No word yet on jail officials’ controversial plan to intercept detainee mail
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Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina claims that drugs like fentanyl are making their way into Rikers Island through mail sent to detainees. File photo by John McCarten NYC Council Media Unit
By Liam Quigley
As New York City's jail system emerges from its deadliest year in a decade, a controversial proposal to intercept and digitize mail sent to incarcerated people will be reviewed by an internal committee, officials with the Board of Correction announced on Tuesday.
The formation of the committee by the Board of Correction, the Department of Correction’s oversight body, comes after a DOC request to eliminate physical mail on Rikers Island was bumped from discussion at the BOC’s most recent meeting in November and rescheduled for Tuesday’s meeting.
Recently-appointed board member Dwayne C. Sampson said that a special internal committee will be put together to assess the proposal, which DOC officials say is needed to cut back on contraband making its way into the troubled jail facility. The proposal has sparked outrage among criminal justice reform advocates and some lawmakers, who say the change raises privacy concerns and could cause harm to the emotional well-being of detainees.
Sampson said the committee would balance “contraband entry concerns and the needs of incarcerated individuals to make connections to their family and community.”
The proposal received backlash from advocates and similar schemes have resulted in lawsuits at other jail systems. It’s the latest step in what Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina says is part of comprehensive efforts to reduce skyrocketing deaths in the city jail system. About a quarter of the 19 people who died on Rikers Island in 2022 died of suspected overdoses.
Molina and other jail officials claim that they’ve begun to see cases of detainees receiving pieces of paper soaked in fentanyl through the mail and that the new practice has been a driver of a number of fatal incidents.
On Tuesday, board members noted that since the last time the commission met, another person had died in custody.
Edgardo Mejias, died on Dec. 11 on Rikers Island. He was the 19th and final person to die in the jail complex last year. While an official cause of death hasn’t been announced, initially reporting suggested he had died of overdose.
“We are investigating the circumstances of his death,” said Jasmine Georges-Yilla, general counsel for the board. “It is too early to speak to the cause of his death.”
Last week, the Eagle obtained a redacted BOC report on Mejias’ death, which casts doubt on the possibility that he died as a result of an overdose.
According to the report, Mejias, 39, began suffering a medical emergency and called for help around 4:20 p.m. on Dec. 11, 2022. A person in custody told a BOC investigator that Mejias said that he couldn’t breath and warned others that he believed he was dying. With his face turning purple, Mejias got on all fours on his bed and waited for help as an officer in the housing unit inside the Anna M. Kross Center called for medical assistance, according to the report.
A few minutes later, several people in custody decided that the medical team was taking too long and decided to take action. They grabbed Mejias and began to carry him to the medical unit. At no point did any officer attempt to offer aid, the report found. Additionally, medical staff were never dispatched to the housing unit – they were allegedly told that because the people in custody were carrying him, there wasn’t a need. Mejias was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to the medical unit.
The 39-year-old allegedly suffered from severe asthma, according to his former attorney, Dean Vigliano. The attorney had written an email to the DOC about a month before Mejia’s death, stating that the incarcerated man was not receiving medical attention for his condition.
“Mr. Mejias is complaining that he is not getting proper medical attention,” the email reviewed by the Eagle reads. “In particular, his allergies are really bothering him and he is having trouble breathing and sleeping. He seemed quite desperate.”
Appearing before the board on Tuesday, Molina insisted the DOC was sparing no effort in attempts to clamp down on spiking violence across corrections facilities, and detailed a variety of efforts made to curb the flow of contraband, including both weapons and drugs, into the jail system.
“When it comes to overdoses, overdoses are not a unique DOC problem,” he said. “We in this country are in the deadliest drug epidemic in history, according to the CDC.”
He said the department has ramped up efforts to distribute the life-saving drug Naloxone across the jail system, even training incarcerated people to administer the drug to others who are locked up. Naloxone was not available in the housing unit where Mejia’s was held on the day that he died, according to the report.
He said the department was also looking into the legal ramifications of distributing fentanyl test kits to people at the jail to help prevent overdoses. According to the commissioner, 4,000 uniformed officers have been trained to use Naloxone. There are currently around 6,800 officers on staff.
Molina rejected the idea that the majority of contraband was being brought in by uniformed employees at the jails, despite 25 uniformed corrections staff having been arrested for bringing or conspiring to bring illegal items into city jails since 2017.
“Twenty-five is not a majority of the people at the Department of Corrections,” he said.
He pointed to a high number of positive tests for fentanyl in mail sent to people locked up in city jails.
“A lot of this stuff is getting in through the mail as well,” Molina said.
As an alternative to the shifting mail policy, advocates have suggested installing airport-style scanners that could be used to detect illegal items on the more than 4,000 people who come and go in the city jail system daily.
Molina and other DOC and city officials have resisted the suggestion, raising concerns over the price tag and feasibility of the machines.
“In principle I agree, just like an airport, all people get screened,” Molina said on Tuesday. “We are currently doing an analysis of that now. The capacity to be able to do that, we’re talking upwards of 4,000 people in a 24-hour period working in some capacity, civilians, volunteers going to the jail.”
“That work is ongoing right now, and hopefully I’ll have something in the near term future,” Molina added.
The commissioner said that the DOC has cleared more than half of the approximately 4,000 disciplinary cases backlogged from the previous administration, and forced out corrections employees when necessary.
Advocates giving testimony to the board on Tuesday continued to raise doubts over the DOC’s diagnosis of the drug issue.
"There's no data to support that this measure is actually going to stem the flow of drugs into Rikers,” said Rebecca Phipps, a special litigation attorney with New York County Defender Services. “DOC has still yet to provide more than anecdotes to support this policy.”
Ashley Conrad, a community organizer with Freedom Agenda, said her nephew is locked up on Rikers and that the proposed change to the mail system would only harm the people incarcerated there while doing little to slow the spread of drugs.
“It will continue to punish incarcerated people and their loved ones in the way that this system always has,” Conrad said. “I assure you, mail variance or not, drugs and contraband will make its way onto Rikers Island – through officers, as they mostly do. With my nephew on Rikers Island, it is imperative for me to stay in contact with him by any means necessary.”
“Mail and packages from loved ones are a way to stay connected to the outside world at a low cost,” she added.
For the former Deputy Commissioner for Investigations, Intelligence and Trials for the DOC, Sarena Townsend, the scrutiny on mail and other items sent to people in city jails misses the bigger issue.
“Instead of being honest and recognizing that…the ultimate issues with contraband smuggling is that it’s coming through staff and entities aside from mail…and fixing the actual problem, they’re doubling down on the mail claim, while also infringing on peoples’ rights to receive mail,” Townsend told the Eagle.
“Large packages of drugs are not coming in through an envelope,” she added.
