Stop the Solitary Ban, Too

It’s not just How Many Stops that’s queued up for a City Council veto-override battle: Mayor Adams also, and as rightly, rejected the bill to ban all use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails. It may not impact public safety as broadly as the effort to bury cops in paperwork, but it’s a matter of life and death for everyone in the Correction system — those detained as much as staff.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a main driver of Bill 549-A, hyperventilates that solitary is a form of torture; in reality it’s a perfectly humane and essential part of any successful correctional department. It lets jail authorities keep other inmates and guards safe from incorrigibly violent crooks.

But don’t listen to us. You can take the word of the federal monitoring team overseeing New York’s dysfunctional Rikers jails that the ban would “undermine the overall goals of protecting individuals.”

And: “Those who engage in serious violence while in custody must be supervised in a manner that is different from that used for the general population.”

It’s an utterly commonsensical position. Among prison populations, some inmates do their best to follow rules; others are agents of bloody chaos. That’s why some 1,500 city Correction officers have been assaulted since 2021, 22 sexually.

With no possibility of putting the most dangerous offenders within a jail into housing designed to stop more violence before it starts, more violence is inevitable. Much of it against a population, incarcerated criminals, the bill’s progressive backers claim to love.

New York’s left proves yet again Orwells’ dictum: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”