Reasons for restriction

In a letter sent by Rikers Federal Monitor Steve Martin to Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, the court-appointed expert — who must be consulted on matters that involve compliance with safety standards — convincingly lays out the case against the City Council’s well-meaning bill banning solitary confinement.

The legislation would significantly constrict when DOC can remove someone from the general population. Now, Mayor Adams must act on Martin’s recommendation by vetoing the bill before it automatically becomes law tomorrow.

The bill’s proponents, in and out of the Council, have characterized the opposition to a solitary ban as both ideologically driven and unscientific, the product of an absolute commitment to punitive measures at the expense of the overall health and safety of detainees. Martin’s letter takes that logic apart, putting forth concrete arguments by a team of longtime correctional specialists who both have no political role in the system and are legally bound to advance the interests of safety for detainees and staff.

It’s worth remembering here that the issue isn’t just the safety of the detainees who might be put in restrictive housing, but the safety of everyone else, too. Waiting for the outcome of a slow, bureaucratic process to simply remove someone from the general population even if it’s relatively clear they harbor some ill-intent towards fellow detainees is a choice to put those other detainees at unnecessary risk.

Martin and his monitoring team note explicitly that they oppose solitary confinement as a practice, pointing to the fact that the team’s members have been “been at the forefront of the national effort to reduce and eliminate the use of solitary confinement in adult and juvenile systems.”

Yet they note that, while the bill does ban what is generally understood to be solitary confinement, it goes much further by, for example, forcing the discharge of people from “de-escalation and emergency lock-in” within four hours and from restrictive housing within 30 days, regardless of behavior or apparent intent to cause harm.

The bill’s defenders have often used a sleight of hand to suggest that what it’s really about is preventing the city from resorting to the sort of inhumane, near-total confinement that infamously led to the death of Kalief Browder almost nine years ago. Almost no one would still defend that sort of practice, which has rightly been called a form of torture.

However, that’s not what restrictive housing contemplates; as Martin points out, under contemporary correctional understandings of the practice, detainees are still allowed significant out-of-cell time, including in congregate settings and with access to programs and services. It simply means that they are held in a separate setting for much of the day and separately monitored and managed when out.

If a well-meaning Council wants to formally ban solitary confinement — which the city has said it stopped using anyway — then it should do so; we’re all for it, as would be the monitor and, we’d hope, the mayor. Conflating the different types of restrictions and legislating bluntly across a wide swath of scenarios that require some on-the-ground discretion is not a useful move.

There are certainly good reasons to doubt the Department of Correction’s ability to properly use its discretion here, but over-broad procedural requirements aren’t going to make things better.