With Rikers in crisis, power struggle within jail watchdog board overshadows oversight efforts

The Board of Correction on Tuesday spent around an hour of its meeting engaged in an internal power struggle instead of discussing the top item on its agenda – the crisis regarding the city’s stalled plan to close Rikers Island by 2027. Screenshot via BOC

By Jacob Kaye

It would make sense if tensions were high at the start of the Board of Correction’s monthly meeting on Tuesday.

As part of an energy saving measure, air conditioning in the Manhattan municipal building the oversight hearing was held in had been reduced, and with temperatures hovering above 90 degrees outdoors, the room began to swelter. There also was the fact that the board, which has oversight over the city’s Department of Correction, was planning to spend the next several hours examining the city’s failed efforts – thus far – to build four borough-based jails to replace the crumbling jail complex on Rikers Island. The original plan to shutter Rikers is in crisis, and the Adams administration has yet to present an alternative.

But despite the heat and the complex problems facing the future of the city’s jails, it was instead an internal power struggle between the BOC’s chair and several of its members that led to raised voices and tense back-and-forths on Tuesday.

While the board was supposed to be interrogating the Department of Correction’s plan to shut its notoriously dangerous jail facilities on Rikers, the first half hour of its monthly meeting saw instead a fight between BOC Chair Dwayne Sampson and several of the board’s members. The fight began again toward the end of the meeting, and lasted another 20 minutes.

The battle between Sampson and several of the board’s members on Tuesday was the latest in a year-long struggle between the chair appointed by Mayor Eric Adams and the BOC’s criminal justice advocate-aligned members.

Last year in an emergency meeting, the advocate-aligned members, who at the time made up a majority of the board, voted to reform the board’s bylaws, stripping the chair position of a number of its powers.

At the time, the members claimed that Sampson had overstepped his authority when he had unilaterally moved to appoint his chosen pick to serve as the BOC’s executive director – a position that had opened up after its previous occupant, Amanda Masters, quit in protest of the Department of Correction’s revocation of the BOC’s access to live surveillance video footage from Rikers Island. The BOC would eventually go on to sue the DOC and win back access to the footage, though they did so without Sampson’s support.

Sampson began Tuesday’s meeting by introducing a resolution that would restore the board’s bylaws to their previous iteration before the July 2023 emergency meeting, effectively providing him again with the powers he once had.

“I was not in attendance at that [July 2023] session, so there was no consensus from this chair as to the changes and recommendations that were implemented in that amended bylaws,” Sampson said.

But Sampson’s resolution saw immediate backlash from the board.

DeAnna Hoskins, one of three remaining advocate-aligned members on the board, began to push back against Sampson’s request and said that the changes to the bylaws wouldn’t help the board function better or help it better hold the DOC to account, but instead only help Sampson gain more “power and control.”

Hoskins said that before the bylaws were changed last year, Sampson ran the board as a dictator and that the board’s staff had begun to become demoralized under his leadership. At one point last year, Sampson had allegedly asked the board’s executive director – a permanent staff position – to leave her office so that Sampson could work out of it, Hoskins alleged.

At one point during the argument on Tuesday, Sampson attempted to send the board into executive session and kick the public and press out of the hearing room.

“That's the problem, you think you got a power that you don’t have,” Hoskins said in response to his request.

While the board did not vote to revert its bylaws back to the way they were written before July 2023, they did vote to create a committee to review the bylaws before the board’s next meeting in September.

Board of Correction Chair Dwayne Sampson. Screenshot via BOC

Sampson, who had no prior experience working in corrections before joining the board, has had his struggles with the BOC since he first began as its chair at the start of 2023.

Several of the first meetings he presided over last year were postponed as a result of technical difficulties, forcing the board to put off its public oversight of an agency that has seen nearly three dozen people die in its custody in the past two and a half years. But Sampson’s biggest problems on the board allegedly played out behind the scenes.

In 2022, former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina revoked BOC members’ and staff’s access to live video footage from Rikers Island, a crucial tool the board uses for its investigations and oversight of the DOC. While a majority of the board and its then-executive director fiercely opposed the policy change, Sampson reportedly did not join in the board’s efforts to get their access to the video restored.

“You were silent and when the board finally began to pursue litigation, your position was to get out of the room, rather than to discuss it,” board member Robert Cohen said to Sampson on Tuesday. “We needed to get video back, and rather than develop a strategy to do it, you left the room.”

Also during his first months as chair, Sampson sparked tension when he removed advocate-aligned board members Cohen and Jacqueline Sherman from the board’s subcommittee charged with investigating deaths in the city’s jails. Sampson, who was the sole decision maker behind Cohen and Sherman’s removal, reportedly attempted to replace them with board members Joseph Ramos and Jacqueline Pitts, both of whom previously were employed by the DOC and who were appointed to the board by Adams. The work of the death committee largely came to a halt after Cohen and Sherman’s removal, despite the number of deaths on Rikers Island reaching a 10-year high the year prior.

Tensions on the board came to a boil inn July 2023, when Sampson attempted to install Chai Park Messina, who then served as the BOC’s deputy executive director of monitoring and research, as the board’s executive director.

The move irked Cohen, Sherman, Hoskins and board members Rachel Bedard and Felipe Franco, who called for the July emergency meeting to install then-acting executive director Jasmine Georges-Yilla as the BOC’s permanent executive director and to vote to “clarify the scope of authority and responsibilities vested in the chair, vice chair and executive director.”

Following the meeting, the public clashes between Sampson and its board members began to quiet down.

The resurfacing of the power struggle on Tuesday came after two of the original five advocate-aligned board members left the BOC in recent months. The departure of Sherman and Bedard has left the advocate-aligned group in the minority on the board whose majority is now made up of members appointed by Adams, a staunch supporter of the DOC.

The new majority exerted its power on Tuesday when it rejected a motion from Hoskins that would have directed the board to review the BOC’s minimum standards, a set of rules meant to dictate the humane treatment of detainees behind bars.

Every five days since taking office, Adams has passed an executive order suspending the rules, much to the frustration of the BOC’s advocate-aligned members, who have repeatedly and unsuccessfully lobbied the administration to stop passing the order.

Hoskins motion introduced on Tuesday would have kicked off a review of the minimum standards, which haven’t undergone any major revisions since 1975 despite major changes being made in that time to the city’s jailing practices.

After getting pushback from Sampson, the motion failed and was tabled until the September meeting.

Throughout Tuesday's meeting, Chaplain Dr. Victoria A. Phillips, a longtime criminal justice reform advocate who has held various positions working with people incarcerated on Rikers Island, heckled Sampson as he attempted to wrestle back his power. Sampson threatened to have her kicked out of the room, a threat he also made to Phillips last year.

“He doesn’t know how to hold DOC accountable,” Phillips told the Eagle last year. “He’s just happy to be there, but we don't need people that are happy to be on the board, let alone be the chair.”

“We need people that are going to hold the DOC accountable in real time and protect every New Yorker behind those walls, whether it's staff or the detained,” she added.

During the board’s meeting on Tuesday, news broke that a 23-year-old woman who had been released from Department of Correction custody last week had died over the weekend in Elmhurst Hospital. According to the attorneys representing the woman, Charizma Jones, DOC staff ignored her pleas for help as she began to experience the medical crisis in May. The BOC will now be charged with investigating Jones’ death.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect that Charizma Jones was not in Department of Correction custody at the time of her death.