We’re locked up at Rikers, too, lawyers complain
A lawyer and a staffer for two different city public defender groups have been locked up alone in Rikers Island cells for as long as 90 minutes during visits to clients at one of the island’s highest-security jail areas.
Rachel Sznajderman, a correction specialist with New York County Defender Services, spent 20 minutes in late January in a cell at the Rose M. Singer Enhanced Supervised Housing (RESH) unit. Michael Klinger, a jail services attorney for Brooklyn Defenders Services, was held there for an hour in December.
“It was literally an intake holding cell. It had two benches and a dirty blanket on the floor. Another colleague had seen the blanket two weeks before,” said Sznajderman, who is to testify about her experience at a city Board of Correction hearing Wednesday.
Klinger’s entire trip for that visit — including his hour behind bars — took five hours, roughly double the time consumed by a visit at a typical Rikers Island housing unit, he estimated.
“There’s no way out and it’s not clear anyone knows you are there. It can be frustrating,” Klinger said.
Correction Department policy states lawyers visiting the 7-month-old secure unit are to be picked up at the Perry visitors center just inside Rikers and driven directly to the secure unit.
Then, the lawyers are to be moved from the family visit trailer to the attorney visit room, which is actually a converted dorm area.
But in practice, a routine client visit to the unit often becomes an ordeal, public defender groups say, driven by not by rankand-file officers but by a Byzantine bureaucracy and a lack of staff.
On Sept. 19, a 20-minute visit by a Legal Aid staff attorney took 3½ hours, though a city lawyer had previously promised it would go smoothly, according to a written account from the group.
“Really sorry about this,” the city lawyer replied to a Legal Aid complaint. “I will definitely have someone look into this.”
On Aug. 9, a Legal Aid lawyer reported he waited two hours for a bus to take him from the front entrance of Singer Center to the entrance of the secure unit at another end of the Singer Center — a short distance. He was then put in a locked room and left there for roughly 90 minutes, emails show.
“I pounded on the doors, yelled, and held signs up to the two surveillance cameras to alert someone in the bubble — if anyone was there — that I was confined and left in that room,” the lawyer wrote.
That same Legal Air lawyer said a similar visit to the secure unit on Aug. 21 consumed four hours while the entire meeting with his client took roughly 35 minutes, emails show. It took 2½ hours just for a bus to arrive.
In July, Christopher Boyle, director of data research and policy with New York County Defenders, was marooned in the unit after a visit for two hours and had to wander around looking for an officer to let him out, he previously said.
The secure unit, which opened in June, houses roughly 180 male detainees in one section of the Singer Center. The rest of the 35-year-old jail houses roughly 386 women.
Created to house difficult detainees, the restrictive unit has been under fire for conditions and violence. In two weeks in September, eight detainees were slashed there.
An Oct. 5 report by the federal court monitor tracking violence and use of force in the jails reported it had the highest use of force rate in the system and the most stabbings and slashings.
“Contraband — both weapons and drugs — are pervasive, leading to frequent slashings and open drug use,” the monitoring team wrote.
The Correction Department is required to allow lawyers and their staffs to visit clients in the jails under well-established law and the Board of Correction’s minimum standards.
Sznajderman said her journey on Jan. 24, a Wednesday, began at the Samuel Perry Visitor Center, where she says correction staff were puzzled about how she should get to the secure unit at the Singer Center. Finally, she was told to board a bus.
At the Singer Center, she was eventually handed off to a correction officer who drove her in a car literally around to the back of the center where she was let into the RESH secure area.
“His only job was to transport people from Rosie’s to RESH,” she said. “He told me since they opened RESH, fewer lawyers were making the trip and there was a lot of confusion. I was the only one that day. Only two or three people had visited that week,” he said.
Once she reached RESH, the onduty officer had to leave to escort two detainees, she said. She was locked in the cell. Then, the officer stationed inside the “bubble,” or glassed-in security booth, went on break and covered the windows with paper.
“I had to peek between the paper to see there was a human being in there. I had no idea how long I would have to wait,” Sznajderman said.
Both Sznajderman and Klinger said the hurdles lead some lawyers to rely more on videoconferences, but those are a poor substitute for personal communication.
“It’s really a detriment to attorney-client relationships when you can’t visit people face-to-face,” Sznajderman said.