The Legal Aid Society slammed the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) in response to a new report detailing how DOC has failed to properly manage its bloated employee headcount, according to the New York Daily News.

The report concludes that there are “an unusually large number of staff” despite the presence of many problems – elevated levels of violent uses of force by staff chief among them – that typically suggest understaffing rather than overstaffing. The Monitor made plain that even with the “abnormally high absenteeism” among DOC staff, “the Department still has an extraordinarily large number of staff to operate the jails.”

Kayla Simpson, staff attorney at the Prisoners’ Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society, said the issues stem from a “deep, dysfunctional mismanagement by uniform leadership at the top of the agency and within the facilities themselves.”

“This is an overstaffed department that is operating like an understaffed department,” said Simpson. “It would be serious error for the city to increase a [staffing] ratio that already results in dangerous, persistent inefficiencies. The city must instead follow through on a full, independent staffing audit of the department, and then bring in new leadership at all levels to actually implement the recommendations of that audit.”