Mayor suspends solitary confinement ban
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Mayor Eric Adams over the weekend issued an executive order suspending key elements of the City Council’s law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails. File photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.
That’s the platitude Mayor Eric Adams has appeared to employ in his attempts to skirt around a new law banning solitary confinement 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 on Sunday, Adams passed an executive order on Saturday, suspending key elements of the ban on solitary confinement – a correctional practice that has been deemed torture by the U.N. but one the mayor, the city’s Department of Correction commissioner and correction officers claim they haven’t used in years.
Adams, alongside DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, have made a number of claims about how the law wouldn’t do enough to remove detainees accused of committing violence behind bars out of the jails’ general population, putting detainees, officers, staff and civilian workers at risk.
“There were some parts of it that were extremely dangerous to the inmates,” the mayor said in defense of the “temporary pause” of Local Law 42 on Sunday. “The goal is we want to make sure the spirit of the law does not get in the way of the implementation of the law.”
Adams’ executive order, which was passed alongside a state-of-emergency declaration in regard to the jails on Rikers Island, is only the latest escalation between the city’s top executive and its legislative branch over the law the council passed in the final days of last year’s legislative session.
It also may be the final move before the fight makes its way into the courts.
Though they didn’t explicitly threaten legal action in the days following Adams’ executive order, the City Council has already indicated that they would be willing to sue the mayor over his lack of implementation of the law.
A little more than a week before Adams’ weekend executive order, the City Council passed a resolution allowing Speaker Adrienne Adams “to engage in legal action on behalf of the council to defend Local Law 42.”
A council spokesperson on Monday blasted Adams’ executive order, calling the move one that shows “how little respect [the Adams administration] has for the laws and democracy.”
“The reality is that the law already included broad safety exemptions that make this ‘emergency order’ unnecessary and another example of Mayor Adams overusing executive orders without justification,” the spokesperson said.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is prepared to take the Adams administration to court over its failure to implement a city law banning solitary confinement. File photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
Adams’ executive order was also decried by both the Legal Aid Society and the New York Civil Liberties Union, two organizations that have taken Adams to court – or threatened to take him to court – over policies he has both enacted or failed to enact in the two and a half years he’s served as mayor.
“This manufactured ‘emergency’ is an overreach by Mayor Adams,” the Legal Aid Society said in a statement. “These executive orders set a dangerous precedent where the Mayor can avoid implementing laws that he disagrees with simply by claiming they would adversely affect public safety.”
“Instead of issuing emergency orders a day before the ban was scheduled to go into effect, Mayor Adams should be doing everything possible to end the inhumane isolation of incarcerated New Yorkers, stop the rampant brutality in the jails, and reduce the jail population,” they added.
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who sponsored the legislation that languished for years before its ultimate passage in 2023, called the executive order a “shameful tactic” and “another abuse of power by this administration to try and ignore the laws it opposes.”
“It is inexcusable, and we will explore all means of ensuring that this administration cannot continue to abandon its duty to execute the law the council overwhelmingly approved twice," he said.
The mayor’s executive order comes around a month after the city’s Board of Correction, which provides oversight to the DOC and the city’s jails, voted to create the rules by which the ban on solitary confinement will be implemented.
Under the rules, incarcerated individuals who commit a violation behind bars and are ordered to restricted housing would be prevented 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 law would also allow for people in custody being placed in restrictive housing to have a hearing on whether or not their placement in restrictive housing is necessary. During that hearing, they would be allowed to be represented by an advocate, be it a lawyer, law student, paralegal or another incarcerated person. Local Law 42 also requires that people in restrictive housing are given access to at least 14 hours of out-of-cell time per day. That time's supposed to include programming and activities, according to the law.
The Adams administration has long opposed a City Council law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails. A day prior to its implementation this weekend, Mayor Eric Adams passed an executive order suspending key elements of the law. AP file photo by Bebeto Matthews
Adams’ executive order suspends or changes a number of elements of the law, including the cap on the amount of time a person can be held in solitary confinement.
Under the mayor’s order, the DOC can “hold a person in de-escalation confinement for more than four hours in exceptional circumstances as determined by the commissioner or a deputy commissioner, or another equivalent member of department senior leadership over the operations of security.”
The order also suspends the provision of the law that prohibited the DOC from holding a detainee in restrictive housing for more than 60 days in a single 12-month period. According to Adams’ decree, staff must instead review the agency’s placement of a detainee in restrictive housing every 15 days.
The Adams administration has, for months, signaled that it was unwilling and unprepared to enact Local Law 42.
In early June, attorneys for the city wrote to federal Judge Laura Swain and claimed that the ban on solitary confinement would interfere with the consent judgment in the ongoing detainee civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, which Swain oversees.
The city cited concerns about the law expressed by Steve J. Martin, the federal monitor appointed by Swain to keep track of conditions in the city’s jails and the DOC’s compliance with the consent judgment.
While Martin has said he believes a number of elements of the law “set standards that are not consistent with sound correctional practice,” he’s also called into question the DOC’s ability to safely implement the law while lauding its intention.
Several days before the law was set to be implemented, Swain ordered the city and the monitor to meet and hash out the implementation of the law over the next several months, and issue a report on the law’s status by the end of October.
Swain’s order did not delay the actual implementation of Local Law 42.
Adams said on Sunday that he planned to renew the executive order suspending parts of the law every month until at least October, when the report to Swain is due.
“We just wanted the judge to have time to analyze the law and decide the proper way to implement it without bringing harm to the inmates or bringing harm to the correctional officers,” Adams said. “It’s just a temporary pause to give them time to do that analysis.”
Without Adams’ executive order, it’s unclear if the DOC would have been able to begin enacting the law as written by the council.
Over the past several months, the Eagle has asked the DOC multiple times about the agency’s preparation for the law’s implementation. DOC spokespeople have declined to give any detail about the work that the agency has done surrounding the law, beyond its efforts to oppose it publicly and challenge it legally.
On Friday, hours before the mayor issued his executive order, the Eagle asked the DOC if officers and staff had been brought up to speed on the new law, what form of tracking the DOC planned to use in order to ensure detainees’ time in segregated housing aligned with the law, and other actions it had taken to prepare for the ban on solitary confinement.
DOC spokesperson Annais Morales did not respond to any of the Eagle’s specific questions and instead said that the DOC and federal monitor were “working to determine the safest and most efficient way to deter violent acts in our jails.”
“It is important to note, the department has not practiced solitary confinement since 2019 and the commissioner agrees the practice, as conventionally defined, is inhumane,” she added.
