The number of personal injury claims filed against New York City for episodes at the Rikers Island jail complex and other city correctional facilities surged last year in what the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, called a troubling indication of a continuing plague of violence and mismanagement.  The claims, most of which come from Rikers, resulted from violent encounters between inmates or between inmates and guards, as well as more routine injuries and accidents, Mr. Stringer said in a news conference on Wednesday.  “The claims don’t lie,” Mr. Stringer said. “We have obviously a crisis of violence and an untenable situation.”  Mr. Stringer said that in the 2015 fiscal year, which ended June 30, his office received 2,846 personal injury claims from the jail system, an increase of 27 percent from the previous fiscal year, when there were 2,245 claims filed. In 2010, there were 1,204 claims.  Mr. Stringer said the trend appeared to be continuing, with preliminary data showing that the number of claims filed from July 1 through Feb. 25 rose by 39 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier.  A claim filed with the comptroller’s office is a notice by which a person reserves the right to file a lawsuit against the city. The claim must be filed within 90 days of an injury occurring, Mr. Stringer’s office said.  Some of the claims may represent simple slips and falls. But many are the result of violence in the facility, Mr. Stringer said.  He also said the city paid out $13.1 million in settlements or judgments in the 2015 fiscal year resulting from cases filed against the city related to injuries or deaths at its correctional facilities, a jump of 66 percent from the same period a year earlier. Three of those settlements, each for more than $1 million, involved the cases of men who died while in custody at Rikers.  Data provided by the comptroller’s office shows an increase in violence at the city’s correctional facilities, which would appear to parallel the rise in claims. While the jail population has fallen in recent years, several measures of violence have gone up.  Calculated by the number of incidents per 1,000 inmates in the 2015 fiscal year, there was a 19 percent increase in infractions cited to inmates for fights or assaults, a 46 percent increase in reports of inmate assaults on jail staff and a 27 percent increase in reports of the use of force by staff members against inmates, the comptroller’s office said.  Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken several steps to address the problems at Rikers, such as hiring additional correction officers, improving training and sharply reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement.  Monica Klein, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said that while the overall number of violent episodes had continued to rise, there had been a reduction in the most severe cases. She said that inmate assaults on correction staff members that resulted in serious injury were down 11 percent, and reports of the use of force by correction staff members that resulted in the serious injury of inmates fell by 23 percent from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2015.  The city “is taking aggressive steps to keep our inmates and officers safe,” Ms. Klein said in a statement, adding that “we are putting clear reforms in place to address violence and improve inmate outcomes on Rikers.”  A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2016, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Stringer Cites 27% Rise in Jail Injury Claims. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Personal injury complaints from correction employees and inmates rose by 27 percent, the city comptroller said, and most came from the Rikers Island complex.