Conditions on Rikers ‘improve’ but remain ‘troubling’
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The latest report from the federal monitor appointed to oversee conditions on Rikers Island found that while improvements have slowly begun to take root, dangerous conditions and a lack of accountability persist. AP file photo by Julie Jacobson
By Jacob Kaye
In the first major report on Rikers Island since last fall, the federal team monitoring the troubled jail complex says that while conditions remain dire, improvements have very slowly begun to take root.
The federal monitor Steve J. Martin issued a status report on Rikers Island to Judge Laura Swain, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York late Monday. The status report, which was originally due on Friday, is the first major report on the jails since November, when Swain ruled that the Department of Correction would given more time to implement its “action plan,” staving off a federal takeover of the jail where three dozen people have died in the past two years.
The federal takeover, also known as a federal receivership, may be considered again later this spring. But Martin, who did not support calls for receivership last year, suggested in his report Monday that conditions in the jail complex are beginning to improve, albeit with some major roadblocks and continuing dangers.
“The Department’s headquarters and the jails’ conditions of confinement may be best described as in a state of flux, as both begin to gradually transition away from deep dysfunction towards the beginnings of improved management,” the monitor said in the report.
The report focused on four areas at the core of the DOC’s action plan – the plan was originally submitted to the court after a motion for receivership was put forward by the Legal Aid Society, which represents the plaintiffs in the decade-old Rikers Island civil rights case. The areas targeted by the plan include staffing, security, detainee management and discipline.
While the monitor said certain aspects of those areas have seen improvements, others have lagged behind.
“The overall number of use of force incidents remains too high as do the instances of unnecessary and excessive force,” the monitor said. “Further, assaults on staff and violence among people in custody also remain at unacceptable levels and the number of recent in-custody deaths is alarming.”
Among some of the more troubling revelations detailed in the monitor's report was the lack of discipline issued to correctional officers accused of misconduct, a metric that has begun trending in the wrong direction in recent months. The lack of discipline comes as use of force incidents continue to be pervasive, the monitor said.
“The Monitoring Team’s analysis of nearly all [use of force] incidents…continues to reveal that misconduct is prevalent and there is no evidence to suggest that practices have materially improved,” the monitor said.
Use of force incidents, or incidents where officers use force against detainees, increased nearly each year dating back to 2014, the year the federal monitor began overseeing conditions in the jail complex.
They increased to their highest level in 2021. Last year, the average monthly use of force rate decreased for the first time since the monitor was appointed, according to the report. However, the rate “remains more than double the rate at the time the Consent Judgment went into effect.”
The severity of the use of force incidents have also begun to climb in recent years, reaching their highest level in 2021 and decreasing slightly in 2022. Last year, there were 434 “class A” use of force incidents, or incidents that result in severe injuries to detainees. There were 464 the year prior and around 180 in 2020, according to the report.
But even as severe use of force incidents persited, a large number of misconduct cases against officers began to be dismissed without action. The trend began when now-former Deputy Investigations Commissioner Manuel Hernandez took over the post in the middle of 2022.
“Beginning in summer 2022, a discernible deterioration in the quality of investigations conducted by [the Investigations Division] was identified and there was evidence that [the Investigations Division] was not consistently addressing or analyzing the available evidence and their conclusions did not appear to be objective,” the report read.
“That is, beginning midway through 2022, a greater number of Intake Investigations were being closed with no action, a significantly smaller number of cases were being referred for further investigation via a Full ID Investigation, and misconduct was being identified much less frequently than in the past,” the report continued. “This deterioration in the quality of investigations does not appear to be the result of less skilled investigators or supervisors nor does the deterioration appear to be determined by the type of investigation.”
Under Hernandez, the monitor said investigators began to take a “more lenient approach” to assessing cases and changed their methods in a way that “compromised the quality of investigations.”
Hernandez, who previously worked with DOC Commissioner Louis Molina in the NYPD and who was appointed by Molina in May 2022, abruptly resigned from the DOC investigations job a couple of days before the release of the report on Monday.
The monitor’s report seemed to suggest that Hernandez’s resignation was forced by DOC leadership.
“The Department has recently taken some important steps to address these concerns,” the report said. “Most importantly, a very recent change in ID’s leadership (at the end of March 2023), is expected to mitigate any further decline in the quality of investigations and to restore the division’s previous progress towards achieving compliance.”
The Department of Correction did not respond to request for comment on Tuesday.
The monitor’s report issued this week appeared to be one of the least scathing reports written by the oversight team in recent years.
Several months after Molina took the reins of the department in 2022, Martin’s report said that “despite initial hopes… the Department’s attempts to implement the required remedial steps have faltered and, in some instances, regressed.”
The report added that Rikers’ “dysfunctional practices [are] unlike any jail system with which the Monitoring Team has [overseen].”
Even when expressing his support for the DOC’s action plan in June 2022, Martin said that serious concerns about the agency’s ability to implement it and concerns about the magnitude of the dangers that exist on Rikers persisted.
“While the action plan certainly is a viable pathway forward, the monitoring team must acknowledge that given the decades of mismanagement, quagmire of bureaucracy, and limited proficiencies of many of the people who must lead the necessary transformation, serious concerns remain about whether the city and department are capable of fully and faithfully implementing this action plan with integrity,” the monitor said in a letter to Swain in 2022.
“This combined with the monitoring team’s serious concerns about the current conditions of the jails means the monitoring team cannot warrant that the action plan alone will be sufficient to address the danger, violence, and chaos that continue to occur daily,” Martin added.
But the monitor’s tone slightly shifted in his most recent report.
“As in all complex institutional reform cases, time is of the essence when issues of constitutional dimension are at play,” he said in Monday’s report. “That said, changes of the magnitude necessary to transform the jails simply cannot be accomplished quickly or by large leaps and bounds. The Monitoring Team’s experience suggests that progress toward safe facilities becomes evident via small improvements that accumulate over a long period of time.”
“The pace of reform, to date, has been unquestionably slow and must be accelerated,” he added. “Nonetheless, there have been improvements in addressing core foundational issues and in remediating the dangerous conditions in the jails — but the current state of affairs remains deeply troubling. Recent signs indicate the Department is beginning to reverse the spiral of chaos and disorder of the last few years and that the reforms are gaining momentum.”
