Yet all those candidates and dozens like them were hired last year to be part of the force overseeing nearly 11,000 inmates on Rikers Island, according to a yearlong city probe of jail hiring practices released Thursday.
The probe found systemic problems with the Department of Correction hiring system, including no recruiting strategy for the past six years, that allowed an alarmingly high number of hires who had arrest records, gang ties or other red flags that are markers for corruption.
The Department of Investigation (DOI) report looked at 150 recent hires of correction officers on Rikers and found red flags among nearly a third of them.
Ten officers had more than one arrest, 79 had relatives or friends currently or previously in jail, and a number had gang connections.
"We can't tackle the problems of violence and contraband if we hire officers who are affiliated with exactly that kind of thing," DOI Commissioner Mark Peters said.
And there are other red flags in the report. Nearly half of the new hires reported psychological concerns, others financial problems that could leave them susceptible to corruption, and some had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies.
Peters said the chronic problems of violence, smuggling and bribery that plague the city jails can all be traced to the character and qualifications of the employees.
"Unless you have consistently qualified correction officers, solving the other problems we care about is an almost insurmountable task," Peters said. "This is just a function of, for a decade, hirings and screenings and investigations being ignored."
Norman Seabrook's union represents correction officers.
"I do not see this as a pervasive problem," he said. "When you live in the city of New York, the five boroughs, you are going to encounter people, they could live next door, who are associated with things they should not be doing. At the same time, that doesn't make you a bad person. Correction officers are good citizens of this city."
Seabrook says he has no problem with tighter screening and better recruitment, improvements Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte said.
"We have made every change possible in personnel and practice," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of the things in the report have already been done or in progress. I'm confident we'll get better outcomes."
Both commissioners were careful to emphasize the findings in this report predate their administrations, with the DOI commissioner saying this is the result of 10 years of neglect.
Rikers has come under increased scrutiny in the past year by the media and investigators, including federal prosecutors who have sued the city to institute reforms to what it has called a "deep-seated culture of violence."
(Information from the Associated Press was used in this report)