BOC chair absent from crucial Rikers oversight hearing
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Board of Correction Chair Dwayne Sampson was absent from the board’s monthly oversight hearing on Friday, Sept. 8, 2023. Screenshot via BOC
By Jacob Kaye
The embattled chair of the Department of Correction’s oversight body was missing in action on Friday during the Board of Correction’s monthly meeting, which was the first to be held since the oversight board sued the DOC over the agency’s decision to revoke the board’s remote access to video surveillance footage from within Rikers Island.
Dwayne Sampson, who was appointed to serve as the chair of the BOC by Mayor Eric Adams earlier this year, told his fellow board members around a half hour before the start of their 1 p.m. meeting that he would not be present, board members said Friday.
The meeting, which also comes at a time of acute crisis for the Department of Correction, began around 10 minutes late, after board members had to wait for an additional member to arrive to reach a quorum.
“Our chair did not let us know until 12:27 that he wouldn't be here to have a quorum,” said board member DeAnna Hoskins, whose tardy arrival marked the start of the meeting, which she ran in the chair’s absence.
The BOC did not provide any additional detail about Sampson’s absence on Friday.
Sampson’s absence was notable, and Friday’s meeting was only the latest evidence of an ideological divide within the citizen watchdog board between members appointed by Mayor Eric Adams – who has strongly defended the DOC and its commissioner, Louis Molina – and the board’s members who often challenge DOC leadership publicly. Two other Adams appointees – Joseph Ramos and Jacqueline Pitts – were also absent from Friday’s meeting.
Sampson, who does not have any previous correctional experience, has clashed several times with the board’s more criminal justice advocate-aligned members, who in recent months have taken oversight action on behalf of the board seemingly without Sampson’s approval.
Last month, BOC members Robert Cohen, Rachel Bedard, Jacqueline Sherman, Felipe Franco and Hoskins penned an op-ed published in the Daily News, calling on federal Judge Laura Swain to instal a federal receivership over Rikers Island, stripping control of the troubled jail complex away from the DOC and the city.
The op-ed was published the same day the BOC brought a lawsuit against the agency it’s been tasked with providing oversight to. The lawsuit, which was filed in Bronx Supreme Court, accused the DOC of impeding the BOC’s ability to provide oversight as a result of a decision to revoke BOC members’ remote access to video footage from within Rikers Island. In their suit, the BOC said that Molina’s decision to revoke their remote video access was one that “flies in the face of the express inspection rights granted to the Board under the New York City Charter.”
“Unfortunately, we have found the Department of Correction intent on obstructing the BOC’s access to data required to do our work; unnecessarily adversarial when we provide feedback; dismissive of civilian oversight; recalcitrant when asked to explain their actions in public; and, most importantly, incapable of ensuring a safe environment both for the people in its custody and people who work in the jails,” Hoskins, Cohen, Bedard, Sherman and Franco said in their Daily News op-ed.
Also missing from Friday’s meeting was Molina, who has only attended two BOC meetings this year.
Sampson has yet to publicly comment on either the lawsuit or the op-ed.
Sampson also recently bumped heads with Hoskins, Cohen, Bedard, Sherman and Franco after he attempted to install a new BOC executive director – the BOC’s previous executive director, Amanda Masters, stepped down from the post at the start of this year, citing Molina’s revocation of the board’s video access in her resignation letter.
In June, the five board members called an emergency meeting to install Jasmine Georges-Yilla as acting executive director of the board. Though Georges-Yilla, who was present at Friday’s meeting, had been serving as acting executive director since Masters’ resignation in February, Sampson had reportedly attempted to install a new executive director on his own, without the board’s input.
In a letter to board members and staff sent the weekend before the emergency meeting, Sampson said that he had planned to install Chai Park Messina, the BOC’s deputy executive director of monitoring and research, as its executive director.
“Over the weekend, Chair Dwayne Sampson notified board members, in writing, that he had made a unilateral decision to replace Ms. Georges-Yilla with an interim executive director of his choosing,” the five board members said in a statement released by the BOC following the June meeting. “Chair Sampson’s written notice provided no rationale for the decision. The majority of the board expressed deep concern regarding the chair’s action and convened the meeting to reaffirm Ms. Georges-Yilla’s authority and their confidence in her work.”
After naming Georges-Yilla their acting executive director, the five board members also voted to “clarify the scope of authority and responsibilities vested in the chair, vice chair and executive director,” specifically in relation to their powers over the boards committees.
The move came several weeks after Sampson removed Cohen and Sherman from the board’s subcommittee charged with investigating deaths in the city’s jails. Both Cohen and Sherman are among the most harsh critics of the DOC on the board.
Sampson, who was the sole decision maker behind Cohen and Sherman’s removal, reportedly attempted to replace them with Ramos and Pitts, who were also absent from the June emergency meeting.
Beyond members of the board, Sampson has also been accused by advocates of failing to hold the DOC accountable for the violent conditions on Rikers Island, where over two dozen people have died dating back to the start of last year.
“It seems that the new chair has the idea that his objective is to prevent the department from being portrayed in any negative way, which is not at all his job,” Sarita Daftary, the co-executive director of Freedom Agenda, told the Eagle in May.
“His job is oversight,” Daftary added. “Oversight involves things that are not going well and trying to figure out what the board is going to do about them, and pushing the city to take action to rectify them.”
The turmoil on the BOC comes at a time of crisis for the DOC. The agency is currently facing the prospect of having its primary jail turned over to a court-appointed authority, after Swain allowed receivership proceedings to begin last month.
The judge is unlikely to rule on the receivership proceedings before early next year.
