Do your job “before someone dies,” an advocate pleaded at a meeting of the city Board of Correction, which has the power to monitor Rikers Island.
Of all the agencies that share responsibility for New York City’s troubled jail system, only one was established by the city solely to monitor conditions behind bars.
That organization, the Board of Correction, has its own budget and the power to inspect the city’s jails at any time, even daily. It is meant to serve as an independent check on the entire system, to ensure that those in city custody are treated humanely.
But as the death count in city jails rose to 14 this year, the board’s inaction was conspicuous.
One of the board’s central weapons for enforcing its standards is public censure, via reports, open letters on jail conditions or public notices that the Department of Correction has violated its rules.
Yet the board has not issued any notices of violation during the pandemic — not even after board members had documented “horrible” conditions while investigating a death at the Rikers Island jail complex in April. Many of the board’s minimum standards — including the rules governing personal hygiene and how long detainees were in intake — appeared to have been violated.
The jail system’s most severe problems are at Rikers Island, where neglect, mismanagement and the pandemic have created a dangerous, chaotic environment for the incarcerated and correction officers. But even as conditions seemed to worsen this summer, the board canceled its meeting in July and was unable to reschedule it for August, because it could not summon enough of its members to meet the required quorum.
When the meeting finally took place in September, for the first time in three months, advocates’ frustration with the board was evident.
“You’re the oversight!” Victoria Phillips, who works with the Urban Justice Center, testified. “Oversee this work. Make sure it happens. Please do it, before someone else dies.”
The board’s chairwoman, Jennifer Jones Austin, had technical issues and was unable to read a report at the beginning of the meeting. After those issues were resolved, she stayed for only an hour, missing the bulk of the five-hour event. She said last week that she had a conflict because the nonprofit organization she runs also had a meeting.
“I run my own organization, and my service to the board is voluntary, and I give many hours beyond the time of board meetings,” she said.
The Board of Correction, created in 1957, is one of the oldest jail oversight organizations in the country. It has helped push a number of reforms, including the creation of specialized mental health units, suicide prevention programs and the elimination of solitary confinement for young people in 2015.
The board was granted increased funding in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first years in office, allowing it to hire more staff, and in turn, to more than double the number of studies it produced, evaluating the jails’ operations in detail with data about health care, injuries, grievances and investigations.
The board’s insistence that the Correction Department implement certain conditions — for example providing those in its custody with time out of their cells and due process, and ensuring that those with serious disabilities not be placed in housing designed for detainees with histories of violence — made a quantifiable difference.
The board also revamped how the city keeps tabs on younger detainees. As a result, the amount of time that those detainees spent in one of the department’s largest restrictive housing units declined nearly 30 percent from 2017 to 2018, and the use of desks outfitted with restraining devices in the unit declined more than 50 percent, according to testimony that the board provided to the City Council.
But the pandemic led to budget cuts, the emergency suspension of several minimum standards — including those requiring that detainees have access to lawyers and group religious services — and the cessation of some of the board’s traditional roles, including its members’ daily visits to jails.
Mr. de Blasio largely reversed those budget cuts this spring and authorized funding for two positions that would focus on jail deaths. But those positions — a death investigator and an independent auditor on suicides — have yet to be filled. (More than a third of those who have died in jails this year have committed suicide.)
When the board does make critical findings, it often has not shared them. The April report was only released via a freedom of information request, in this case by The City, a news organization. Another report, on the first three deaths of Rikers detainees from Covid-19, was not released publicly until a public defender organization sought it using the state’s freedom of information law. Even then, it was in draft form and the board redacted the report’s recommendations.
The redacted portions of the report included recommendations that the city release more people from jail; that the Correction Department keep the dorms less crowded; and that officials notify detainees of positive Covid-19 test results within 24 hours, according to someone who has read the unredacted report.
“I would hope that the board going forward would be more open in its findings,” said Dr. Robert Cohen, the longest-serving commissioner on the board. “The next mayor should not pressure the board to keep its findings to itself.”
In an interview, Ms. Austin, the board’s chairwoman, suggested the board did not release the report on Covid deaths publicly because it was not comprehensive enough.
“If you’re going to write about the Department of Correction, and its handling of Covid in the jails, you have to look at several circumstances,” she said. “You have to look at how they’ve handled intake, you have to look at how they’ve handled infection, you have to look at how they handled the quarantine, you have to look at all of the different facets.”
But the board never produced a more comprehensive public report of the sort Ms. Austin described. She said the board did not issue a notice of violation, because such a notice “does nothing.”
A spokesman for the mayor’s office, Mitch Schwartz, said that the Board of Correction has yet to finish the report on the first Covid deaths from 2020 and added that he was sure the board would be fully transparent with its ultimate findings.
“The Board of Correction performs critical, independent oversight,” said Mr. Schwartz. “Its investigations are often difficult — and public — reminders of the challenges the city must meet to make our jail system safer and more humane. Their work poses us with some tall orders, but City Hall is grateful for their tireless advocacy for staff and detainees alike.”
Much of the public information about the city’s jails crisis has come not from the board but from an oversight entity unaffiliated with the city: a federal monitor who was appointed in 2015 to assess the Department of Correction’s cooperation with an agreement reached with the federal government.
In the course of that work, the monitor’s public reports have revealed conditions, particularly this summer, that the Board of Correction has not made public.
In the meantime, the lack of staff at Rikers has led to significant lags in basic services for those being held there, including regular meals and water. Days-long waits in intake cells, where incarcerated people are meant to be held for less than 24 hours when they arrive on the island, led to unsanitary conditions. And the lack of guards allowed detainees to wield an unusual amount of control inside the jails, leading to scenes of chaos and violence.
The board had to cut back its visits significantly during Covid, out of concern for both the health of staff members and detainees. Now, staff go into the jails, but they are not required to.
“Over the course of the last few weeks, more of our on-site team have been returning to the jails,” the board’s executive director, Margaret Egan, said. “But many of them have expressed concern for their safety, and I am going to be absolutely sensitive to those concerns.” She noted that Covid-19 had been a persistent threat in the jails.
The board has a $3.3 million budget, covering some 30 employees who are supposed to oversee a $1.2 billion jail system and its more than 9,000 Department of Correction workers.
During Mr. de Blasio’s pandemic-era budget cuts, the board lost nearly 24 percent of its funded head count. Its modest expansion initiative was shelved, along with plans to hire a research director for health and mental health.
In the past year, roughly half of the board’s executive staff has resigned, including its general counsel, deputy general counsel and policy director. Ms. Austin is leaving the board this year, as is Ms. Egan, the executive director.
In Ms. Egan’s resignation email, she made it clear that she believed the incoming mayor should “have the opportunity to choose their own leadership team, including board members and the executive director.”
The board’s reliance on the mayor to determine its budget could, in theory, compromise its willingness to criticize the administration. The mayor also largely controls the board’s makeup; he effectively appoints six of the board’s nine board members, including its chair.
“City Hall has a historic and current tendency to see the board as a threat and not as an extremely important source of information that could help them do a better job inside of the jails,” said Martha King, the board’s executive director from 2015 to the summer of 2019.
In September, as the press began to focus on the number of deaths in city jails, the board finally released a statement acknowledging the high suicide numbers at Rikers — five since last November, compared with none in 2018, 2019 and January-October 2020.
“The Board of Correction calls on the City of New York to move with urgency to create a safer environment for persons in custody and staff,” the statement said.
It was, by some accounts, too little, too late.
“Yes, they did put out a statement, I think in early September, about the suicides,” said Jennifer Parish, the director of criminal justice advocacy at the Urban Justice Center. “But there’s so much more that could have been happening along the way.”
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