The Department of Correction came under fire Tuesday from a city oversight board for quietly creating a new high-security unit on Rikers Island that may violate a law limiting the use of solitary confinement.
The new Special Management Unit at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center limits detainees to just seven hours a day outside of their cells, DOC General Counsel James Conroy said during a Board of Correction meeting. However, Local Law 42, the law limiting solitary, requires 14 hours per day of out-of-cell time.
The unit, which opened Wednesday, currently has just five occupants, though the capacity is 40. Board members reported they observed a botched roll-out in visits on Sunday and Monday.
“We are very disturbed by the fact that the board was never privy to the plans with respect to this new unit,” said board member Barry Cozier, a retired state judge. “We observed numerous operational deficiencies.”
The new unit is located in the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, above, on Rikers Island. (Andrew Savulich / New York Daily/New York Daily News)
Board chairperson Dwayne Sampson questioned creating the new unit without laying the proper groundwork.
“It seems like a keg of dynamite ready to explode,” he said.
One thing the board did not question is whether the Adams administration had the right to create a unit that violates the solitary-confinement law — an issue now the subject of a bitter legal battle. The City Council sued the administration Dec. 9 to stop Mayor Adams’ practice since July of using “emergency” executive orders to block elements of the law. The case is pending.
The board members focused instead on their contention that correction officials appeared not to have set up the unit for a range of basic services, such as recreation, a law library and health clinic visits, and even access to razors.
An aerial view of the Rikers Island prison complex. (Photo by Debra L. Rothenberg/Getty Images)
While the detainees are supposed to be let out of their cells at 10 a.m., a captain and a security team are required to be present to do pat-frisk searches and cell searches — a factor that builds in delays, Cozier said.
“They are at the mercy of that,” he added.
The roughly 35 correction officers assigned to staff the unit had yet to be fully trained, board vice chairperson Helen Skipper said.
“I find it hard to believe that you opened the housing unit with officers who are not trained properly,” she said.
Skipper recounted an incident where the 64-year-old mother and 8-year-old daughter of a detainee in the unit had to wait six hours for a visit on Sunday. She said they were told the visit room had to be completely empty for the visit to take place.
“That’s an unreasonable restriction,” she said.
Conroy countered that the federal monitor tracking violence and use of force in the jails approved creation of the new unit as “sound correctional practice,” as did the state Commission on Correction.
He said the unit was intended as a midway step between the highest security units for men, dubbed RESH, at the Rose M. Singer Center, and the Rikers general population. He said the unit’s officers had already received five training sessions.
“We have an obligation to control violence in the jails,” Conroy said.
A New York City Department of Correction officer is pictured in Rikers Island’s George R. Vierno Center in this file photo. (James Keivom/New York Daily News)
Meanwhile, the City Council sent a letter Monday to Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is weighing whether to appoint an outside receiver to manage the city’s jails, urging her to make sure the Council’s powers to pass binding legislation are preserved.
Swain is presiding over Nunez v. the City of New York, a 2011 class action lawsuit about violence and staff use of force in the jails.
The letter also calls on the judge to choose a receiver “aligned” with the legally mandated closure of Rikers by 2027 — though, in practice, the construction of the four new borough jails intended to replace Rikers is already years behind schedule.
In addition, three new amicus curiae briefs were filed this week that oppose selection of a receiver with ties to city government.
The city proposed last month that sitting Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie also serve as receiver — an idea immediately rejected by the lawyers representing the plaintiffs.
The amicus briefs were filed by a group of influential former city officials, including former First Deputy Mayor Stanley Brezenoff, the New York City Bar Association, and the Vera Institute.
“This Rube Goldberg construction signals that the receiver is subordinate to — not independent of — the Mayor, his government and the political forces that inevitably and always are present in government,” the Brezenoff group wrote, referring to the cartoonist known for drawing fanciful contraptions.