Jail oversight board stalls mail digitization plan
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DOC Commissioner Louis Molina, right, argued in favor of a plan that would see all detainee mail digitized. The Board of Correction declined to vote on the plan during their monthly meeting this week. File photo via City Council/Flickr
By Jacob Kaye
A controversial plan to intercept and digitize detainee mail on Rikers Island has again been kept in limbo after the city’s jail oversight body declined to vote on the plan, months after it was first introduced.
The Board of Correction declined to even bring the plan from Department of Correction Commission Louis Molina up for a vote during its monthly meeting on Tuesday. Previous planned votes on the plan have been booted off the board’s agenda at previous meetings and thwarted by technology issues that resulted in a canceled meeting last month.
Though the plan, which was pitched by the DOC as a way to cut back on the number of times drugs are sent through the mail to Rikers, was introduced and discussed at the monthly meeting, it didn’t meet the procedural threshold to be brought to a vote by the full board.
And so, for at least the third time, the controversial plan has been put on ice.
The mail plan would require that all detainee mail is first intercepted by DOC officials and officials with Securus Technologies, the company contracted to run the program, should it eventually be put in place.
Letters and documents sent through the mail would be scanned and delivered digitally to detainees on Rikers Island, who are all soon expected to be given their own individual electronic tablet.
The plan would also require packages to be ordered and sent through a third party, like Amazon or Walmart.
Advocates and a number of elected officials have spoken in strong opposition to the plan. They say the plan would invade the privacy of Rikers’ detainees and would further separate them from their loved ones. They also say the Department of Correction has done little to stem the flow of drugs into the jail perpetrated by corrections officers, a number of whom have been caught and convicted after taking bribes to smuggle drugs into the jail in the past several years.
“This reduces the ability for loved ones to connect with those isolated by incarceration, and has been shown to decrease the volume of correspondence,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams testified on Tuesday. “The proposed variance also represents a large violation of the privacy and civil rights of people in DOC custody.”
“Digitalization is often cited for the lack of intimacy, privacy and connection,” he added. “Not only is this distressing from a human standpoint, we've yet to see concrete evidence that incoming mail is solely responsible for the rash of overdoses.”
The mail digitization plan is aimed at reducing overdoses inside Rikers Island, where two dozen people have died dating back to 2020, including several by suspected overdoses.
According to Molina, jail officials have begun to see an increase in incidents where physical pieces of mail are soaked in drugs, like fentanyl, and sent to detainees in the city’s jail, who then smoke the paper. The DOC has yet to present the board or the public with data on the frequency of drug-laced mail coming into Rikers Island.
On Tuesday, discussion over the data got heated.
Molina said that while he was unaware of how many physical pieces of mail were checked by corrections officers, around 130 had been found to have been laced with narcotics of the approximately 300,000 letters received by detainees last year. Of those 300,000 about 500 were checked for narcotics.
But Board of Corrections officials pushed the commissioner to give them more data on the current drug-smuggling situation and evidence that could support the implementation of the mail program.
“You haven't shown us anything – you’ve shown fentanyl is in the jails, but that can come in through officers,” said Robert Cohen, a longtime BOC member.
Though Molina has previously been reluctant to roll out body-scanning devices that would scan officers coming into the jail complex, he said on Tuesday that the DOC had begun rolling out a randomized body-scanning program in one of its facilities this week.
Molina declined to say how many officers would be scanned per day, but noted that the program could expand to other facilities on the island.
“Mail is one river in bringing contraband and narcotics, corrupt staff and contract providers that bring them is another, and sometimes it's poor family members that are coming to visit their loved ones because they can't sit there and watch their loved one suffer because they're dealing with addiction,” Molina said.
When it came time to bring up the program for a vote, none of the board’s seven members formally introduced the vote into the agenda.
A similar procedural protest came on a separate item on the BOC’s agenda – a plan to reduce the number of BOC meetings held annually, from nine to six. The item, which is also opposed by advocates and a number of lawmakers, was introduced by the board’s new chair, Dwayne Simpson. It was not brought up for a vote.
The mail plan was originally scheduled to be discussed during the board’s November meeting. But a briefing on the program from the DOC and a vote on the change was delayed and pushed to the board’s next meeting, which came in January. The vote was again pushed and scheduled to take place in February.
Though the item was on the agenda for the February meeting, the board had difficulties streaming the audio and video of the meeting online, and decided to cancel the meeting about an hour later.
The mail plan has also been at the center of recent tensions between the board and the DOC.
Last month, the BOC’s former executive director, Amanda Masters, announced to staff that she would be stepping down from her role. Masters did not cite the mail policy in her resignation letter, but sent it the day before the BOC’s planned February meeting.
In her letter, Masters urged that the BOC vote against reducing the number of meetings they hold per year and also criticized Molina after he moved to prevent BOC members from viewing security footage from inside Rikers remotely.
“[Molina] has also acted to restrict and encumber staff access to information necessary to perform their work effectively and to discuss and illustrate their findings among themselves, with me, and with board members,” Masters said in the letter.
“I hope the Department will change course — soon — and allow unfettered access to images and video again,” she added. “This period has been very unfortunate.”
