing that policy during the pandemic.

“We saw people who were out for months and months who were continuing to get paid by the department and not coming to work,” Townsend said.

NBC New York’s Chris Glorioso reports.

Last summer the de Blasio Administration began sounding frequent public alarms about dangerously low work attendance at Rikers Island. At one point, 1 out of every 5 jail employees called out sick or was AWOL.

So where was Steele during the four months he skipped work last summer?

According to police records and court documents, he spent part of the time away from work getting arrested in Pennsylvania. A criminal complaint filed outside Lancaster says Steele was caught at a FedEx store trying to mail 3 pounds of marijuana to Puerto Rico in June. When investigators examined Steele’s credit card records, they found he’d also spent nearly $3,000 on Puerto Rico hotels — during the same timeframe he was marked absent from his job at Rikers Island.

Steele’s criminal…