NEWS: New York City Officials and Advocates Push for Change to the “Culture of Brutality” on Rikers Island

By Savannah Crowley. Excerpted from Solitary Watch.

Update, 8/22/14:  On Thursday, August 21, the New York City Council passed legislation introduced by Councilman Danny Dromm of Queens that would require corrections officials to release quarterly reports documenting information about inmates being held in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail. Presenting this information to the New York City Board of Corrections would create increased transparency and oversight concerning the jail’s use of punitive segregation. The legislation is now awaiting the signature of Mayor de Blasio, who has said he supports the bill.

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New York City advocates and public officials gathered on the steps of City Hall on Monday to demand an end to the “culture of brutality” emerging from New York City’s Rikers Island, the second biggest jail in the country. The demand followed recent reports released by the United States Department of Justice and the New York City Board of Corrections, as well as months of investigative reporting by the New York Times, exposing brutality, violence, and excessive use of solitary confinement by officers specifically against mentally ill and teenage inmates. One previously incarcerated advocate that spoke at the event described Rikers as “worse than Dante’s Inferno.”

At the press conference, organized by the New York City Jails Action Coalition, speakers expressed support for legislation introduced by Councilman Daniel Dromm of Queens that would bring about much needed transparency and oversight to Rikers. The bill will be voted on this Thursday in the City Council. Speaking at the event, Dromm recounted his tour of Rikers saying, “I saw the horrible conditions inside of solitary people have to endure—a very small cell, the smell of urine, graffiti, a bed that was rusted, a mattress that had mildew on it, a blower of heat directly on top of the bed blowing down.” Strong criticism of Rikers Island has surfaced most recently after a series of exposes in the New York Times covering the staggering rise in violence at Rikers since 2009.

The Times managed to uncover an internal report conducted by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that documented, during an 11 month period, 129 cases of violence by corrections officers towards prisoners yielding injuries so serious they could not be treated at the jail’s clinic. Individuals incarcerated at Rikers suffered fractured jaws and eye sockets, wounds needing stitches, and severe back and head trauma. The report found that 77 percent of those seriously injured had a diagnosis of mental illness. Yet in not one of the 129 cases was a corrections officer prosecuted.  Over half of the 80 prisoners interviewed by health department staff admitted to being intimidated by officers during their treatment, making it easier for staff to cover up the violent episodes.

According to the same article, about 4,000 out of 11,000 people held at Rikers have a mental illness. This number is about 40 percent of the jail population, a 20 percent increase from eight years ago. Few corrections officers have received any in-depth training on how to deal with individuals with mental illness.

Criticism of policies at Rikers Island continued to rise after August 4, when the United States Department of Justice unveiled a secret three-year investigation of Rikers conducted from 2011 to 2013. The investigation concluded that there is a “deep seated culture of violence” at the jail and that the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) has violated the civil rights of adolescent males ages 16 to 18, by subjecting them to and not protecting them from excessive force and violence. For example, the report said, “In FY [Fiscal Year] 2013, there were 565 reported staff use of force incidents involving adolescents… (resulting in 1,057 injuries).”Teenagers at Rikers suffered extreme violence by officers including “…broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring sutures.”

Read more here.

NEWS: Abuses at Rikers Island: Officials and Advocates Call for End to Solitary Confinement and Officer Violence

By Annie Wu. Excerpted from The Epoch Times.

For Johnny Perez, the horrors of being placed in solitary confinement still remain fresh in his memory. More than 15 years ago, when Perez was a young teen, he was placed in solitary confinement for 60 days at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.

“It’s second by second, the attack on your soul,” Perez said, who now works as an advocate for the mentally ill at the Urban Justice Center.

Perez recalls having suicidal thoughts and crying so much that “you cry even when you run out of tears.” In addition, corrections officers often turned a blind eye to the violence that occurred among inmates.

“The abuses came out of pure neglect,” Perez said.

Perez was among the group of advocates and elected officials gathered at City Hall on Monday to call for an end to correction officers’ violence toward inmates and the excessive use of solitary confinement at Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail facility.

EVENTS: Human Rights Day Vigils Will Challenge the Torture of Solitary Confinement in New York

Press release from the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, December 6, 2013.

jac demo big 1NEW YORK — Representatives of human rights, civil liberties, and religious organizations will join formerly incarcerated people and family members of those in solitary confinement at several vigils across the state, to protest the routine use of extreme and prolonged isolation in New York’s state prisons and city jails.

The largest vigil, which is part of a longer event highlighting current human rights issues in New York, will take place on Human Rights Day, Tuesday, December 10, from 4 – 5 pm in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square, within sight of several courthouses and detention centers.

Billed as a “Teach-in and Speak-out,” the vigil will feature advocates from the Campaign for Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (CAIC), including individuals who have been directly affected by the use of solitary confinement. The vigil will conclude with the words of people currently in solitary, read by representatives of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

“We want New Yorkers to recognize that there are serious human rights violations going on in their own backyards,” said Five Omar Mualimm-ak of the American Friends Service Committee, a survivor of five years in solitary confinement in New York state prisons and an organizer of the vigil.  “By depriving people of all human contact, solitary confinement causes extreme anguish and permanent psychological damage,” Mualimm-ak continued. “That’s why it has been widely denounced as torture.”

On Long Island, a Human Rights Day vigil will be held on Saturday, December 14, at 12 noon at the Nassau County Jail in East Meadow, also featuring religious leaders, activists, survivors, and family members.  “We know that our children or spouses can be sent to these houses of torture for the slightest infraction,” said Barbara Allan of Long Island’s Prison Families Anonymous. “We know the consequences, and we worry about how this will affect them upon release.”

In Upstate New York, the site of most of the state’s 62 prisons, opponents of solitary will gather for a vigil in Ithaca on Sunday, December 8, at 2 pm in front of Tompkins County Library. The vigil will be followed by a write-a-thon to incarcerated individuals at Tompkins County Workers’ Center, with Amnesty International. The Ithaca Prisoner Justice Network is also holding a letter writing campaign in three local Episcopal churches to urge policy-makers to take action to end isolated confinement.

A vigil will also be held on December 10 at St Lawrence University in Canton. A group of students will spend the day inside chalk outlines of 7 x10-foot cells to call attention to the use of solitary in New York.

According to CAIC, New York’s prison and jails use solitary and other forms of isolated confinement far too broadly and routinely, and for periods of time, namely months and years, that far exceed the 15 day-limit recommended by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. New York holds people in 23-hour-a-day isolation at rates significantly above the national average. On any given day, there are at least 4,000 people, disproportionately people of color, in New York State prisons who are in special housing units (SHU) and thousands more locked down in their own cells. In addition, approximately 1,000 people in New York City jails are held in isolation.

Solitary confinement often causes deep and permanent psychological, physical, and social harm for those who endure it, and can have even more dire consequences for the many incarcerated individuals with pre-existing mental health needs or disabilities, and for youth. Prolonged isolation has been shown to be counterproductive as well as inhumane, since it can increase both prison violence and recidivism levels.

“We need a fundamental transformation of how corrections officials understand and respond to problematic behavior,” says Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center, a CAIC member group that helped to spearhead the rallies around the state. “We no longer can allow ineffective, inhumane responses that exacerbate the problems; we want safe, humane, and effective responses that fit in line with our fundamental human values and make things safer for our prisons and our communities.”

Solitary confinement in New York’s state prisons has been challenged not only by advocates, but by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez. In March of 2013, Méndez wrote to the U.S. government, seeking information about the practice of extreme isolation and solitary confinement in New York State prisons and the welfare of three individuals subjected to this treatment.

This week, CAIC sent letters to both U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, urging them to provide the requested information, and to facilitate Mr. Méndez’s access to conduct fact-finding visits to New York prisons and jails. “With Human Rights Day approaching,” the letter reads, “we join in calling on you to take these steps to honor the humanity and dignity of New Yorkers suffering the torture of solitary confinement.”

Survivors of solitary confinement and families of those currently in isolation are available for interview in New York City and on Long Island.

For more information, please contact:

Megan Crowe-Rothstein, 646-602-5665 megan@urbanjustice.org

Five Mualimm-ak, 646-294-8331, endthenewjimcrow@gmail.com.

Scott Paltrowitz, 212-254-5700 spaltrowitz@correctionalassociation.org

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