Detainees moved out of NYC’s lone private jail as federal contract expires
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Private prison firm GEO Group’s contract with the U.S. Marshals Service to operate the Queens Detention Facility ended Wednesday. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File
By David Brand
Dozens of detainees have been transferred out of New York City’s lone private jail after the troubled contractor’s deal with the federal government expired Wednesday.
Private prison firm GEO Group had contracted with the U.S. Marshals Service to detain pretrial defendants at the 222-bed Queens Detention Facility before an executive order from President Biden prompted the feds to end the agreement. The jail closure comes almost exactly one year after COVID-19 began to surge through the facility, infecting nearly 20 percent of detainees at the pandemic’s peak.
Extensive coverage by the Eagle fueled a formal investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued GEO Group in federal court in December to obtain records related to the pandemic failures and unsafe conditions. The lockup’s most famous inmate, rapper Tekashi69, was released in March 2020 after a judge said he was at risk from the coronavirus.
The U.S. Marshals spent the past two weeks moving the detainees, many of whom are cooperating witnesses, out of the jail and into other facilities in the area, officials said.
A detainee told the Eagle last month that many of his peers were “shell shocked” by news of the closure because they feared being marked as snitches and attacked or killed at a new lockup.
Two defense attorneys said Thursday that several detainees have been moved to the Essex County Correctional Facility in New Jersey. The wife of another detainee said the U.S. Marshals Service had transferred her husband to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The Bureau of Prisons and Department of Justice did not provide a response to specific questions Thursday, but a federal law enforcement source confirmed that detainees have been moved out of the jail.
GEO Group first disclosed the jail closure in a March 16 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, first reported by the Eagle. GEO Group said in a statement that it “expects to market the Queens Detention Facility to other government agencies” if it does not get a new deal. Before contracting with the U.S. Marshals, the warehouse jail once held immigrants awaiting deportation after their arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The closure came after President Joe Biden signed an executive order preventing the Department of Justice, which oversees the U.S. Marshals, from renewing contracts with private prison firms.
According to the WARN Notice, 147 staff members will be laid off or transferred over the next two weeks.
Several Queens Detention Facility staff members who picked up the phone at the jail refused to answer questions about the closure and directed inquiries to GEO Group’s corporate office. GEO Group did not respond to multiple messages.
Local leaders have hailed the closure of the jail, which has largely remained under the radar aside from reporting by the Eagle and Daily News.
“The closure of the jail will end years of the GEO Group profiting from the incarceration of Black and brown people at the only private jail in New York City,” said Assemblymember Khaleel Anderson. “The conditions at the facility were unsafe, even more so amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. We’re thankful for its closure.”
In April and May 2020, the percentage of Queens jail detainees with COVID-19 nearly doubled the rate of infection at Rikers Island. Overall, at least 41 detainees and 42 staff members have tested positive for coronavirus, according to court-ordered reports published three times a week by the BOP.
Six detainees, their loved ones and their defense attorneys contacted the Eagle in March, April and May to blow the whistle on conditions in the jail, where COVID-sick detainees shared bunk beds with non-symptomatic inmates in the jail’s open dormitories.
An eight-cell solitary confinement unit was initially used to quarantine sick detainees, but it quickly filled up. Meanwhile, staff and inmates lacked personal protective equipment despite the deadly virus. At one point, so many guards had called out sick that a single officer was forced to patrol multiple units at the same time, detainees said.
“Everyone’s coughing, sneezing on top of each other,” one man told the Eagle April 3. “We’re not practicing social distancing because you cannot do social distancing in this jail because everyone is so on top of each other.”
“It’s, like, really a disaster,” said another. “I feel scared for my life. It’s not like a home where I can have my own sanctuary and sanitize the facility. I’m living in a pigsty f------ jail where whatever is happening is happening.”
A handful of inmates filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, which they later pulled, reportedly because they feared losing favorable deals offered by federal prosecutors.
