Pushing fed rule of jails
Jumaane & Lander plan to offer resolution in City Council
Two of New York City’s top elected officials — Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Comptroller Brad Lander — plan a City Council resolution backing a federal takeover of Rikers Island and the rest of the city’s jail system.
Williams and Lander announced Wednesday that they are introducing the resolution after they toured jails at Rikers Island. A resolution carries no legal weight and is largely symbolic, but it could influence the debate over a federal takeover.
“What I want to see is something change,” Williams said.
“I have problems and concerns about what could happen in federal receivership. But the options are not many,” Williams said. “I haven’t seen what I want to see [from the city] . ... What’s happening on Rikers is not working.”
Under federal receivership, a judge would appoint an outside expert and give them special powers to bypass or overcome practices or policies at Rikers Island and other city jails that are seen to be blocking improvement in the system.
Williams (photo) and Lander are making the move on the heels of a May 26 report by a federal court appointed monitor of violence in the city’s jails that revealed five serious incidents, including two deaths, that may have been the subject of attempted coverups within the Correction Department.
The controversy became more acute when the second man to die, Joshua Valles, 31, was found to have a skull fracture in an autopsy even though the Correction Department had said he died of a heart attack.
Correction Commissioner Louis Molina asked the jails violence monitor, Steve Martin, not to release the report and has defended the agency against the criticisms of Martin and his staff. Mayor Adams has questioned the monitor’s integrity.
But when the report was released, Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain immediately ordered a special conference on the matter June 13.
Mayor Adams opposes a federal takeover of the city’s jails. “Since taking office, we have been working diligently to turn the Department of Correction around, reducing violence, bringing officers back to work, and working with all our partners to improve conditions,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
“There has been a lot of progress as Comptroller Lander and Public Advocate Williams have acknowledged, and a federal receiver will not magically fix decades of dysfunction and mismanagement,” the mayor’s statement said
Benny Boscio, president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, took a dim view of the proposed resolution.
“This meaningless call for a resolution, seeking to impose a receivership, just shows how desperate [Williams and Landers] are to appease the Close Rikers advocates funding their campaigns,” Boscio said.
“Our members need stronger policies to deal with violent offenders, not political theater.”
Lander noted that he could not get answers about what happened to another of the five cases citd by the monitor — including that of Ovidio Porras, 86, who spent at least 11 days in intensive care after officer roughed him up in the Eric M. Taylor Center.
Porras, who is accused of killing his elderly wife, remained in a Bellevue Hospital prisoner ward on Wednesday, records show.
“He was in septic shock while bleeding, and he should have been taken to the hospital immediately,” Lander said.
During their visit on Wednesday, Lander said he came across an 18-year-old housed with men who was shackled by two hands and one foot to a desk bolted to the floor.
In a section of the North Infirmary Command, they found men locked in their cells 23 hours a day with no clear procedure for getting out or requesting a hearing to review their housing, Lander said.
“We did see multiple places where the practices we saw do not comply with the rules set by the Board of Correction,” Lander said.
Williams and Lander also called for the mayor to withdraw a plan to cut $17 million in funding for programs in the jails that are provided by outside non-profit groups, like the Fortune Society.
“We need more programming, not less,” Williams said. “The places with programming seem to be operating better.”