Mayor grumbles about Rikers reforms at correction officer graduation
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Mayor Eric Adams blasted the City Council and others who attempt to create policies in the city’s jails on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
While giving remarks at a graduation ceremony for Department of Correction officers on Friday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams bristled at recent attempts from the City Council and others to make reforms to the troubled jail complex on Rikers Island.
Speaking to the new class of correctional officers from the DOC’s training facility in Queens, Adams appeared to lambast an effort by the City Council to ban solitary confinement in the city’s jails, as well as an effort by federal prosecutors to strip the city of its control over Rikers Island – both of which could very likely prove to be successful.
Even as the mayor’s new DOC commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, called the graduating class “leaders in criminal justice reform,” the mayor scoffed at any attempt from those not working inside Rikers Island to create its policies.
“While you try to protect the people that are inside our jails, people are trying to take away your power and authority to do the job right,” Adams said. “That's what we're fighting against.”
The mayor’s comments come about a month after the City Council overwhelmingly passed a bill that would virtually ban solitary confinement in the city’s jails. While the mayor has claimed the city no longer uses solitary confinement, he has also argued that the bill would prevent correctional officers from being able to maintain safe conditions on Rikers Island, where over two dozen people have died since Adams took office.
While it’s unclear if the mayor will veto the bill, should he do so, the Council will have the votes to overturn the mayoral rejection.
But the potential battle with the Council didn’t seem to bother the mayor on Friday.
“I'm not going to be able to do everything I would desire to do in my time as the mayor of the City of New York, but I'm going to damn sure try,” Adams said during his speech.
“You need to understand something – you have a goddamn mayor that believes in what you're doing and I will fight like all hell to be with you throughout this entire journey,” he added.
The mayor’s comments were met with applause and were echoed later in the ceremony by Benny Boscio, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.
Boscio, who has gotten into verbal arguments in public with progressive lawmakers including Public Advocate Jumaane Willams, the prime sponsor of the bill to ban solitary confinement, told the families of the recent grads that elected officials in the City Council were putting their loved ones in danger.
“I want you to imagine that somebody cuts another individual on a subway, our brothers and sisters in the NYPD arrest that individual and that individual goes to jail for four hours and then is released back to the public to commit the same heinous crimes – that is basically what they are doing to us,” Boscio said.
“I implore you, family and friends, to keep in mind who your city councilmembers are and who your legislators are that are voting for and be mindful the next time you go to the polls,” he added.
Boscio, like Adams, frequently argues that the DOC no longer uses solitary confinement, which is recognized by the United Nations as a form of torture, and instead uses punitive segregation. Advocates and others say the difference in the two practices is only semantic.
The DOC has been sued multiple times in the past year – a period of time they said they didn’t use solitary confinement – for allegedly using solitary confinement.
A December report from the Columbia University Center for Justice also found that “New York City jails continue to inflict various forms of solitary confinement by various different names,” including punitive segregation.
The bill to ban solitary would prevent incarcerated individuals from being held in an isolated cell for more than two hours per day within a 24-hour period and for more than eight hours at night directly after an alleged offense occurred – the confinement would be referred to as a “de-escalation” period. Should corrections officials determine that further confinement is required to de-escalate a situation, an incarcerated person could be held for up to four hours total in a 24-hour period.
The bill would also require that staff meet with the incarcerated person at least once an hour to attempt to de-escalate the situation. Originally, the bill required that medical staff conduct checks on the incarcerated person in confinement every 15 minutes.
"By banning solitary confinement, with clear guidelines for separation and de-escalation, our bill simply ends the torture of isolation on Rikers Island,” the public advocate said in a statement to the Eagle on Friday. “By dehumanizing the people housed on Rikers and instilling fear in the people who would staff the island, the mayor is perpetuating a status quo that has been dangerous for people on both sides of the bars.”
“I hope the day is coming when he will stop misleading officers and the public alike about what our bills do so that we can work together on actually making our city safer,” he added.
Like the bill to ban solitary, both Adams and Boscio have opposed efforts by federal prosecutors and the Legal Aid Society to get a federal judge to install a federal receivership over Rikers Island. The extreme judicial order could see the right to manage the jail complex taken away from the city and handed over to a court-appointed authority.
On Friday, Boscio called the receivership attempt “absolutely absurd.”
Last summer, federal Judge Laura Swain allowed receivership proceedings to begin. In the fall, the Legal Aid Society formally called on the judge to hold the DOC in contempt of court for allegedly failing to adhere to the 2015 consent judgment issued in the ongoing civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
“The levels of violence and brutality in the city jails that exist today were unimaginable when the consent judgment was entered in 2015, and the city has demonstrated through eight years of recalcitrance and defiance of court orders that it cannot and will not reform its unconstitutional practices,” Mary Lynne Werlwas, the director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society, said in a statement at the time.
“A receiver with the authority and mandate to make the difficult decisions the city will not is needed to secure the progress that two administrations and multiple Correction commissioners have all failed to achieve, and protect the constitutional rights of all people incarcerated in New York City jails,” she added.
The city is required to submit its response to receivership motion in March.
Adams appeared, at least in part, to appoint Maginley-Liddie to the commissioner’s position in December in an effort to stave off receivership. Former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina had been accused on several occasions of bucking the authority of the court-appointed federal monitor, Steve J. Martin, angering Swain. Additionally, in the eight years since she had started with the DOC, Maginley-Liddie had worked in various capacities helping the DOC implement the consent judgment.
The new commissioner on Friday took a different tone than the mayor and union president during her remarks.
“Integrity, compassion, transparency and innovation are the watchwords of this department,” Maginley-Liddie said. “These are the principles that will guide our new officers.”
“Let’s do this,” she added.
