Rikers ‘deadlocking’ allegations resurface at Council hearing as DOC denials continue

The Department of Correction again denied the use of a practice known as “deadlocking” during a City Council hearing led by City Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers on Wednesday, even as an attorney during the same hearing alleged the practice was still being used in the jails. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit

By Jacob Kaye

Nearly two years after a social worker first alleged that correctional officers on Rikers Island regularly locked up detainees suffering from mental health issues for weeks or months at a time – cutting them off from healthcare, programming and other people in custody – the debate over the existence of the practice, known as “deadlocking,” continued during a City Council hearing Wednesday.

While an attorney with the Legal Aid Society told the City Council during an oversight hearing on mental health in the city’s jails that several of her clients have languished as a result of the long-disputed practice, officials with the Department of Correction separately told lawmakers that they have been unable to identify the use of deadlocking, which a whistleblower first said was regularly employed against detainees in October 2024.

Both the attorney and the DOC officials gave their testimony under oath.

The existence of deadlocking has been the subject of debate since former Rikers Island social worker Justyna Rzewinski told the Board of Correction that officers were using the variation of solitary confinement to punish detainees with mental illnesses. Rzewinski, who worked on Rikers Island from December 2023 through August 2024, told the BOC that some detainees were deadlocked in a cell for so long that they began to “decompensate.”

The DOC immediately denied the use of the practice, even as others alleged deadlocking was Rikers Island’s “worst-kept secret.”

Though allegations of deadlocking continued, the Department of Investigation found in May that its probe into the practice “did not reveal any instances where [detainees] were locked-in their cells for weeks or months at a time as alleged,” according to The City Reporter.

When asked by City Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, to “assure the Council that deadlocking [was] no longer occurring,” the DOC referenced the DOI report.

“[The DOI] issued a full report that they had not found instances of this,” James Conroy, the DOC’s general counsel, said. “The previous and this administration, in particular, is committed to ensuring that that is not going on.”

While Conroy acknowledged in July during an oversight hearing before the Board of Correction that lock-in procedures weren’t always followed, he has long denied the existence of deadlocking.

“Let’s be candid – it would be obtuse of us to think that we don't have deviations from policy,” he told the BOC. “Obviously we do see instances in any area where there's things that go on outside the scope of what's authorized.”

When asked by Brooks-Powers on Wednesday if the DOC had provided any training to officers so that they wouldn’t resort to deadlocking, Conroy said that while lock-in procedure trainings are given to officers, they aren’t “necessarily focused or pointed to be specifically that word ‘deadlocking.’”

But not long after the DOC’s testimony was completed on Wednesday, allegations of deadlocking again bubbled up.

Barbara Hamilton, the director of the Incarcerated Client Services Unit at the Legal Aid Society, said the public defense group had several clients who had experienced deadlocking in the years since the practice was first alleged.

One client had been deadlocked on and off for around a year and began to experience hallucinations, Hamilton said. The detainee did not receive medical care until they committed an act of self-harm, according to the attorney.

Another Legal Aid client suffering from serious mental illness was allegedly cut off from recreation and access to programming while deadlocked.

When attorneys went to see her, “her clothes were visibly stained with menstrual blood, and she was using cereal boxes to make sanitary products,” Hamilton told the Council.

“What we see is a punitive system that is failing,” Hamilton said. “The Council has an important role to play, and we urge them to exercise this oversight of DOC and [Correctional Health Services], demand transparency about what's happening in these units, scrutinize and end the use of isolation and restrictive practices.”

The Legal Aid Society declined to provide additional information about the detainees referenced by Hamilton in her testimony.

The attorney’s allegations mirror those made by Rzewinski in 2024.

That year, the former social worker told the BOC that she witnessed some deadlocked detainees “smear feces all over themselves and their cells.”

“They would sit in their cells almost catatonic, with flies and maggots and feces all over,” she said. “This is how these individuals woke up, went to sleep and ate the meals that were delivered to them through a slot three times a day.”

The Department of Correction did not respond to an additional request for comment.