The city’s latest budget includes funds to grow the number of apartments in the Justice-Involved Supportive Housing program (JISH) from 120 to 500. That expansion was among the commitments the city made in its 2019 agreement to close Rikers Island.

A May 2023 rally calling for the city to move forward with plans to close Rikers, citing the costs of incarceration compared to supportive housing. (Neha Gautam/Urban Justice Center)

In 2019, when Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council passed a plan to eventually close the notorious jail complex at Rikers Island, the “Points of Agreement” struck as part of the deal included a pledge to expand the city’s Justice Involved Supportive Housing (JISH) program, from 120 units to 500.

The city launched JISH in 2015 to provide affordable housing and support services to New Yorkers with behavioral health needs who tend to shuffle back and forth between shelters, hospitals, and jail or prison—what advocates and experts describe as a “vicious cycle” that feeds both the city’s homeless and shelter populations.

But that expansion has yet to take off, despite the city releasing a $93.7 million Request for Proposals (RFP) six years ago. Providers declined to bid on that RFP, telling City Limits the funding rates were too low to adequately provide the housing and services the program requires.

The city’s latest budget deal, however, includes an additional, baselined $4.8 million that officials and advocates say will finally allow JISH to grow to the promised 500 units. This builds on earlier discretionary funding the City Council allocated last year so the program’s existing three providers can enhance their services.

“This, to us, is a smart investment,” said Stanley Richards, president and CEO at the Fortune Society, which currently operates JISH housing for 60 people in scattered-site apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan.

“It is an investment we need to make when we talk about reducing our footprint on mass incarceration,” he added. “Providing some of our most vulnerable people access to supportive housing and to stop the cycle of hospitalization, homelessness and incarceration.”

The number of people in the city’s shelters and behind bars at Rikers Island has swelled in recent years, and access to supportive housing plays a role in both, experts and advocates say.

JISH is modeled after an earlier Bloomberg-era program called FUSE. Participants housed through that initiative spent 256 fewer days in shelter and an average of 95 fewer days in jail than members of a comparison group, one study found.

In addition to affordable housing, Fortune Society’s JISH clients get access to medical and behavioral health care, medication management, job training, art programs and other resources.

“Those are key components to increasing public safety,” Richards said. “Public safety is not just about policing, police enforcement, incarceration. That’s a piece of it; that’s not the total picture. The other side of public safety is when you provide people with opportunity to rebuild their lives, when you connect them.”

Richards said the higher reimbursement rate provided by the extra City Council funds has allowed Fortune to restructure its existing JISH portfolio so that each participant has their own unit, rather than doubled up with a roommate in a two-bedroom, as they had previously.

“The [prior] amount of funding wasn’t sufficient to pay fair market rent and to provide the level of services we need to ensure people are engaged and connected,” he said.

Kandra Clark, director of policy at Urban Pathways, another organization that runs 30 JISH units, said they’re looking forward to applying to operate more with the city at the new, higher funding rates.

“We would like studios, but all within the same building, then that way it’ll be much easier to do case management,” she said. That work can include providing people with everything from doctor’s appointments to basic life skills training.

“Some of our folks have been in [prison] for decades. They don’t know how to use computers. They don’t know how to use the MTA,” Clark said. “It just looks a little different, even from our regular supportive housing sites, because of those barriers that they’ve had for so long.”

Unlike JISH, other types of supportive housing are often inaccessible to people coming out of jail or prison. For many supportive apartments, applicants must prove they’re “chronically” homeless, meaning they’ve been unhoused for long stretches of time, typically a year. A stint in jail for more than 90 days would disqualify someone from most units, restarting that clock.

The City Council is expected to pass a bill Thursday that would amend that requirement when it comes to city-funded supportive housing programs, allowing time spent behind bars to count as time spend unhoused.

“We must update our housing policies to be sensitive to the unique vulnerability faced by people cycling in and out of the jail system,” the bill’s sponsor, Councilmember Carlina Rivera, told City Limits last year.

Reducing the population at Rikers is key to the city’s ability to close the troubled island jail complex, as required by a law passed under the de Blasio administration, which will replace it with four new, smaller jail facilities across four of the five boroughs.

The number of people being held at Rikers surpassed 7,000 this spring, several thousand more than what the future borough-based jails will be able to accommodate. While the law requires the city to close Rikers by 2027, it’s currently unlikely to meet that deadline.

At a press conference earlier this month, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and other lawmakers urged the Adams administration to implement the new JISH funding as quickly as possible, along with other recent mental health reforms they say will help reduce the number of people in jail.

“These investments, which we have consistently championed and were a part of the independent Rikers commission’s updated blueprint to close Rikers, are critical to our goal of keeping our city safe, reducing the inflated jail population and ultimately closing Rikers for good,” Speaker Adams said at the time.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees JISH, said the 2019 RFP remains open on a rolling basis and that the administration is discussing the best approach to using the extra funds from the most recent budget.

While finally expanding the program to the planned 500 units would be a win, advocates say the need is even greater than that, and would like to see the program grow further.

In 2022, an analysis by the Corporation for Supportive Housing estimated that some 2,500 people held at Rikers Island in a given year fit the criteria of need for supportive housing, generally meaning they’re homeless and have a behavioral health diagnosis.

“We’re very confident that the 2,500 number is a conservative estimate,” said Cassondra Warney, CSH’s senior program manager. 

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post Funding Boost Could Fulfill City’s Pledge to Expand Housing for New Yorkers Who Cycle Between Shelter and Jail appeared first on City Limits.

By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Rhode Island man accused of faking his death and fleeing the United States to evade rape charges was found guilty late Wednesday of sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in his first of two Utah trials.

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An eight-person jury in Salt Lake County found Nicholas Rossi guilty of a 2008 rape after a three-day trial in which his accuser and her parents took the stand. Rossi, 38, declined to testify on his own behalf. He will be sentenced on Oct. 20 and is set to stand trial in September on another rape charge in Utah County.

First-degree felony rape carries a punishment in Utah of five years to life in prison, said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.

“We are grateful to the survivor in this case for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place,” Gill said in a statement. “It took courage and bravery to take the stand and confront her attacker to hold him accountable.”

Utah authorities began searching for Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, when he was identified through a decade-old DNA rape kit in 2018. He was among thousands of rape suspects identified and later charged when Utah made a push to clear its rape kit backlog.

Months after he was charged in Utah County, an online obituary claimed Rossi died on Feb. 29, 2020, of late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But police in his home state of Rhode Island, along with his former lawyer and a former foster family, cast doubt on whether he was dead.

He was arrested in Scotland the following year while receiving treatment for COVID-19 after hospital staff recognized his distinctive tattoos from an Interpol notice.

Extradited to Utah in January 2024, Rossi insisted he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who was being framed. Investigators say they identified at least a dozen aliases Rossi used over the years to evade capture.

He appeared in court this week in a wheelchair, wearing a suit and tie and using an oxygen tank.

Rossi’s public defender denied the rape claim and urged jurors not to read too much into his move overseas years later.

“You’re allowed to move, you’re allowed to go somewhere else, you’re allowed to have a different name,” attorney Samantha Dugan said. She declined further comment following the verdict.

Prosecutors painted a picture of an intelligent man who used his charm to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman. The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly.

FILE- Nicholas Rossi leaves Edinburgh Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Court during his extradition hearing in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 30, 2023. (Andrew Milligan/PA via AP, File)

The woman was living with her parents and recovering from a traumatic brain injury when she responded to a personal ad Rossi posted on Craigslist. They began dating and were engaged within about two weeks.

She testified Rossi asked her to pay for dates and car repairs, lend him $1,000 so he wouldn’t be evicted, and take on debt to buy their engagement rings. He grew hostile soon after their engagement and raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home, she said.

Deputy Salt Lake County District Attorney Brandon Simmons told jurors Wednesday that the woman did not consent. “This is not romantic, this is not her mistaking things.”

The woman said her parents’ dismissive comments convinced her not to go to the police. She came forward a decade later after seeing him in the news and learning he was accused of another rape from the same year.

Rossi’s lawyers said the woman built up years of resentment after he made her foot the bill for everything in their monthlong relationship. They argued she accused him of rape to get back at him years later when he was getting media attention, and sought to undermine her credibility with jurors.

Rossi’s accuser in the Utah County case, who testified at this week’s trial, is also a former girlfriend. She went to police at the time of that alleged rape. He is accused of attacking her at his apartment in Orem in September 2008 after she came over to collect money she said he stole from her to buy a computer.

When police initially interviewed Rossi, he claimed she raped him and threatened to have him killed.

Rossi grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island and returned there before allegedly faking his death. He was previously wanted in the state for failing to register as a sex offender. The FBI says he faces fraud charges in Ohio, where he was convicted of sex-related charges in 2008.

By PATRICK WHITTLE

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A network of clinics that provides health care in Maine is expected to ask a judge Thursday to restore its Medicaid funding while it fights a Trump administration effort to keep federal money from going to abortion providers.

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President Donald Trump’s policy and tax bill, known as the “ big beautiful bill,” blocked Medicaid money from flowing to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. The parameters in the bill also stopped funding from reaching Maine Family Planning, a much smaller provider that offers health care services in one of the poorest and most rural states in the Northeast.

A federal judge ruled last month that Planned Parenthood clinics around the country must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the provider wrangles with the Trump administration over efforts to defund it.

Maine Family Planning filed a federal lawsuit last month seeking to restore reimbursements.

Lawyers and representatives for Maine Family Planning say its 18 clinics provide vital services across the state including cervical cancer screenings, contraception and primary care to low-income residents. They also say the funding cut occurred even though Medicaid dollars are not used for its abortion services.

“Without Medicaid, MFP will be forced to stop providing all primary care for all patients — regardless of their insurance status — by the end of October,” the organization said in a statement, adding that about 8,000 patients receive family planning and primary care from the network.

It also said many Maine Family Planning clinics “provide care in very rural areas of the state where there are no other health care providers, and around 70% of their patients rely exclusively on MFP and will not see any other health care provider in a given year.”

In court documents, Anne Marie Costello, deputy director for the Center for Medicaid & CHIP Services, called the request to restore funding “legally groundless” and said it “must be firmly rejected.”

“The core of its claim asks this Court to revive an invented constitutional right to abortion — jurisprudence that the Supreme Court decisively interred — and to do so in a dispute over federal funds,” Costello said.

While advocates of cutting Medicaid for abortion providers focused on Planned Parenthood, the bill did not mention it by name. Instead it cut off reimbursements for organizations that are primarily engaged in family planning services — which generally include things such as contraception, abortion and pregnancy tests — and received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023.

The U.S. Senate’s parliamentarian rejected a 2017 effort to defund Planned Parenthood because it was written to exclude all other providers by barring payments only to groups that received more than $350 million a year in Medicaid funds. Maine Family Planning asserts in its legal challenge that the threshold was lowered to $800,000 this time around to make sure Planned Parenthood would not be the only entity affected.

It is the only other organization that has come forward publicly to say its funding is at risk.

Planned Parenthood’s legal fight with the Trump administration over Medicaid funding is still in the court system also.

By WAFAA SHURAFA and SAM METZ, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than 100 nonprofit groups warned Thursday that Israel’s rules for aid groups working in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank will block much-needed relief and replace independent organizations with those that serve Israel’s political and military agenda — charges that Israel denied.

At the same time, hospital officials reported more deaths from Israeli airstrikes and an increasing toll from malnutrition.

The mounting backlash over aid restrictions and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza have been cited by several countries as a factor in their moves toward recognizing Palestinian statehood. Yet on Thursday, Israel advanced plans for a new settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, with one far-right government minister describing the move as a way to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

Letter accuses Israel of ‘weaponizing aid’

The nonprofit groups, including Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and CARE, were responding to registration rules announced by Israel in March that require organizations to hand over full lists of their donors and Palestinian staff for vetting. They contend doing so could endanger their staff and give Israel broad grounds to block aid if groups are deemed to be “delegitimizing” the country or supporting boycotts or divestment.

The aid groups stressed on Thursday that most of them have not been able to deliver “a single truck” of life-saving assistance since Israel implemented a blockade in March. Their letter called on other countries and donors to pressure Israel “to end the weaponization of aid, including through bureaucratic obstruction.”

The aid that the groups provide supplements assistance from the United Nations, airdrops organized by foreign governments and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — the new Israel and U.S.-backed contractor that since May has been the primary distributor of aid in Gaza.

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Despite those channels, the amount of aid reaching Gaza remains far below what the U.N. and relief groups previously delivered.

Meanwhile, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said Thursday that dehydration is increasing in Gaza amid limited water supplies and a heatwave that has pushed temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).

U.N. agencies and a small number of aid groups have resumed delivering assistance, but say the number of trucks allowed in remains far from sufficient.

COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of humanitarian aid to Gaza, denied the claims in the NGOs’ letter. It said 380 trucks entered Gaza on Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Israeli military said, 119 aid packages containing food for Gaza residents were airdropped by six different countries.

During the two-month ceasefire, aid groups demanded Israel allow entry for 600 trucks per day.

“The alleged delay in aid entry … occurs only when organizations choose not to meet the basic security requirements intended to prevent Hamas’s involvement,” COGAT said.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Israel has pressed U.N. agencies to accept military escorts to deliver goods into Gaza, a demand they’ve largely rejected, citing their commitment to neutrality. The standoff has been the source of competing claims: Israel maintains it allows aid into Gaza that adheres to its rules, while aid groups that have long operated in Gaza decry the amount of life-saving supplies stuck at border crossings.

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had met with U.N. humanitarian officials in New York about the “need to, speedily, scale up aid into Gaza.”

Death toll mounts from airstrikes and malnutrition

Hospitals throughout Gaza on Thursday reported casualties from Israeli strikes on Gaza City, which Israel identified as a combatant stronghold last week when it announced plans to launch a new offensive against Hamas. An Israeli strike on Gaza City killed one person and wounded three others, an official at Shifa Hospital said. A separate strike killed five people in Gaza City on Thursday morning, according to al-Ahli hospital, which received the casualties.

Israel’s military did not immediately respond to questions about the strikes.

The casualties add to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed since the war started when Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 people.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not specify how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals but 50 remain inside Gaza. Israel believes around 20 of them to be alive.

The health ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own.

The ministry on Thursday also reported four additional malnutrition-related deaths, raising the total to 239, a toll that includes 106 children.

Israel announces settlement expansion in West Bank

In the occupied West Bank, Israel’s far-right finance minister on Thursday announced the construction of a new settlement expansion that Palestinians and rights groups worry will scuttle plans for a future Palestinian state by effectively cutting the West Bank into two separate parts.

Minister Bezalel Smotrich said doing so “buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.”

“Anyone in the world who tries today to recognize a Palestinian state – will receive an answer from us on the ground,” he said, referencing the many countries moving toward recognition.

The 3,500 apartments in question would expand the settlement of Maale Adumim into an open tract of land east of Jerusalem known as E1. Development in the area has been under consideration for more than two decades, but was frozen due to U.S. pressure during previous administrations. The E1 plan has not yet received its final approval, which is expected next week.

Rights groups swiftly condemned the plan. Peace Now called it “deadly for the future of Israel and for any chance of achieving a peaceful two-state solution.”

Italy evacuates Palestinians from Gaza, including injured kids

As European countries amplify their criticisms of Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, some are expanding evacuations.

Italy’s foreign affairs ministry said it received 114 Palestinian evacuees from Gaza on Wednesday, including 31 children suffering from either severe injuries and amputations or serious congenital diseases.

Since the beginning of the war Italy has evacuated more than 900 Palestinians from Gaza, including those who have arrived as part of a family reunification program.

Metz reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut, Lebanon, Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations and Andrea Rosa in Rome contributed reporting.

Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war