Vermin, dirt and mold: New report shows continued deterioration on Rikers
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A new report from a monitor tasked with tracking environmental conditions on Rikers Island found that deteriorating conditions in the city’s jail complex has generally continued this year. Photo via Legal Aid Society
By Jacob Kaye
Dirty surfaces, mice sightings and droppings, scummy showers, broken faucets and other unsanitary and unsafe conditions were found in a number of Queens buildings home to around 6,000 people at any given time – Rikers Island.
A new report from the court-appointed monitor in the 50-year-old case Benjamin v. the City of New York found that conditions inside New York City’s jails were generally in a state of deterioration during the first four months of the year, the time period covered in the report.
In addition to the dirty conditions inside the housing areas of a number of the facilities on Rikers Island, the monitor found that a number of vents had been almost entirely blocked by dust or paint and that several areas throughout the island lacked proper fire safety equipment meant to slow down blazes, like the one that injured 20 people in April.
In all, “inspections conducted during this monitoring period recorded thousands of violations distributed across all facilities,” the monitor said.
Accompanying the report were over 100 photographs that show rusted showers, clogged toilets, trash-strewn cells, broken light fixtures, blocked vents and other conditions that suggest that the Department of Correction is “not in substantial compliance” with a number of the mandates stemming from Benjamin v. City of New York, a lawsuit that was first brought by the Legal Aid Society in 1975.
Though a number of conditions inside the jail, like window safety, have been removed from the monitor’s purview, the Office of Compliance Consultants, which leads the monitoring, is currently tasked with tracking sanitation, ventilation, lighting, heating, cooling and fire safety conditions within the city’s jails.
“I want to say we’re disappointed except that that doesn't really quite capture it,” Veronica Vela, the supervising attorney with the Prisoners' Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society, told the Eagle. “We've been seeing the same type of non-compliance with the orders in these reports for probably at least a couple years now.”
“It's extreme disappointment and also frustration, because these aren't easy fixes,” Vela added. “But we don't see any effort at all to try to brainstorm how to improve conditions. It's just sort of complacency with the status quo, and the status quo is pretty horrifying.”
Fruit flies, cockroaches and mice droppings were observed dozens of times during the four-month span of the monitoring period. There were also dozens of reported instances of dirty floors in shower areas, “excessive” mildew build up on the ceilings, leaks and standing water noted in the report.
Among the violations found by the monitor were unclean sinks and dirty cells. Detainees have reported that they are not provided with the supplies to clean their housing areas. Photo via Legal Aid Society
A spokesperson for the Department of Correction said in a statement that “the health and safety of everyone at DOC facilities is a top priority and the Department is working toward collaboration and solutions with the Benjamin Monitor to address concerns,” and defended the conditions by noting the general wear-and-tear that comes with older buildings being heavily utilized by dozens of people each day.
Though the spokesperson also added that shower facilities inside Rikers Island are cleaned each day, that didn’t appear to be the experience of Kwaine Thompson, a detainee whose complaint about conditions in his cell and the jail were included in the monitor’s report.
“My toilet smell like urine because there no scrub brush and cleaning supplies to clean the toilet,” Thompson wrote in the complaint. “Shower are being clean once a week when there’s 6 inmates that use the shower everyday. These showers need to be clean at least twice a day.”
“My mental and physical health is deteriorating because of those conditions,” he added.
Vela said that on a recent trip to Rikers related to the Benjamin case, a number of detainees wanted to share their experiences with the conditions inside the jail complex. Among the top complaints were dirty sinks and showers, Vela said.
“Those areas were probably the dirtiest areas that we see,” Vela said. “They all wanted to point out, ‘Look how dirty these showers are, look how dangerous they are, there's all these tiles missing on the walls and there's mold growing on the ceilings and there's drain flies coming up from the floor drains.’”
“It's dehumanizing,” Vela added.
In the latest report from the monitor tasked with tracking environmental conditions on Rikers Island, the monitor notes a number of instances where shower areas were not clean. Photo via Legal Aid Society
The monitor’s report also includes a section detailing a fire that broke out in Rikers’ North Infirmary Command on April 6.
The incident began when a detainee rigged a fire in the cell he was being held in. It quickly grew out of control. The sprinkler system designed to tamper the flames failed because one of the sprinkler heads had been damaged by a detainee in an earlier incident and the entire system had yet to be turned back on, according to the monitor’s report.
One detainee suffered serious burns and four staff members suffered smoke inhalation. In all, 20 people were injured.
In investigating the matter, the monitor’s fire safety expert requested surveillance video footage of the incident. According to the report, what he got instead was footage with large swaths of the incident missing.
DOC officials told the monitoring team that the camera was motion activated and that it does not record during stretches of time where there is no movement.
“This cannot be the reason for missing camera coverage during an active fire, where movement of incarcerated people and staff can be observed on camera immediately preceding the missing blocks of footage,” the report reads.
In response to the fire incident, a DOC spokesperson said that the agency was in the “process of updating all our internal polices and standards, developing our own tracking and compliance software to ensure that we are current on compliance items in fire safety, actively repairing fire systems as they are reported broken with our in-house repair teams and through a fire protection vendor, and developing a new program which will be led by our new fire safety director and fire response coordinator.”
But elsewhere in the report, the monitor speaks of several issues obtaining data and other relevant materials from the DOC, an accusation made recently by Steve J. Martin, the federal monitor in a separate Rikers case known as Nunez v. City of New York.
Martin, who issued several special reports last month, accused DOC brass and staff members of either intentionally or negligently failing to report around half a dozen fatal or near-fatal incidents inside the jail complex in May, a month where two detainees died.
Last month, the federal judge overseeing the Nunez case ruled that the Legal Aid Society, which also represents the plaintiff class in that case, would be allowed to begin working toward submitting a motion calling for the court to put Rikers Island into a federal receivership – a court order that could see management of the jail handed over to a court-appointed authority.
But regardless of what comes in the Nunez case, Vela says that the city needs to make serious improvements to the facilities on Rikers Island now. Those improvements should come even as the city is preparing to close Rikers Island as a jail complex by 2027, as the city is legally mandated to do.
“You have to ensure that the facilities that are currently in use are safe and are able to meet the basic human needs of the people that are in the DOC custody,” Vela said.
“It takes time to get conditions as bad as they are right now and there's always been kind of an attitude of neglect toward the jails by the city and by the mayoral administrations,” Vela added. “It's just a convenient excuse to say, ‘Well, you don't want us to invest millions of dollars into installing a fire alarm system if we're just going to be demolishing this building in a couple of years.’”
