Former Rikers worker says DOC locks mentally ill detainees inside cells for weeks
/By Jacob Kaye
Detainees with mental health issues are sometimes locked inside cells for weeks or months at a time without access to their needed medication and left to deteriorate, a former social worker on Rikers Island told the jails’ watchdog board on Tuesday.
Justyna Rzewinski, who recently left her job as a social worker with Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides healthcare to the city’s detainees, told the city’s Board of Correction during its monthly meeting on Tuesday that the Department of Correction frequently “deadlocks” detainees with mental illness inside cells as a form of punishment.
The alleged practice, which the DOC did not confirm or deny on Tuesday, would appear to be a violation of the BOC’s rules that govern the rights of detainees on Rikers Island, a jail complex where half of the incarcerated population has been diagnosed with a mental illness.
Rzewinski’s account is the first public description of the alleged practice, which she said effectively acts as a form of solitary confinement, a practice the DOC has consistently denied using. The Daily News first reported Rzewinski’s experience on Monday evening.
Rzewinski told the BOC that some detainees are deadlocked in a cell for so long that they “decompensate.”
“Many would smear feces all over themselves and their cells,” Rzewinski said. “They would sit in their cells almost catatonic, with flies and maggots and feces all over.”
“This is how these individuals woke up, went to sleep and ate the meals that were delivered to them through a slot three times a day,” she added.
The former social worker who worked for nine months on Rikers said that the practice of deadlocking was well-established when she arrived at the jail complex in December 2023, the same month DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie began leading the troubled agency. Rzewinski said that officers continued to deadlock detainees with mental health issues throughout her time with CHS, despite “distraught” mental health workers who “did the best we could to advocate for these patients to be released,” she said.
“This deadlocking practice was extremely traumatic to witness for me and my fellow mental health staff, and also for other people in custody,” Rzewinski told the BOC. “I could not believe what I saw. I have never seen anyone living in these types of conditions.”
According to Rzewinski, there was no guidance for deadlocking, and officers would sometimes lock up detainees for looking at them in a way they felt was inappropriate. DOC officers also allegedly locked up detainees with mental health issues and intellectual disabilities.
The former Rikers worker recounted one incident in which a detainee with serious mental health issues and a medical condition that required daily medication was deadlocked.
The detainee was initially brought to Rzewinski’s unit after being deadlocked in a different facility. The former social worker said that when he arrived, the detainee was “non-functioning,” and spent all day screaming, banging, smearing feces around the cell and tearing up his mattress.
Rzewinski said the detainee, while not deadlocked, showed some “odd behavior, like standing by my door and staring at me.” She said however that the behavior, which lasted throughout the week, did not make her fear for her safety because she “knew he was severely mentally ill and was extremely shell shocked.”
When she returned to Rikers on a Monday after not working over the weekend, she had learned that the detainee had been deadlocked after an officer said he “looked at her inappropriately and made her feel uncomfortable.”
“There were no allegations of touching or physical contact or threats,” Rzewinski said. “She just thought that he was weird and she wanted him to be locked in.”
Not long after the detainee was eventually put back on medication and again became communicative, Rzewinski decided to resign.
“He blamed himself for being locked in… [but] I assured him that it wasn't his fault,” she said. “As I spoke to him, I kept thinking about what had been done to him, and how this healthy version of him was who he should have been all along. After ending the session, I went into my office and cried.”
“That was the moment that reaffirmed that leaving was the right decision for me,” she added.
DOC officials in attendance at Tuesday’s BOC meeting claimed that they were unaware of the deadlocking practice before Rzewinski’s testimony.
“We are looking into the allegations wholesale,” James Conroy, the department’s general counsel, said. “I don't have a lot of specifics with respect to that.”
A spokesperson for the DOC directed the Eagle to Conroy’s testimony when asked if their office disputed any of the claims made by Rzewinski on Tuesday.
Descriptions of the practice sparked outrage on Tuesday, as well as a threat of litigation.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, whose law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jail has been put on hold by an ongoing executive order from Mayor Eric Adams, who opposes the law, called the alleged deadlocking practice “inhumane and indefensible.”
"These reports are disturbing, alarming, but not surprising from an administration that has actively refused to even attempt to implement the law banning the prolonged isolation of solitary confinement in city jails,” Williams said. “Combined with these latest allegations, it appears the administration believes isolation is an acceptable tool, despite the irreversible damage it causes and irrefutable data showing that harm. No matter what name it goes by– ‘deadlocking,’ shower cages, or emergency lock-ins, we are left with the same results.”
Despite claims from detainees, attorneys, advocates, judges and others that solitary confinement is often still employed by officers on Rikers, Adams and DOC leadership have consistently denied that the practice is still used.
However, the mayor and department fought off Williams’ bill that explicitly bans solitary from being used as a form of punishment in the city’s jails.
After being passed by a super majority of the City Council in December, the bill banning the holding of detainees for more than four hours at a time was vetoed by the mayor in January. Then, after the council overwhelmingly voted to overturn his veto less than a month later, the mayor and his administration turned toward the courts, making a half-hearted – and ultimately, unsuccessful – attempt to get a judge to delay the implementation of the law.
Then, with less than 24 hours before the law was slated to go into effect in July, Adams passed an executive order, suspending key elements of the ban.
The law remains suspended, as do a separate set of rules passed by the BOC limiting the amount of time detainees can be locked in cells.
City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, said that the allegations of deadlocking confirm what she and others have been told about the use of solitary inside Rikers.
“The mayor continues to say we don’t have solitary confinement,” Nurse said. “Yes, we do.”
“We know and continue to say that people who have severe mental illness do not belong in jail,” Nurse added in a statement. “Instead of providing people with the care that they need, people are outright being abused.”
Tina Luongo, the chief attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice, said that the public defender group was “considering all litigation options to protect our clients who have been subjected to this inhumane treatment.”
“This report has us seething,” Luongo said. “To condemn one of the most vulnerable populations at Rikers Island – people diagnosed with mental illness – to makeshift solitary cells, while depriving them of essential medical care, is downright cruel.”
“For anyone who still takes city officials at their word that DOC has ceased to employ solitary confinement, today’s troubling reporting should clear any confusion,” she added. “The city continues to default to isolation instead of care, even in specialized units that claim to treat mental illness. Solitary is torture, and its continued use is both illegal and immoral.”
