WHY JAIL IS SO CRAZY
Delays treating mentally ill Result is often tragedy or long stays in solitary
A SPIKE IN the number of mentally ill inmates and a lack of hospital space keeps many of the city’s most dangerous inmates in their cells on Rikers Island — instead of in treatment, the Daily News has learned.
Medical staffers are often told to keep worst-case prisoners behind bars due to a chronic shortage of available beds, according to records obtained by The News.
The explosion of mentally ill inmates in the jail’s population prevents many from ever reaching Bellevue Hospital — where doctors can compel the use of antipsychotic medications.
“These are human beings that are really suffering,” said a veteran jail medical worker. “The stuff that I see every day really breaks my heart.”
Without treatment, the results are often vile and violent. Three deaths, several near-fatal attacks and numerous horrifying acts of self-mutilation were caused in part by the shortage of psychiatric beds, according to sources.
In one instance, medical aides were forced to wait for days to hospitalize an inmate who was eating his own feces, according to the health staffer.
Around the same time, Dr. Neil Leibowitz — a top jail doctor — sent an email to underlings titled “Limited Bellevue Space.”
Staffers were instructed in the missive to “maintain patients in your facility” because of lack of space at the city’s biggest public hospital in March.
Two similar emails from another medical bigwig, Dr. David Rosenberg, were dispatched to front-line medical workers in February.
“That happens routinely,” the medical aide said.
By all accounts, the beleaguered city Correction Department struggles to cope with the burgeoning number of mentally ill prisoners flooding the system at a record pace. Nearly 40% of the approximately 11,000 daily inmates at Rikers are diagnosed with a mental illness. That’s a 24% increase from 2007 — a jump in part due to the closing of large mental hospitals.
Officials say about half the violence behind bars is carried out by mentally ill inmates.
“Rikers is the new dumping ground for everyone’s problems,” said Norman Seabrook, president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.
Despite the damning records obtained by The News, Bellevue officials maintain space is rarely a problem.
The hospital’s 68-bed forensic unit “does not turn away patients who need to be admitted, and we encourage the mental health providers at Rikers to refer for evaluation any inmate they think requires intensive psychiatric hospitalization,” said spokesman Ian Michaels.
The average daily population in the specialized unit has been 53 this fiscal year, Michaels added.
Most of Rikers’ mentally ill inmates do not require hospitalization and can be cared for by medical staff in jail.
But others, struggling with severe psychosis, are left free to harm themselves and others.
Inmate Horsone Moore, 36, who arrived with a long history of mental illness, killed himself on Rikers on Oct. 14, 2013.
Moore was stopped on three previous suicide tries before he finally succeeded by hanging himself from a showerhead when left alone in a decontamination cell, The News reported last year.
Under standard protocol, suicidal inmates are required to be immediately taken for a psychiatric evaluation. They are often admitted to a hospital or put in a monitored cell, where officers watch their every move.
They are also dressed in a special smock that can’t be fashioned into a noose.
Records show that despite his troubled past, none of those steps were taken in Moore’s case.
In 2004, police arrested Moore after he barricaded himself and a girlfriend inside her Brooklyn apartment. He turned on a stove and threatened to light a match. Authorities said Moore was holding a machete to his throat.
He was sent to Rikers last year for a parole violation and placed in the central intake at the Anna M. Kross facility.
His family is suing the city for $8 million, arguing officials failed to properly care for him.
“There was so much time and opportunity, and nobody took any action whatsoever,” Moore’s sister Felicia Moore-Grant told The Associated Press.
“It hurts a lot because now all we have is memory and pictures. We can never talk to him again. We can never hear his voice.”
Mayor de Blasio has allocated $32.5 million in the budget for new, specialized housing for mentally ill inmates, along with adding extra staff and added instruction for correction officers. It’s the first increase following five years of budget cuts that left some large dormitories on Rikers Island with just a single correction officer on duty each night.
The de Blasio administration has also convened a task force to improve city care for the mentally ill. His predecessor appointed a similar task force in 2011, to no avail.
The mental health crisis be- hind bars frequently pits medical staff and inmate advocates against jail bosses.
The advocates contend the city needs to drastically reduce the use of solitary confinement, known as The Bing. But jail supervisors believe more needs to be done to stop hardened criminals from gaming the system.
Badly behaving inmates quently threaten to harm themselves only when they face punishment, said Sidney Schwartzbaum, head of the union that represents deputy wardens.
As the debate rages on, violence in jail continues to spin out of control.
On May 23, Chance McCurdy, 28, a reported Bloods gang mem- ber, needed more than 100 stitches to close gashes on his face, torso and arms. Jail brass transferred him to a facility filled with Crips members, including Shawn Campbell, 22, and Louis Smith, 25, who reportedly set upon McCurdy in the East River lockup’s Otis Bantum Correctional Center. The fight should never have occurred, sources said.
Campbell, awaiting trial on robbery charges, owed 87 days in the solitary “box” for prior fights, the sources said. And Smith, facing assault charges, was facing 85 days in solitary.
Both inmates were deemed “seriously mentally ill” and were waiting to go into the jail’s Clinical Alternative to Punitive Segregation unit, which is similar to an inpatient hospital psych ward.