Attorneys claim DOC cooked books to show compliance with court order
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Public defense attorneys claim that the Department of Correction is still failing to provide adequate medical care to detainees despite data that shows otherwise. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
Attorneys representing incarcerated clients on Rikers Island argued in court Friday that the Department of Correction has been potentially fudging its data to show that it’s in compliance with its mandate to offer medical care to people in custody.
Appearing before Bronx Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Taylor, attorneys from the Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services and Milbank LLP, said that the city should not be able to purge itself of a standing contempt of court order because it doesn’t have the data to show that it’s been providing medical care to detainees on Rikers consistently.
“We can’t use this data as a metric to measure whether or not DOC is in compliance,” Amie Bircoll, an attorney with Milbank, told Taylor on Friday. “The DOC appears more concerned with data than providing care.”
Taylor ordered in December that the DOC work to fix its issues with providing medical care to incarcerated people. Taylor ordered the DOC to provide incarcerated people with access to sick call on weekdays and make it available at least five days a week within 24 hours of it being requested, provide security to allow incarcerated people to move to and from health facilities within the jails and to not prohibit or delay detainees’ access to medical care.
A correctional officer staffing crisis that began last year and has, for the most part, continued into 2022, has meant that a large number of detainees have been unable to be escorted to medical facilities on the island.
DOC staff has linked the number of missed medical appointments to the staffing issues within the agency.
In a January letter to the court, DOC Bureau Chief of Facility Operations Ada Pressley blamed the agency’s inability to produce detainees for medical appointments on “the biggest increase in members of service out sick in December 2021 and January 2022, with 1,831 and 2,229 members of service reported sick, respectively.”
In May, Taylor found the DOC to be in contempt of the order and gave the city 30 days to show that it has come into compliance or otherwise face a $100 fine for each missed medical appointment from December through January, totaling around $200,000.
In a letter to the court last week, Kathleen Thompson, chief of staff of the DOC, argued that the city had come into compliance with the order, despite the fact that nearly 200 detainees missed medical appointments from May 17 to June 12.
“In the period lasting from May 17, 2022 to June 12, 2022, 42,177 clinic appointments were scheduled,” Thompson wrote. “Of that number, the Department failed to produce 186 inmates due to lack of escort availability. This represents approximately 0.4 [percent] of the total scheduled appointments during this time period.”
Thompson added that from February to April, 91 percent of incarcerated people were produced for sick call.
Thompson took over for Presely, who announced her retirement in February.
“In general, the department feels it’s accomplished a lot in the past couple of months,” Chlarens Orsland, an attorney for the city, told Taylor on Friday.
But attorneys representing the class of incarcerated people argued that the DOC’s methods for collecting and presenting the data may have changed since Taylor’s order was given, giving the false impression that it has come into compliance.
“Data collection and policies for reporting could be just as responsible for DOC’s progress in its escort numbers,” Bircoll said.
When presenting the number of missed medical appointments, the DOC breaks each missed appointment down by the reason why the appointment was missed. A number of reasons are lumped into the “Other” category, including a missed medical appointment caused by a lack of escort.
From December through February, no escort missed appointments accounted for approximately 60 to 85 percent of the “Other” category, according to the attorneys. In June, that number dropped to less than one percent, but the overall number of missed appointments hasn’t changed at that same rate.
“While that proportion has gone down, the overall number has stayed in the thousands and it hasn’t really decreased,” Broccoli said. “Something else has to be coming up to keep it at that level.”
Three people have died on Rikers Island or while in DOC custody this month, bringing the number of in custody deaths this year to nine. Last year, 16 incarcerated people died in DOC custody, marking an eight-year high.
Last week, Mayor Eric Adams made a trip to Rikers Island to defend DOC Commissioner Louis Molina and correctional officers, whose absences have been said to be the main cause of an increase of dysfunction on the island by former Mayor Bill de Blasio, former DOC Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, the Board of Correction, two judges and the federal monitoring team appointed to oversee the DOC.
Despite the contempt of court order, Adams said that the officers should not be blamed for the spate of deaths in the past two years. Instead, he said that a lack of adequate medical care prior to a person’s detention was to blame.
“[Rikers detainees] have pre-existing conditions, their health crises, mental health illnesses, all of the things that people are facing at the worst end of their lives are discovered when they come here,” the mayor said.
“By the time people reach Rikers, their health has deteriorated and they come to these facilities,” he added. “Now, if you're telling me, ‘Eric, three people were stabbed, and three people were murdered,’ now we're talking about a different conversation.”
On Friday, Taylor gave the DOC until the close of business on Tuesday to provide further context to its data, something the agency committed to prior to Friday’s conference.
The parties will reconvene on Monday, July 11, for a conference to determine whether or not the DOC has purged themselves of contempt.
