A Conversation with Commissioner Stanley Richards at the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City.
On April 23rd, Flawless Foundation attended the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City Breakfast Forum, hosted by CCC President Richard Aborn and featuring New York City Department of Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards. The conversation centered on the people inside the system, the staff who work alongside them, and what care can look like when it begins long before someone is in custody.
Some conversations stay with you because of the data. Others stay with you because of the person delivering it. Commissioner Stanley Richards offered both. Speaking to a packed room, he traced a line from his own beginnings in the Bronx, through his time inside the New York City correctional system, to the role he holds today as the Commissioner of the same department. It is an arc almost no one in his position carries, and it gave everything he said a different weight.
Commissioner Richards spoke about a corrections officer named Officer Sumner who, more than forty years ago, knew him by his name rather than by his identification number.
“She knew me by my humanity,” he said.
Being treated with compassion, he told the audience, pushed him to consider that his life could look differently from the path he assumed he was on. He went on to earn his GED and a college degree, and after his release in 1991 began a career in reentry services and criminal justice advocacy that culminated in three decades of leadership at the Fortune Society, an organization he helped grow from a small staff serving a few thousand people a year into a national model serving 18,000.
From that lived experience, he made one of the morning’s most important observations.
Of the roughly 6,700 people currently under the department’s care, he said, about 60 percent carry a mental health diagnosis.
The Department of Corrections has been asked to absorb a mental health crisis it was never designed to address.
“The department is not a mental health provider. We’re just not,” he said. “Our officers are not clinicians. They’re not therapists.”
It was a clear-eyed acknowledgment that when a system without clinical training and infrastructure becomes the default response to mental illness, the people inside that system, in custody and on staff, are the ones who bear the consequences.
What stood out was how Commissioner Richards described the people who work for the department. When he stepped into the role, he said, the corrections officers he met used the same language he had heard for years from people in custody. They told him they need to be seen, heard, and valued. They told him they needed help and they needed hope. He has made it a priority to build out confidential mental health support for officers, in partnership with external providers, so that staff have somewhere to turn when the work takes a toll.
“They matter just as much as the people in our care,” he said.
For a foundation that sees mental health as a thread running through every life, that framing is aligned with how we understand the work.
Commissioner Richards laid out a vision that was both specific and grounded. The borough-based jail system now under construction, he said, is being designed with mental health and medical capacity built from the start. Outposted beds at Bellevue Hospital have already opened, and the Brooklyn and Bronx facilities are progressing through construction. Where it makes sense, people leaving custody will move into community-based care rather than being released into a vacuum.
The goal, he explained, is a system right-sized for the people who genuinely require secure detention, with everyone else connected to the kind of clinical and community support that can help them build a stable life.
At Flawless Foundation, we sat with a familiar truth as we listened. The criminalization of mental illness is what happens when the mental health system fails to reach someone before a crisis, and another system becomes the default response. The people most often discussed in conversations like this one, the individuals cycling through emergency rooms and courtrooms and correctional facilities, are most often people the mental health system did not reach in time.
Early intervention is mental health work. Family support is mental health work. Workforce capacity is mental health work. The Commissioner’s call for partnership was a call for the kind of integrated, community-based care that prevents crisis long before any other system has to step in.
We were also struck by the throughline of dignity. Commissioner Richards spoke about Officer Sumner the way someone speaks about a person who changed their life. He spoke about the men and women in his department’s custody and the men and women who staff his department’s facilities with the same care, drawing no hierarchy between them.
“We see people not as the worst thing they’ve ever done,” he said, “but as who they can become and who they are.”
It is the same belief that animates our work, and is what keeps us hopeful about what is possible when more of us choose to operate from that place.
We left the forum grateful for these thought leaders, energized by the conversation, and reminded that change happens in rooms like this one, where people across professions sit down together and ask what it would take to do better. Mental health does not exist in a silo, and neither do the systems built to respond to it. Through partnership, advocacy, and a steady commitment to the humanity of every person involved, we can keep building toward a more flawless world where care is the first response and not the last resort.
Thank you to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City for convening this important conversation, and to Commissioner Richards for his candor and his service.
