Board of Correction
The Department of Correction says that the de Blasio-era practice of notifying the press when someone dies in a detention facility is over. Advocacy groups and a federal monitor say it’s part of a broader effort to hide wrongdoing.
The city’s jails commissioner wants the system, but the Board of Correction is letting his proposal stay in limbo — a win for opponents who call it illegally intrusive.
A majority of City Council members plus the public advocate say they want to get rid of so-called punitive segregation — but some jail staff aren’t so sure.
A Department of Correction captain and three officers are implicated in one scheme, which allegedly involved ID card check-ins when employees weren’t actually at the jail.
Julio Medina, the founder of Exodus Transitional Community, resigns as the nonprofit faces five separate investigations.
Any court battle over whether control of city jails should be transferred to a federal overseer will have to wait until April, a U.S. District Court judge ruled Thursday.
Apart from the obvious privacy and intimacy issues that come with reading everyone’s letters and turning them into emails, experts note that similar efforts in other states haven’t reduced contraband.
Correction Department Commissioner Louis Molina wants to keep people in punitive segregation locked in their cells for longer — even as Rikers reformers are looking to end the practice entirely.
A new report from the Board of Correction states that “a pervasive issue of insufficient supervision by correctional staff” was a factor in most tragedies behind bars.
The City Council has still not introduced any measure to end solitary confinement in city jails despite a majority of members publicly opposing the practice. The public advocate’s office meanwhile has taken up the mantle and says a bill will be introduced in weeks.
A worker with the Osborne Association, which provides inmate services on the island jail, was overcome by pepper spray after a terrifying surprise training drill with a correction officer dressed up as an inmate.
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The sister of Layleen Polanco, whose 2019 jail death galvanized the movement to end isolating inmates, expressed her “disgust” for the mayor. De Blasio’s handpicked leader of the city jail oversight board also condemned his 11th-hour executive order.
Self-harm — including suicides — at Rikers Island and other local lockups spiked last summer as COVID-19 ravaged New York, figures obtained by WNYC/Gothamist and THE CITY show. The rate’s climbed to historic levels in the months since.
Missing blankets and sheets. No pillows. Limited food and exercise. That’s what a new father jailed on a parole violation stemming from a shoplifting arrest faced before becoming the first of three men to die at Rikers since April.
“All they did was change the name, and slightly, very slightly, changed a few things,” said Melania Brown, whose sister, Layleen Polanco, died in a solitary cell at Rikers Island in 2019.
Scathing report from the city’s jails oversight board finds the men — all with medical conditions — were packed into dormitories without masks. One tried, in vain, to protect himself with sheets and pillow cases.
An “emergency” petition by the Correction Department to put youths alone in cells for up to 17 hours a day comes nearly eight months after Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to end solitary confinement for all inmates.
For the hundreds of young adults in city jails working toward a high-school diploma, educational and other much-sought programming has been devastated by the pandemic.
The Board of Correction now says a proposal, spurred by the death of Layleen Polanco at Rikers Island, will be out this month. But the City Council could beat them to it with a law.
Two in five detainees 18 to 21 are in the general population — defying rules that say they must be with people their own age in Rikers Island and other city lockups.
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