Jails oversight board blasts DOC for quietly opening new restrictive unit
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Department of Correction attorney James Conroy (left) defends the agency’s opening of a new restrictive housing unit without first notifying or consulting the Board of Correction, which is led by board chair Dwayne Sampson (right). Screenshot via BOC/YouTube
By Jacob Kaye
The city’s jail watchdog board bashed Department of Correction leadership Tuesday after the agency failed to tell them about a new punitive housing unit opened in alleged chaotic fashion last week.
Members of the city’s Board of Correction said during their monthly meeting this week that they were “disturbed” to learn that they had been cut out of the loop when it came to the opening of the “Special Management Unit” at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.
The SMU, which is designed to serve as a step down from the most restrictive punitive unit on Rikers, allegedly houses detainees who have a history of committing violence behind bars. Their placement in the unit isn’t based on a single infraction but is instead determined by their infraction history and their risk classification score, which is calculated by the DOC.
Members of the board who visited the unit and spoke with four of the five people currently being detained there said a number of the minimum standards for care set by the BOC were not being met, including out-of-cell time – detainees in the unit are limited to seven hours out of their cells, well below the 14 hours required under the minimum standards.
The lack of significant out-of-cell time also appears to clash with Local Law 42, which bans solitary confinement in the city’s jails and mandates detainees receive 14 hours out of their cells each day, among other things. However, the law has yet to take effect and has been stuck in limbo after Mayor Eric Adams, who opposes the legislation, passed an executive order suspending its implementation indefinitely. A lawsuit from the City Council challenging that executive order is currently making its way through the courts.
While the DOC on Tuesday claimed that it consulted with the state’s oversight board – the New York State Commission on Correction – and the monitor in the ongoing detainee civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, the BOC was not brought in about discussions about the SMU at any point over the past several years.
Multiple board members, including several who had until Tuesday refrained from publicly criticizing the DOC, said they felt the BOC should have been consulted about the unit prior to its opening.
Worse, they said the DOC appeared unprepared to safely house detainees at the SMU.
BOC chair Dwayne Sampson, an appointee of Mayor Eric Adams who has been accused by advocates of failing to hold the DOC to account in his time atop the board, said that the SMU, which he visited on Monday, was “not ready to receive [detainees], with respect to [BOC] standards.”
Despite a requirement that all detainees have access to an electronic tablet, only one of the four detainees being held at the SMU, which allegedly wasn’t equipped with Wi-Fi, had been given one at the time of the visit, BOC member Barry Cozier said. A spokesperson for the DOC on Wednesday disputed Cozier’s claim, and said that all detainees had been given tablets in the unit, which also allegedly has internet access.
But BOC members said detainees in the SMU also lacked access to a handful of other services given to detainees in general housing, including the law library, recreation time and medical visits.
They also raised concerns about the alleged arbitrary nature in which detainees had been placed in the SMU.
Sampson accused the DOC of creating conditions in the unit that would invite violence.
“It's my opinion that this unit, once housed at [full capacity], will not be a reduction in overall violence,” Sampson said. “It just seems like a keg of dynamite ready to explode.”
Veronica Vela, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, blasted the DOC for excluding the BOC from the restrictive housing unit’s development and implementation. She also accused the DOC of forming the SMU and similar units as a way to place detainees in solitary confinement, despite city and state laws regulating the use of the practice deemed torture by the U.N.
“These are just more actions towards what increasingly seems like to me a strategy to keep the entire population of Rikers Island on constant lockdown in the name of violence reduction,” Vela said.
“DOC has a huge staff and a huge budget, and their entire plan for violence reduction can't be to lock everyone down so they have no physical contact with other people,” the attorney added. “These are not the actions of a well-functioning, well-managed system.”
Throughout the meeting on Tuesday, DOC attorney James Conroy defended the opening of the unit but did not tell board members why they weren’t brought into the planning process.
“[The Nunez monitor] articulated that management units such as [the SMU] are in line and consistent and sound correctional practices, which is kind of the overarching theme related to this – managing populations that have some propensity for violence, and doing so in a way that's thoughtful and helpful,” Conroy said. “That’s why we started slow.”
The monitor, Steve J. Martin, first made mention of the SMU – once called the General Population-Max unit – in a report he issued in April 2024.
In the report, he described the unit as one that would house “individuals with high classification scores and serious infraction histories in a more structured environment than a regular general population unit.”
According to the monitor’s report, detainees who enter the SMU will be held there for at least 60 days, at which point the DOC will review whether or not they can be moved back to the general population.
Martin was supportive of the unit in his April report, as well as in subsequent reports he issued.
But Martin hasn’t always been kept in the loop when it comes to the opening of new units.
In 2023, former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina oversaw the opening of a secure housing unit meant to hold detainees accused of habitually committing arson. However, Molina failed to notify Martin about the unit, in violation of the 2015 consent judgment in the Nunez case.
Though the DOC chalked the opening of the unit up to a series of miscommunication, it shuttered the unit the day after the monitor found out about it.
For the brief period in which it was opened, the unit housed five detainees, each of whom were placed there arbitrarily, the monitor said in 2023.
