Monitor raises alarm over missing fire safety info on Rikers Island
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A toilet area in Rikers Island’s West Facility with scorch marks from a fire. Photo via the Office of Compliance Consultants
By Jacob Kaye
The Department of Correction has stonewalled a court monitor looking for answers about fire safety practices in the city’s jails, even as more than 40 fires were started by detainees over the last weeks of 2025, according to a new report.
The Office of Compliance Consultants, which has monitored environmental conditions on Rikers Island for over 50 years as part of a lawsuit originally known as Benjamin v. Malcolm, said in a report filed earlier this month that the DOC has not been forthcoming about fire safety in the notoriously dangerous jail complex.
The lack of information became so troublesome that OCC and the city had to meet to come up with a stipulation to “resolve outstanding document and information requests and to establish a path toward the timely production of information.”
The monitor said in the March report that while an agreement is close, “several items…remain unanswered.”
And what answers the monitor has received have been dubious, according to the report.
“OCC continues to doubt the thoroughness and effectiveness of some inspections, and some reports are questionable,” the report read.
A number of reports submitted to the monitor by the DOC last year concerning fire safety documentation, fire inspections and fire drills were “incomplete and often contradictory,” according to OCC.
For example, a May 2025 DOC report said that sprinkler heads in the North Infirmary Command on Rikers were “corroding.” But the DOC allegedly failed to put in a work order to get them fixed. The monitor also said no corrective action was mentioned in the report, which went unsigned by the person who conducted the inspection.
A DOC report conducted several weeks later in the Eric M. Taylor Center allegedly said that fire hose conditions in the facility were “good.” But a separate inspection conducted on the same day found that the facility was not equipped with fire hoses or nozzles, according to the OCC.
The monitor appeared most disturbed by the fire drills conducted – or not conducted – on Rikers Island.
“The majority (if not all) of the fire drills are not actually fire evacuation drills,” the report read. “They are classes or discussions!”
The monitor also claimed that the DOC submitted fire drill reports copied from past reports with the old date scratched out and the new date written in its place.
The allegedly incomplete reporting on fire safety came as the DOC experienced more than one fire per day during the final weeks of 2025.
In all, 44 fires were started by detainees during the last 42 days of the year, according to the report. Of those, seven occurred in various jail facilities on Dec. 3 when detainees lit papers, linens, clothes and a mattress on fire.
“The Department had earlier reported limiting the ability of those in custody to start fires, but during this monitoring period, numerous fires of unknown origin were still started in DOC facilities,” the report read.
A spokesperson for the DOC said the agency said fire safety remains a “top priority.”
A shower area on Rikers Island with ponded water and mildew. A shower area on Rikers Island with ponded water and mildew. Photo via the Office of Compliance Consultants
Fire safety wasn’t the only troubling condition covered by the monitor in the latest report.
OCC also found that Rikers Island struggled with general sanitation, heating, ventilation and lighting from September to December 2025, the time period covered in the report.
Though a judge has mandated that the DOC clean and sanitize showers, janitor’s closets, laundry areas, toilets, washbasins and sinks at least once a day, and cells, dormitories, showers, bathrooms and dayrooms at least once a week, the agency often fails to do so, according to the report.
The monitor found that cleaning supplies were often missing from janitor’s closets, garbage was seen overflowing in common areas, and gnats, roaches and mice feces were spotted in facilities across the island. During one inspection, the monitor’s team saw a live mouse in a housing area.
The report also claimed that mildew and “organic debris” were “frequently found in showers, toilet areas, janitor’s closets, and in some cells.”
Lauren Stephens-Davidowitz, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project, which originally brought the Benjamin lawsuit, said the report shows “a continued failure on the Department of Correction’s part to provide clean and safe living conditions for people in its custody.”
The case is believed to be the longest-running open litigation in Manhattan federal court, THE CITY reported in 2024.
Much of what was described in the latest report has been found by the monitor during past reporting periods.
Stephens-Davidowitz said it was “frustrating” that the DOC had yet to take substantial steps to address the dirty and unsafe conditions in the jails, which are slated to close at some point within the next decade.
“The Department could create conditions that meet modern safety and sanitation standards, but I think that these conditions are the result of choices – choices to neglect those responsibilities and people's basic needs,” she said.
The attorney said that while all the conditions laid out in the report were concerning, the lack of answers surrounding fire safety concerned her the most.
“Of all the issues the monitor covers, it's the one that keeps me up at night,” Stephens-Davidowitz said. “We need to see action from the city, because they may have a firetrap on their hands.”
But with a reform-minded mayor in City Hall and a new commissioner leading the DOC, Stephens-Davidowitz said she was hopeful the agency would begin to take the requirements laid out in the Benjamin court orders a little more seriously.
“We're hopeful that the new administration could actually make progress on these issues, because the progress is attainable,” she said. “If the new administration is committed to fixing these conditions, it can be done.”
