Council to vote on long-stalled solitary confinement ban
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City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is set to bring a bill that would effectively ban solitary confinement in New York City jails up for a vote in the Council this week, three years after the bill was originally proposed. File photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The New York City Council is expected this week to vote on – and pass – a long-stalled bill that would effectively ban solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
The bill, which has stalled in the Council for several years despite having the support of a super majority of the legislative body, will be heard by the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice on Wednesday before likely being sent to the full Council for a vote later in the day for its last full meeting of this year’s legislative session.
With 38 councilmembers signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation, the bill is expected to be passed by the council when it’s brought for a vote.
The legislation has made its way onto the City Council’s schedule after a final push from lawmakers and advocates to get Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to bring the bill up for a vote, around three years after it was first introduced.
Its inclusion on the calendar also comes after several last minute changes were made to legislation, making it more palatable for at least one of its early opponents – the union representing healthcare workers who work on Rikers Island.
However, other opponents remain, including the union representing correctional officers and Mayor Eric Adams, both of whom say the ban on solitary – a punishment the DOC and mayor’s office says the city does not use – will create unsafe conditions for those who work and are detained on Rikers, the jail complex where over two dozen people have died in the past two years.
Nonetheless, the bill, which was introduced by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, appears poised to head to the mayor’s desk at some point soon.
"The physical and psychological harm caused by solitary confinement leads to increased death and violence on Rikers and ultimately makes us all less safe,” the speaker said in a statement to the Eagle. “The Council has been working with the public advocate, other elected officials, advocates, and labor unions that represent workers within city jails to make progress on refining a bill with consensus among the many stakeholders to ban the use of solitary confinement.”
“As we approach the end of the legislative session, the Council hopes to enact a law that makes our city safer, healthier, and more humane," she added.
The bill, which was first introduced in 2020 by former Queens City Councilmember Daniel Dromm, would essentially ban solitary confinement in New York City jails.
It would prevent incarcerated individuals from being held in an isolated cell for more than two hours per day within a 24-hour period and for more than eight hours at night directly after an alleged offense occurred – the confinement would be referred to as a “de-escalation” period. Should corrections officials determine that further confinement is required to de-escalate a situation, an incarcerated person could be held for up to four hours total in a 24-hour period.
The bill would also require that staff meet with the incarcerated person at least once an hour to attempt to de-escalate the situation. Originally, the bill required that medical staff conduct checks on the incarcerated person in confinement every 15 minutes.
However, the latest version of the bill, which was uploaded to the Council’s website on Friday, says that the “department shall conduct visual and aural observation of each person in de-escalation confinement every 15 minutes, shall refer any health concerns to medical or mental health staff, and shall bring any person displaying any indications of any need for medical documentation, observation, or treatment to the medical clinic.”
The change in the bill’s language was enough to win the support of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers, the union that originally fought against the bill over fears that it would make their members on Rikers Island less safe.
“[I]n city jails, we must end the cruel and inhumane practice of solitary confinement, which can cause irreparable, lifelong trauma and has been linked to self-harm and suicides,” George Gresham, the president of the union said in a statement on Monday. “These reforms are long overdue and necessary to building a fairer and more effective criminal justice system.”
Williams celebrated earning the union’s support of the bill in a statement.
“1199SEIU is at the forefront of standing up for working people, for progress, and for justice,” Williams said. “Members of 1199 are working on Rikers every day to promote and preserve the safety and well-being of people on both sides of the bars, to support systems which make our jails and communities safer.”
“They are committed to the health of our city and everyone in it. It's an honor to have their support in our movement to ban solitary – not just in name, but in practice – in our city,” he added.
The last-minute change to the bill wasn’t enough, however, to win over every union standing in opposition to the bill.
The Correctional Officers Benevolent Association, which has opposed the bill since its inception, remains opposed to the legislation as it heads for a vote.
Antoinette Anderson, the union’s corresponding secretary, said in an op-ed published in amNY on Monday that she believes the bill’s passage would “all but ensure that inmate assaults against correction officers and non-violent inmates will surge, jeopardizing thousands of lives in our jails.”
That view is shared by the mayor, who, even before taking office, got into a public fight with the Council’s progressive wing over the definition of solitary confinement, claiming that the city does not utilize the practice, instead using punitive segregation.
“Instead of promoting a humane environment within our jails, the Council’s bill would foster an environment of fear and instability,” a spokesperson for the mayor told the Eagle on Monday. “It would make it harder to protect people in custody, and the predominantly Black and brown workers charged with their safety, from violent individuals.”
“We encourage any councilmember committed to the safety of those in our care and those who protect them to vote against this bill,” the spokesperson added.
A separate effort to change the use of solitary confinement in New York City has similarly stalled under the Adams administration.
In 2021, the Board of Correction voted to eliminate 24 hour isolation and replace it with a two-level Risk Management Accountability System.
But not long before it was set to be implemented at the end of the year, former Mayor Bill de Blasio passed an executive order, suspending the board’s rules because of a staffing crisis occurring in the jails at the time.
Adams has passed the same executive order every week since taking office in January 2022. The mayor and former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina have also blamed the delay on federal monitor Steve J. Martin, who said in a June 2022 report that the “RMAS design appears to be unlikely to deliver on the core tenets of an effective model of restricted housing — to hold people accountable for violent misconduct in a safe and effective manner.”
Martin has not – in any public reporting – further commented on the implementation of RMAS since the report issued over a year and a half ago.
A last minute push
In the days prior to the bill’s inclusion on this week’s Council calendar, a public push began to get the speaker to bring the bill up for a vote.
In recent days a group of over 160 organizations from around New York City, including scores of public defender groups and criminal justice nonprofits, called on the speaker to bring the bill to the Council’s floor.
In an open letter to the speaker, the organizations highlighted research that shows that solitary confinement causes people to engage in self-mutilation and suicide, increases risk of heart diseases, causes anxiety, depression and psychosis. Undersigning the letter were groups like Brooklyn Defender Services, Envision Freedom Fund, Freedom Agenda, the First Presbyterian Church of Forest Hills, the Legal Aid Society, the Working Families Party and dozens of others.
“Long overdue, Int. No. 549 will end solitary confinement, while allowing such alternative forms of separation,” the organizations said in their letter. “After many failed promises by various city leaders and officials, the City Council has a moral obligation to end this torture once and for all.”
The letter from the organizations came days after every member of the Democratic U.S. congressional delegation from New York City wrote to Adams to “strongly encourage the New York City Council to take advantage of its current historic opportunity and to act before the end of the Council’s current term to end the torturous and deadly practice of solitary confinement in our city.”
The bill would go into effect 180 days after its passage into law.
