City agrees to pay $53 million for solitary confinement violations
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The city agreed to pay $53 million to detainees improperly held in solitary confinement during a four year stretch from 2018 through 2022. File photo via BOC
By Jacob Kaye
Over 4,000 people who were improperly held in solitary confinement in the city’s jails at various points over the last four years will get a cut of a $53 million settlement the city agreed to last week.
The settlement, which is pending approval from a federal judge, was reached in federal court on Wednesday in a case that alleged that the city’s Department of Correction had improperly and illegally confined detainees in isolated conditions without due process from 2018 until 2022.
“No human being should be subjected to such highly isolated confinement, and certainly not without a hearing to challenge that placement,” said Eric Hecker, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiff class in the case.
“The compensation from the settlement cannot undo the substantial psychological harm these conditions have caused, but we hope it will provide some relief to the class,” Hecker added.
The lawsuit alleged that the DOC had violated laws and Board of Correction standards for holding detainees who had been alleged to have committed infractions while incarcerated in isolated conditions, often referred to as solitary confinement.
Among those violations was a lack of hearings for detainees to determine whether or not their transfer from a general population area to a solitary confinement cell was appropriate. From March 2018 through June 2022, those hearings were denied to around 4,400 detainees, according to the suit.
The detainees who were denied a hearing will each receive $400 for each of the days they were held in isolated cells, according to the settlement. That per diem increases to $450 if the detainee had previously been diagnosed with a serious mental health condition or were under the age of 22 at the time of their confinement.
On average, each member of the plaintiff class is expected to receive over $9,000, meaning the average detainee in the class spent well over half a month in solitary confinement during the period defined in the lawsuit. One man, who was being held on murder charges that he was later acquitted of, spent 14 months in an isolated cell, according to the suit.
The settlement agreement is one of the largest to have been agreed upon by the DOC and it comes several months after the DOC agreed to a $300 million settlement to settle a case involving holding detainees for hours after they’d already posted bail.
A spokesperson for the city’s law department did not respond to a request for comment from the Eagle on Thursday.
Solitary confinement rules in the city and state have undergone a host of changes in the past several years, beginning in 2016 when the Board of Correction, the DOC’s oversight body, required that pretrial detainees first be granted a hearing to determine whether their alleged infraction should result in solitary confinement.
The BOC also set a standard saying that pretrial detainees have the right to live in general population and to be in common areas for 14 hours a day.
More recently, the BOC passed new standards for a type of solitary confinement cell and process known as the Risk Management Accountability System. Though the system, which includes increased programming, fewer hours spent in a cell and new cells that reduce isolation, was supposed to be implemented toward the end of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, it has yet to be implemented.
Both de Blasio and Mayor Eric Adams through executive orders have said that the general crisis in the jail in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic have created conditions that would make it unsafe to implement the program.
“The Board of Correction has made progress towards ending inhumane practices of restrictive confinement in New York, but the Department of Correction tried to end-run around those reforms with practices that we challenged here,” said Alex Reinert, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and another member of the legal team representing the plaintiff class.
“We hope this litigation will ensure that the City permanently ceases this practice, and that the settlement will provide much-deserved compensation to the people who were subjected to it,” Reinert added.
The settlement was also celebrated by a number of criminal justice reform groups, including the HALTsolitary campaign and its co-director, Victor Pate.
“We applaud the courage of the people who were illegally locked in solitary confinement and successfully brought this lawsuit against the torture they suffered,” Pate said. “It is outrageous that New York City’s jails locked thousands of people in solitary confinement by calling it a different name.”
“This has been a long-standing practice and still today DOC continues to use various forms of solitary confinement, from shower cages to so-called de-escalation units to structurally restrictive housing and more,” Pate added. “Whatever their name, these different forms of solitary continue to cause devastating harm and death, while worsening safety for everyone in jails and outside communities.”
DOC Commissioner Louis Molina has long denied that the agency uses solitary confinement to punish detainees.
“We don’t have anybody in solitary confinement here,” Molina told Gothamist last year. “We ended punitive segregation a long time ago here in this department, and I’m real proud of that.”
Despite his insistence that the practice is not used, Molina is strongly opposed to a bill from the City Council that would ban solitary confinement in New York City jails.
“If enacted, [the bill] would have grave consequences – it would make the job of running a humane and safe jail system far more difficult,” Molina told the City Council during a hearing on the bill last fall. “Let me begin by saying that we fundamentally agree on a very important point – our jails should be humane and solitary confinement is inhumane.”
“If this bill solely banned solitary confinement, it would have my total unwavering support,” the commissioner added. “But that is not what this bill is about, it does much, much more.”
Though the bill, which was introduced by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, has had super majority support in the council since last December, it has not been brought up for a vote this year.
THE CITY reported in February that a number of unions that represent health care workers on Rikers Island have expressed opposition to at least one facet of the bill. Under the legislation, health care workers would be required to regularly check on detainees being held in punitive segregation. The unions say that in order for the bill to be implemented, more health care workers would be needed on the island.
Pate urged the council to renew its push to pass the legislation in his statement last week.
“Now is the time for the New York City Council to pass Intro No 549, legislation with veto-proof supermajority support, to finally end solitary confinement in all its forms by all its names, and to utilize alternative forms of separation proven to better protect people’s health and improve safety for all,” he said.
