Another clinician who had served 13 years in prison on a kidnapping charge was arrested recently and accused of smuggling a straight-edged razor into Rikers. He was the third Corizon employee in the last year arrested on suspicion of smuggling contraband into the jail.

Anthony E. Shorris, the first deputy mayor, said that beyond Corizon’s track record, the idea of a for-profit health care provider was contrary to the mayor’s philosophy.

“Frankly, contracting out basic public services like the provision of health care to prisoners is not generally our position on things,” Mr. Shorris said. “We have a bias clearly toward public provision of care.”

Mr. Shorris noted that the president of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, Dr. Ram Raju, was particularly well qualified to take over at Rikers, having overseen health care at the Cook County jail in Chicago before coming to New York.

City officials said they were hoping to restore a sense of mission with its jail health care. Medical care at the jails was overseen by Montefiore Hospital from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Several of the doctors at that time were from the National Health Service Corps, a federal program that provided medical care in hard-to-serve areas. The hospital also provided an ethicist to review, among other things, conflicts between health care staff and correction officers.

Dr. Robert Cohen, who was a medical director at Rikers in the 1980s and is now on the New York City Board of Correction, said he hoped the hospitals corporation would be more independent and view its responsibilities to the patient as paramount.

“That could have a dramatic effect on patient care,” he said.

The Correction Department said in a statement that it had “begun implementing steps to improve the vetting of correctional health service provider staff.”