Rikers Island sees massive spike in missed medical appointments

By Jacob Kaye

The number of detainees missing their medical appointments on Rikers Island has skyrocketed this summer, with a single facility within the troubled jail complex driving the spike, data obtained by the Eagle shows.

Though the city’s Department of Correction has long been plagued by chronic failures in getting incarcerated New Yorkers medical care, the number of missed medical appointments on Rikers Island jumped by approximately 35 percent in recent months when compared to the rest of 2025.

While the number of missed medical appointments on Rikers fluctuated by a couple hundred appointments each month through the first four months of the year, the DOC saw an increase of nearly 4,000 missed appointments in May. The issues continued in June, when over 17,260 scheduled medical appointments were missed by detainees, compared to the 12,623 appointments missed in April, according to city data. While the DOC saw a decline in the number of missed appointments from June to July, there remained over 2,440 more missed appointments in July than there were in April.

The consequences can be deadly.

Five of the last six people to die in Department of Correction custody suffered medical emergencies before their deaths, according to the agency, including Ardit Billa, a 29-year-old man who died in the jail on Saturday. Multiple oversight reports and lawsuits filed over the past several years have accused the DOC of failing to get detainees to their medical appointments prior to their deaths.

Missed medical appointments aren’t new to Rikers. In 2022, a Bronx judge held the city in contempt of court for failing to get detainees to the doctor. While the city has since purged itself of the contempt finding, the lawsuit remains ongoing.

Each month, over 10,000 scheduled trips to medical facilities in the city’s troubled jail complex are missed for any number of reasons. Sometimes, there’s a scheduling conflict – a detainee has to be in court, or programming, or is getting their haircut at the time of their medical appointment. A plurality of the missed medical appointments on Rikers are categorized as “refusals,” though detainees, defense attorneys and advocates have raised concerns about the DOC’s claim that detainees refuse to be taken to their appointments thousands of times each month.

But the increases seen over the past several months appear to be caused almost entirely by one problem – there isn’t enough clinic space at the Otis Bantam Correctional Facility.

The clinic for those being held at OBCC, which mostly houses men awaiting trial, is often so crowded that thousands of men a month are turned away, despite having scheduled appointments on the books.

In June, 5,162 appointments were missed at OBCC for what the DOC describes as “maximum safe capacity,” according to data obtained by the Eagle. Only one of the other eight Rikers housing facilities had detainees miss appointments for the same reason – the Eric M. Taylor Center had 21 missed appointments for capacity issues that month. In May, 5,277 medical appointments were missed at OBCC for the same reason.

The number of missed medical appointments at OBCC have more than doubled this summer.

In April, 2,103 medical appointments at OBCC were missed because of maximum safe capacity concerns.

The increase in missed medical appointments at OBCC from April to May accounted for nearly 70 percent of the overall increase in missed medical appointments for all reasons across all facilities on Rikers Island.

OBCC, which first opened in 1985, was shuttered briefly by the DOC in 2022 amid a staffing crisis that began during the pandemic. The DOC reopened the facility the next year as Rikers’ population began to rise after Mayor Eric Adams took office — Rikers currently houses around 7,600 detainees, the most since April 2019.

According to Veronica Vela, the supervising attorney of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society who is helping to lead the organization’s ongoing class action lawsuit regarding medical care on Rikers, said that part of the problem with OBCC is that there isn’t a lot of space in the clinic’s waiting room.

“I think [the DOC] legitimately has a safe capacity issue at OBCC for people to wait for their appointments,” Vela told the Eagle during a recent interview. “I just don't think that it's an issue that is unresolvable.”

Similar capacity issues once existed at the Robert N. Davoren Center, another facility on Rikers, Vela said. But the DOC created a space nearby to hold people while they waited, rather than cancel their appointments, according to the attorney.

“We've long been asking why they haven't done something similar at OBCC,” Vela said.

In a statement, DOC spokesperson Shayla Mulzac-Warner said that the reason there’s been a spike in missed appointments has been because there have simply been more appointments scheduled. OBCC, along with several other facilities in the jail complex, has taken on hundreds of sentenced people who should be in state prisons but are delayed because of staffing issues in correctional facilities across New York.

“The DOC works hard, in collaboration with our healthcare providers, to ensure that everyone receives the medical care that they need,” Mulzac-Warner said.

But while the number of missed appointments because of capacity concerns have ballooned, the number of missed appointments for all other reasons documented by the DOC have remained virtually unchanged.

In April, there were 1,698 missed medical appointments because a detainee had to be in court. That number dropped in May to 1,582, and again in June to 1,477. In July, 1,514 appointments were missed because of court hearings.

Around 60 medical appointments were missed in April because detainees were attending programming in the jails. The number jumped to around 100 in May, where it’s remained each month since.

The DOC did not respond to repeated requests from the Eagle requesting additional information about why the increase in missed medical appointments was concentrated to a single facility and for a single reason.

A group of lawmakers who visited Rikers Island earlier this month told the Eagle they were told by multiple detainees that getting to their medical appointments at OBCC has been a struggle.

“There are some issues getting timely medical attention on Rikers Island,” said Queens Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who visited Rikers on Aug. 14 alongside three of her Albany colleagues.

Valdez said she also heard reports that the DOC wasn’t accurately logging why detainees were missing appointments. The lawmaker claimed that one detainee told her that he had missed a physical therapy appointment on the island because of a court appearance, but when he checked his medical records afterwards, the documents showed that he had refused to be taken to his appointment.

The DOC has been accused in the past of poor data collection surrounding missed medical appointments.

In 2022, attorneys from the Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services and Milbank LLP, who together brought the medical care class action lawsuit against the DOC, claimed that the department had altered the way it had collected data to falsely show that it had improved its rate of getting detainees to the doctor and purge itself of the contempt order a judge had issued against them the year prior.

Attorneys with the Legal Aid Society again asked a judge in 2024 to find the agency in contempt of the same court order claiming that medical care on Rikers has only worsened in the two years since their first legal action. The judge, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Taylor, denied the motion earlier this year.