Monitor’s report puts past six months of chaos on Rikers into context
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The latest Nunez Monitor report details what has been the most violent year on Rikers Island in recent history.
Photo courtesy of Freedom Agenda
By Jacob Kaye
In his latest report on Rikers Island, the federal watchdog first appointed to oversee the jail facilities over half a decade ago, said the Department of Correction was “trapped in a state of disrepair” that likely won’t be fixed anytime soon.
The 12th Nunez Monitor Report was filed in federal court on Monday and outlines was has been understood for months – Rikers Island has been in crisis and conditions in the island’s jail facilities have deteriorated to some of the lowest levels seen in the past five years.
“The Department’s decades of poor practices has produced a maladaptive culture in which deficiencies are normalized and embedded in every facet of the Department’s work,” monitor Steve J. Martin’s report reads. “The Department’s multitude of nonfunctional systems, and ineffective practices and procedures combine to form a deeply entrenched culture. This traps the Department in a state of disrepair, where even the first step to improve practice is undercut by the absence of elementary skills—be it Staff deployment, safety and security, or managing/supervising Staff—and results in a persistently dysfunctional system.”
The report, which mostly covers conditions in the jail from January 2021 through June 2021, describes the unsafe conditions, for DOC workers and incarcerated people alike, that activists, lawmakers, correctional officers and detainees have been deriding for the past year.
The monitor describes the first six months of the year as one plagued by compounding issues, many of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. Court delays have kept people in custody for longer periods of time, staff and detainees had to be distanced from one another creating the need for more resources, detainee services provided by non-uniformed staff have been suspended, training programs have been curtailed and high level staff meetings have mostly been held virtually, the monitor said.
One facility on the island, which is mostly populated by young adults, saw nearly 20 violent and chaotic incidents over the course of month from late July until the end of August, the monitor reports. A detainee attacked a sleeping officer who was working through a double shift, one detainee was able to make his way through two doors before staff stopped him and one fight between nearly a dozen incarcerated people left several detainees and correctional officers stabbed and injured.
On the other side, correctional officers utilized force at an historic rate during the first half of 2021. With three times as many use of force incidents when compared to all of 2016, the monitor predicts in the report that 2021 “will likely result in having the largest number of uses of force in a single year to date.”
“Use of force will inherently occur in all jails,” the report reads. “A well-executed, well-timed use of force that is proportional to the observed threat protects both Staff and incarcerated individuals from serious harm. However, in this Department, the use of force is almost a forgone conclusion to address any issue and therefore occurs too frequently, and without the necessary attempts to resolve the situation without resorting to physical force.”
Mary Lynne Werlwas, the director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society, said that the latest report, especially its sections regarding the increases in use of force incidents, validates what has been said by clients and attorneys over the course of the past year.
“This report supports what we continue to hear from incarcerated clients every day: that correction officers resort to abuse and brutality as a matter of course, rendering even short stays in custody both treacherous and traumatic,” Werlwas said. “The people confined in DOC need urgent, extraordinary action from the City and all criminal system stakeholders - both to decarcerate the current population, but also to address the suffering of our clients who remain forcibly detained behind jail walls.”
Martin’s oversight stems from the settlement made in Nunez v the City of New York in 2015, in which the plaintiffs alleged abuse and violations at the hand of correctional officers and those in charge of the jail complex.
Though Martin says improvements have been made over the past six years, “data on uses of force, fights, stabbings, and slashings among people in custody and assaults on staff reveal that 2021 has been the most dangerous year since the Consent Judgment went into effect.”
Use of force, which was at the center of the original lawsuit, has been a major area the DOC has struggled with since the monitoring began, Martin said.
Though it developed a plan to reduce use of force incidents that was approved by the monitor early on in the process, Martin said that the department has been unable to implement it. In the latest report, Martin said the DOC is not in compliance with the use of force order made by the court. It marks the eighth consecutive report in which the monitor has made that determination.
When compared to 2016, use of force used against 18-year-old detainees increased by over 220 percent in the first half of 2021, by 248 percent against 19-21-year-olds and by 356 percent among all incarcerated people older than 22, the report said.
“As the report shows, the facilities are more dangerous than they were when the federal court entered relief,” Werlwas said. “This is unacceptable and unconstitutional.”
Because of the crisis in the jail facilities, the monitor began providing monthly emergency updates to the court beginning in the summer and some of those reports and figures were included in the latest report.
The DOC says it has begun to make improvements on many of the negative indicators outlined in the report over the past couple of months.
Use of force rates have declined by 11 percent, fights among detainees has declined by 19 percent and the assault rate against staff has declined by 12 percent, according to the agency.
The DOC has also seen staff begin to return to work, an issue that it has long blamed for the increase in violence. The number of staff working triple shifts in “large jails” has declined by 93 percent, the number of officers going AWOL has declined by 81 percent and the number of unstaffed posts has declined over 80 percent in recent months, according to the DOC.
“We’re not declaring victory by any measure,” Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said in a recent statement. “But our hope is that these favorable numbers are early indicators of a positive trend that we can build upon to create a better future for staff and incarcerated people alike.”
