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History > 2014 > USA > Jail, prison (II)
Next Steps
on Brutality at Rikers Island
DEC. 19, 2014
The Opinion
Pages | Editorial
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
The quest to
end the barbarism that has long dominated New York’s Rikers Island jail complex
entered a new phase this week when the Justice Department announced that it
planned to join a pending class-action lawsuit that charges the Department of
Correction with failing to discipline officers engaged in abuse.
Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said the city had not
made enough progress in reforms to end the jail’s “deep-seated culture of
violence,” which was documented in a lacerating report his office issued in
August on the treatment of adolescent inmates.
That report provided bloodcurdling examples of sadistic violence against young
people and called for an extensive overhaul of departmental operations. It
recommended, for example, that adolescents be removed from Rikers Island and
placed in a facility elsewhere. It insisted that the city improve officer
training and disciplinary measures and that incidents of assaults be reported
accurately and promptly.
The August report warned the city that it would find itself in court if the
recommendations were not carried out quickly. Any confidence in the city’s
commitment was shaken in September when The Times reported that city officials
had withheld from prosecutors crucial portions of a report on violence at Rikers
Island and that correction officials involved in reporting data that was
inaccurate had been promoted. Prosecutors pointed to those promotions in court
documents filed this week as an example of the city’s “failure to put in place
qualified managers and supervisors who are committed to and capable of reducing
the level of violence.”
Instead of filing a separate suit, Mr. Bharara asked the federal court in
Manhattan for permission to join a class-action suit known as Nunez v. City of
New York, filed in 2011 by the Legal Aid Society and two private law firms,
Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady and Ropes & Gray.
The charges in the Nunez suit overlap with those in the report from Mr.
Bharara’s office and also allege an out-of-control jail system in which
brutality by guards is rampant. The Nunez plaintiffs have suffered fractured
faces, ribs, jaws, wrists and noses; severe concussions leading to neurological
damage; and internal injuries.
The suit also accuses the staff of routinely using excessive force against
inmates, even for minor misconduct like verbal complaints, protests or
“perceived disrespect.” Inmates, the lawsuit says, were sometimes removed from
their cells and taken to isolated areas without video cameras, where they were
beaten by groups of officers. And yet, those in charge were promoted right up
the line.
In contrast to the Bharara report, which dealt with adolescent inmates, the
Nunez suit applies to all Rikers inmates. Mr. Bharara decided to join the suit
because settlement talks are already underway, and that puts the prosecutors in
position to quickly secure what he described on Thursday as a court-ordered
agreement that would produce enduring, enforceable and verifiable reforms.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A20 of the New
York edition with the headline: Next Steps on Brutality at Rikers Island.
Next Steps on Brutality at Rikers Island, NYT, 19.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/
next-steps-on-brutality-at-rikers-island.html
At Rikers,
a Roadblock to Reform
DEC. 14, 2014
The New York
Times
By MICHAEL
SCHWIRTZ
and MICHAEL
WINERIP
With brutality
by guards at the Rikers Island jail complex rising at an alarming rate, the
chief investigator for the New York City Correction Department stood before a
roomful of senior officers and union leaders in the summer of 2012 and outlined
her plans to crack down on abuse and send more cases to prosecutors.
The presentation infuriated one man in particular, Norman Seabrook, the powerful
president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, who believed the
incidents should be handled internally. For the next two years he did everything
in his power to get rid of the investigator, Florence Finkle. He helped scuttle
some of her investigations, got one of her top people transferred, called for
her resignation and denounced her on his weekly radio show.
In August, he finally got his wish: Ms. Finkle was forced out, replaced by a
former senior Police Department official — a childhood friend of Mr. Seabrook’s.
Over his two decades as president of the union, Mr. Seabrook has come to exert
extraordinary control over the Correction Department, consulting with
commissioners on key appointments, forging alliances with high-ranking uniformed
correction leaders and, more recently, speaking regularly with Mayor Bill de
Blasio about department policy. His influence has paid enormous dividends for
his members, but it has also fed a culture of violence and corruption at Rikers,
an investigation by The New York Times found.
The investigation involved scores of interviews, with former correction
commissioners, former senior City Hall aides, and current and former department
officials, and reviews of internal emails and other documents, as well as
several lengthy interviews with Mr. Seabrook himself. What emerged was a
portrait of a labor leader who wields remarkable power through a combination of
political savvy and intimidation.
“I came to think that my wardens believed Norman was more important to their
career than I was,” said Martin F. Horn, who served as commissioner from 2003 to
2009.
Mr. Seabrook’s power has cut two ways.
Under his leadership, correction officers, long overlooked among the city’s
uniformed services, have seen large gains in salary and pension benefits,
reaching parity with firefighters and police officers. Like Mr. Seabrook, the
overwhelming majority of his members are black. They have risen to dominate the
top ranks of the department, making it far more diverse than the Police and Fire
Departments, where most of the leadership is white.
But current and former city officials repeatedly described Mr. Seabrook as the
biggest obstacle to efforts to curb brutality and malfeasance at Rikers. He has
vigorously resisted stiffer penalties for the use of excessive force by guards
and has fought stronger screening measures designed to stop correction officers
from smuggling weapons and drugs into the jails. Time and again, Mr. Seabrook
has shielded his members from serious punishment when investigators like Ms.
Finkle have tried to go after them.
Last year, when prosecutors charged 10 officers in a beating that fractured an
inmate’s nose and eye sockets, Mr. Seabrook vigorously defended them.
“Here we have correction officers paraded into court for merely defending
themselves,” he said. “The officers did everything that they were supposed to
do.”
Much of Mr. Seabrook’s influence within the department comes from a fear of what
he might do to those who cross him. The Times spoke with about a dozen current
and former senior city officials, both inside and outside the department, who
have dealt with him regularly over the years and were privately critical of him.
But almost no one would be quoted discussing Mr. Seabrook, citing concerns that
he could sabotage their careers. Some also expressed fears about their safety
while visiting Rikers, worrying that a correction officer might look the other
way if an inmate suddenly got violent.
“He’s a bully,” said Daniel Dromm, a city councilman who has openly clashed with
Mr. Seabrook on several occasions. “They’re afraid of him.”
Mr. Seabrook is a volatile personality. He has both dined with mayors and
shouted in their faces. One minute he can be heard exclaiming, “God is good,”
the next unleashing a stream of vulgarities. He once arrived at the home of a
senior city official, during contract negotiations, with a pistol strapped to
his hip. On another occasion, he had one of his correction officers dress as a
cartoon character to mock a commissioner who was leading a tour of Rikers.
Perhaps the most naked display of Mr. Seabrook’s power came on Nov. 18, 2013,
when a Rikers inmate, Dapree Peterson, was scheduled to testify against two
correction officers in a brutality case. Mr. Seabrook essentially shut down the
city’s courts by sidelining the buses that ferry inmates to and from court,
interviews and documents show. As a result, hundreds of inmates missed court
dates, including Mr. Peterson, whose beating had been investigated and referred
for prosecution by Ms. Finkle.
During much of Mr. Seabrook’s career, Rikers has been a low priority for city
officials. But disturbing revelations about conditions in the jails have focused
new attention on the problems there, as well as on Mr. Seabrook’s influence.
In July, The Times published an investigation detailing 129 cases of inmates who
had been seriously injured during encounters with correction officers over an
11-month span last year. Less than a month later, the United States attorney in
Manhattan, Preet Bharara, threatened to sue the city after releasing a report
that accused the Correction Department of failing to protect adolescent inmates
from excessive force by guards.
Mr. de Blasio vowed last month to overhaul the department, which he called the
city’s most troubled agency, and to bring an end to the violence at Rikers. He
has entrusted the task to his handpicked correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte,
who has a national reputation as a reformer. Their single biggest challenge may
well be reining in Mr. Seabrook, who has outmaneuvered a long line of mayors and
commissioners over the years.
During her four years as the deputy commissioner for investigation, Ms. Finkle
was an awkward fit at the Correction Department. In part, it was because her
position, investigating wrongdoing, put her at odds with the uniformed staff.
But it was also because of her background and personality.
In a heavily minority organization that is largely blue collar and defined by
its macho culture, Ms. Finkle is white, a graduate of an elite college and
openly gay. She also had little patience for the niceties needed to negotiate
the department’s politics.
When she refused to fall in line with Mr. Seabrook, he accused her of having it
in for his members. “Flo Finkle had her own agenda,” he said in an interview.
“She just wanted to kill people.”
Before she joined the department in 2010, Ms. Finkle had spent roughly two
decades investigating misconduct by the police, including serving as executive
director of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which provides oversight for
the Police Department. While at the Manhattan district attorney’s office in the
1990s, she sent three officers from the 30th Precinct in Harlem to prison as a
prosecutor in what became known as the Dirty Thirty case, one of the biggest
police corruption investigations in recent history.
Before Ms. Finkle’s arrival, brutality cases at Rikers had usually been handled
as internal disciplinary matters. But at the June 2012 meeting, which she
conducted with a member of the city’s Department of Investigation, Ms. Finkle
announced a major shift, warning that more officers who brutalized inmates would
face criminal prosecution, according to two former investigators and a midlevel
uniformed officer. And, she said, even cases that involved lying to
investigators or falsifying incident reports would be punished as felonies, and
could land officers in prison.
She initiated a policy to immediately suspend without pay officers who had been
caught on video appearing to use excessive force. Twenty officers were suspended
under this policy in the fiscal year that ended June 30. During her time at the
department, 22 officers she had referred for prosecution were criminally
charged.
Despite this track record, the report by the United States attorney’s office
last summer said that much more needed to be done. The report described
pervasive brutality by guards against teenagers at Rikers and harshly criticized
the investigation division for being slow and ineffective.
What the report left out was the role Mr. Seabrook had played in repeatedly
undermining Ms. Finkle’s work.
In August 2012, for example, Ms. Finkle’s investigators began videotaping the
deposition of a correction officer in a brutality case involving an inmate whose
skull had been fractured. One of Mr. Seabrook’s union delegates, claiming that
the recording of such interviews was improper, cut off the questioning and the
interview was never completed, according to several former investigators.
Hours later, Mr. Seabrook went on his radio show and castigated Ms. Finkle for
“beating correction officers over the head, savagely trying to take their jobs.”
The next month, according to two former city officials, investigators from Ms.
Finkle’s office, pursuing a tip that an officer was illegally carrying a
cellphone into the jail, stopped and searched the woman. Nothing was found, but
when Mr. Seabrook learned about the incident, he complained to the
commissioner’s office. Shortly after, the captain who had overseen the search,
Timothy Kozak, was transferred out of the investigation division, a move that
several of his former colleagues described as a serious blow to the unit’s
morale.
Mr. Seabrook said that he had just been doing his job. “Every single day I
respond to labor management issues throughout the department to protect the
rights of my members.”
After complaints from Mr. Seabrook, the commissioner at the time, Dora B.
Schriro, told Ms. Finkle that from then on, before referring a case for
prosecution, it had to be cleared with Ms. Schriro, according to several former
investigators.
At one point, Mr. Seabrook, along with two members of his union board, made an
unscheduled visit to Ms. Finkle’s office. Over the next 15 minutes, according to
someone who was there, he accused her of unfairly suspending his officers as
well as running a “stop-and-frisk program” against them, and warned that he
would be coming after her.
Mr. Seabrook said in an interview that he remembered going to Ms. Finkle’s
office, but could not recall her being there.
Last summer, on the evening of Aug. 21, an email, obtained by The Times, was
sent to several Correction Department staff members announcing that Michael
Blake, a former senior official with the Police Department, had been hired to
work in the investigation division.
No one had told Ms. Finkle. The next morning, after a meeting with Mr. Ponte,
the correction commissioner, she was out of a job and Mr. Blake, a childhood
friend of Mr. Seabrook’s, had been named to take over the division.
There were signs that Mr. Blake’s appointment was hurried. The cover letter he
submitted to the department was for a completely different job, director of
security at the New York Public Library. It was addressed to Iris Weinshall,
chief operating officer at the library, according to a copy obtained by The
Times.
In his 27 years with the Police Department, Mr. Blake had run two precincts,
spent three years overseeing the Queens gang squad and, before he retired in
2013, served as the commander of the department’s counterterrorism division,
overseeing more than 150 officers.
But unlike Ms. Finkle and her predecessor, Richard R. White, who had spent 12
years at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Mr. Blake had never been a
prosecutor. His only experience investigating officer misconduct came during a
stint that lasted less than two years when he was a sergeant in the Patrol
Services Bureau two decades ago.
Mr. Blake declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Seabrook.
For his part, Mr. Seabrook said in an interview that he and Mr. Blake had been
neighborhood buddies when they were teenagers, partying and playing ball
together. Over the years, however, they had seen each other only from time to
time, Mr. Seabrook said.
As it turns out, the relationship was much more complicated than that. Mr.
Blake’s brother, Allen, was once so close with Mr. Seabrook that he had been
given a position on the union’s executive board. Then, in 2010, Allen Blake was
charged with defrauding the union’s insurance company and had a falling-out with
Mr. Seabrook. Still, the union head said there were no lingering hard feelings
over the episode.
Mr. Seabrook said he had not been consulted about Michael Blake’s appointment
but expressed approval. “Mike’s a smart man,” Mr. Seabrook said. “He’s going to
do well.”
Mr. Ponte said in an interview that he was not aware of Mr. Seabrook’s
connection to Mr. Blake, but that he was “very impressed with his credentials.”
He added that he wanted “somebody I was sure had loyalty to me and this
organization.”
Gaining, and
Wielding, Power
Mr. Seabrook first made headlines in 1993 when he and a group of nearly 200
insurgent correction officers blocked the lone bridge that connects Rikers to
the mainland in Queens to protest the handling of contract negotiations by the
union’s leadership at the time.
Two years later, he won the race to become union president and has since been
re-elected four times by large margins.
He grew up poor in the Bronx, one of eight children. As a teenager, he said, he
was sent to an upstate New York juvenile center for “bad boys.” A worker there
took him under her wing, they grew close and eventually he married her daughter.
He said that although his Italian-American father-in-law had been skeptical of
the marriage at first, his mother-in-law believed in him. “When I told her I
wanted to be a correction officer, she was so happy and so was my
father-in-law,” he recalled. “I think that was the turning point.” His
father-in-law said to him, “ ‘You’re going to be able to provide for my
daughter.’ ”
An early mentor was Richard J. Koehler, the correction commissioner when Mr.
Seabrook was starting out in the department, which he joined in 1985. Mr.
Koehler’s law firm was paid a $555,000 retainer in 2012 by the union for, among
other things, defending officers in disciplinary matters, according to the
union’s most recent tax return.
As president, Mr. Seabrook has been skilled at building alliances with powerful
politicians, including former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Gov. George
E. Pataki, which has served his membership well.
With Mr. Pataki’s help, he secured a supplemental bonus for his members’ pension
plan — getting them as much as an extra $12,000 annually — despite fierce
opposition from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
He has also created a foundation for the widows and children of correction
officers.
For all this, Mr. Seabrook, 54, pays himself and his executive board well. His
total annual compensation, combining his city-paid correction officer’s salary
and a union stipend, is about $300,000, according to the union’s latest federal
tax return. In contrast, Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s
Benevolent Association, which is six times the size of Mr. Seabrook’s union,
earns nearly $100,000 less.
Continue reading the main story
According to the tax returns, the union contributed about $500,000 to political
campaigns during the 2012 election cycle, with much of it going toward state
legislative races.
This has opened doors in Albany. A bill that Mr. Seabrook helped craft this year
to move the jurisdiction of Rikers criminal cases from the district attorney’s
office in the Bronx to the one in Queens passed both houses of the Legislature
with almost no opposition. (To become law, the bill must still be signed by Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo.)
Though prosecutions of correction officers are rare, Mr. Seabrook had accused
the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, of being too aggressive with his
members, while going easy on inmate violence. He has said he thinks his members
will be treated more fairly in Queens.
Early in his tenure as union president, Mr. Seabrook faced allegations of sexual
harassment by several women with whom he had worked.
One union administrator, Sharon Tonge, accused him in a lawsuit of firing her
after she refused his sexual advances, which he denied. In her complaint, Ms.
Tonge said that Mr. Seabrook’s behavior was often erratic. He once dismissed the
entire clerical staff on a Friday, the complaint said, only to reinstate the
workers on Monday. The suit claimed that he had used surveillance cameras to
monitor employees, “calling individuals on the telephones at their desks to
advise them he had observed them in various activities.”
The case was settled in 2001 under terms that were confidential.
Standing well over six feet tall, Mr. Seabrook favors finely cut suits with silk
pocket squares and often walks around with an unlit cigar. Those who have dealt
with him over the years say he can quickly shift from charming and benevolent to
angry and cold when doing so fits his needs. His behavior can also be
surprising. Last summer, while at a funeral for a retired correction officer, he
received a text telling him that the family dog had died. He cut his eulogy
short, apologized and hurried home to comfort his family.
He has earned intense loyalty from his 9,000 members. On the day new recruits
walk into the department’s training academy in Middle Village, Queens, he is
there to greet them, and he is there again on the day they graduate.
In October, in an hourlong presentation at the academy, Mr. Seabrook did
everything from helping new recruits set up car pools to acting out the role of
an abusive inmate in several impromptu skits. He gave them all his cellphone
number.
The same manic energy he puts into building loyalty among his membership can go
into tormenting his adversaries.
In November 2012, Ms. Schriro, then the commissioner, was leading several dozen
women onto Rikers Island for a tour. Mr. Seabrook dispatched one of his officers
dressed as Dora the Explorer, the children’s cartoon character, to dance on the
side of the road, stalling the commissioner’s bus as drivers stopped to gawk,
backing up traffic for miles, according to several officials who were there. The
delay was expensive, requiring the city to pay overtime when officers could not
get onto the island for a shift change.
In recent months he has shown up twice during tours of the jails, surprising
health department officials and City Council members who were there to
investigate the mistreatment of inmates. Each time he got into angry shouting
matches — with Mr. Dromm, the councilman, and Mary T. Bassett, the health
commissioner, according to several officials who were there. Notably, the
correction commissioner, Mr. Ponte, stood quietly by.
When asked about Mr. Seabrook’s outbursts, Mr. Ponte said, “The union has a
right to say things in the representation of their work force.”
Once, in the midst of contract negotiations with the city during Mr. Bloomberg’s
first term, Mr. Seabrook made a surprise Saturday night visit to the home of a
deputy mayor, Peter J. Madonia. He showed up wearing a powder blue jumpsuit, Mr.
Madonia recalled, with one gun strapped to his ankle and another on his hip.
Asked about the incident, Mr. Seabrook said: “I carry a licensed firearm at all
times, which I am permitted to do as a peace officer.” Though Mr. Seabrook
lectures his members on using restraint when dealing with inmates, he has backed
officers in even the most egregious brutality cases.
In 2010, he handed out a prize for assistant deputy warden of the year to
Charlton Lemon during the union’s annual fund-raiser, even though at the time
Mr. Lemon was the subject of a lawsuit for leading four guards in the severe
beating of an inmate that the city eventually settled for $350,000.
“We give our awards to those members of the department who have worked
tirelessly to enhance the agency and improve the working conditions for all of
us,” Mr. Seabrook said.
Bringing City
Courts to a Halt
It had become a fairly routine occurrence over the years during contract
negotiations for members of the correction officers union to briefly block the
Rikers bridge as part of a job action.
But what happened on Nov. 18, 2013, when no contract negotiations were underway,
was markedly different.
On that day, a Rikers inmate, Dapree Peterson, 21, was scheduled to testify
against two correction officers who had been accused of assaulting Mr. Peterson
and covering it up in an official report. It was precisely the kind of case that
Ms. Finkle had vowed to pursue.
But that Monday morning, Mr. Seabrook and members of his executive board drove
to Rikers, where officers were preparing 33 buses to ferry inmates between the
jail complex and the city’s courthouses. The buses had all been in working order
the previous Friday and, in some cases, just hours before, according to
affidavits related to the incident later filed with the city. But now they were
all too dangerous to drive, Mr. Seabrook and his members claimed.
The bus stoppage received substantial news coverage when it happened. While it
was widely assumed that Mr. Seabrook was behind it, no one was able to establish
a direct link. Documents reviewed by The Times, as well as interviews, indicate
that he was the one who orchestrated the shutdown.
Mr. Seabrook’s members cited myriad safety problems on the buses, including an
expired fire extinguisher, a noisy engine and cracked windows, according to the
affidavits.
One correction officer, Harcourt Bullard, wrote that he had been given four
buses, one after another, each too dangerous to drive: The first, he wrote, had
the check engine light on; the second, a broken hand railing; the third, an
inaudible backup signal; the fourth, a cracked window.
“We were then assigned a fifth bus which was blocked in by other malfunctioning
buses,” Mr. Bullard wrote in his affidavit. The resulting bus stoppage prevented
nearly 750 inmates, including Mr. Peterson, from making it to court that day.
Another 49 never got to their medical appointments at Bellevue Hospital Center.
The judge presiding over the two guards’ brutality trial complained that the
judicial system had been “held hostage.” The Bloomberg administration eventually
sued the union.
In previous years, according to two former top city officials, a simple call to
Mr. Seabrook’s cellphone had been sufficient to get him to end a job action.
Not this time. Neither the mayor nor the correction commissioner was able to get
the buses moving. Moreover, the highest-ranking uniformed officer responsible
for keeping the jails running, Evelyn Mirabal, the chief of department, did not
go to the scene to take control, according to legal documents and two former
high-ranking correction officials.
Ms. Mirabal, who retired this year, had strong ties to Mr. Seabrook. Not long
after the bus stoppage, her son, Daniel Palmieri, was named to the union’s
executive board, a position that typically carries a total annual compensation
package of more than $150,000.
Asked about her actions that day, Ms. Mirabal said, “The fact is, I was there.”
She declined to elaborate.
It was a captain who told the drivers to muster for roll call.
That did not happen. Edna Wells Handy, the commissioner of the Department of
Citywide Administrative Services who oversaw the investigation into the matter,
later wrote in her report: “At Mr. Seabrook’s urging, all the listed officers
refused to attend.”
Ms. Handy ruled that the 63 officers had violated state labor law and docked
each two days’ pay.
In the end, however, no one suffered any consequences. Mr. Seabrook used union
funds to reimburse the officers and remains unapologetic: “I told them, ‘Look,
if a bus is not operable, not running the way it’s supposed to be running, put
in a work order and down the bus.’ That’s what they did.”
Mr. Peterson did eventually testify, but the two officers were exonerated.
Quick to Balk
at Reforms
When Mr. de Blasio appointed Mr. Ponte as commissioner last spring, inmate
advocates were hopeful. He had worked in jails and prisons for more than 45
years and was known as a reformer.
In Maine, where he had headed the state prison system, he cut the number of
prisoners housed in solitary confinement in half, opened a new therapeutic
cellblock for the seriously mentally ill and worked closely with inmate
advocates.
But even before Mr. Ponte started in New York, Mr. Seabrook called a news
conference to attack him. He mocked Mr. Ponte’s philosophy as “hug a thug.”
“We don’t need a reformer; we need law and order,” Mr. Seabrook told reporters
at union headquarters in downtown Manhattan. “Welcome to New York City. This is
not Maine.”
Mr. Ponte has already committed to several changes that the union would have
fought in the past, including a plan to triple the number of video cameras at
the jails to cover areas like stairwells and hallways, where beatings have long
gone on out of investigators’ view. In September, in the wake of the United
States attorney’s office’s report on the mistreatment of adolescent inmates, Mr.
Ponte also announced a plan to eliminate the use of solitary confinement for all
16- and 17-year-olds by the end of December, something the union still opposes.
As federal and local authorities have applied intense pressure for changes to be
made at Rikers, Mr. Seabrook has toned down his criticism of Mr. Ponte. Even so,
the union leader has won some substantial concessions from the city on issues
like solitary confinement for the adult population. A major reason Mr. Ponte was
able to significantly reduce the solitary population in Maine was that he did
not have to contend with a strong union.
In mid-November, at a meeting of the Board of Correction, a city watchdog agency
for Rikers, Mr. Ponte laid out a plan that would hold the number of adult
solitary confinement beds steady at 719, disappointing inmate advocates
At the meeting, Mr. Seabrook was treated like a dignitary. A member of Mr.
Ponte’s security detail escorted him into the packed room and to a seat in the
front row that had been saved for him.
Later, after criticizing inmate advocate groups, Mr. Seabrook turned to the
commissioner and said, “Joe, I got your back, brother.”
For years, Mr. Seabrook stymied efforts by the Investigation Department and
correction commissioners to impose tighter security measures aimed at preventing
contraband smuggling by guards, including the use of drug-sniffing dogs and
security teams to monitor the jail entrances.
This summer, after several correction officers were arrested for contraband
smuggling, Mr. Ponte, Mr. Seabrook and Mark G. Peters, the Investigation
Department commissioner, discussed improving security. But instead of
substantial changes, Mr. Ponte, urged on by Mr. Seabrook, settled for a few more
modest steps, such as the inspection of lunches, according to several
high-ranking city officials.
In October, all this backfired on Mr. Ponte. A city investigator, disguised as a
guard, successfully smuggled large quantities of heroin and marijuana, along
with a razor blade, in the pockets of his cargo pants through six different
security checkpoints at Rikers.
Only after the embarrassing episode did Mr. Ponte agree to adopt stronger
measures.
Improving security has been slow going, Mr. Ponte said, in part because of the
need “to make sure the unions understood what needed to be done and the
politics.”
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Seabrook will acquiesce to the additional
scrutiny of his members. At a recent public forum, he questioned whether the
city’s investigators could be trusted. “I don’t know whether or not that this
was something that was real or something that’s not,” he said. “So until I see
all the facts, it’s not real to me.”
A crucial unanswered question is how the relationship between Mr. Ponte and Mr.
Seabrook will play out when it comes to the disciplining of officers. In
September, an administrative judge found five officers and a captain guilty of
brutally beating an inmate and then lying about it, and recommended — in an
unusually forceful decision — that they all be terminated.
More than two months later, Mr. Ponte, who has the final say over whether to
uphold the termination, has yet to make a decision.
Despite all of the attention on Rikers, violence by both inmates and correction
officers has continued to rise. There were 88 stabbings and slashings by inmates
and 752 assaults on uniformed staff members reported in the 2014 fiscal year,
compared with 34 and 500, respectively, four years earlier.
In the first 10 months of this year, officers used physical force against
inmates 3,381 times, compared with 2,618 during the same period the year before.
Nevertheless, Mr. de Blasio has continued to embrace Mr. Seabrook.
In October, less than an hour before the mayor was to hold a major news
conference to announce the city’s first confirmed case of Ebola infection, he
made time for a side trip to the Bronx ballroom where Mr. Seabrook was holding
the union’s annual charity fund-raiser. The two men stood side by side before
more than 700 correction officers and their families and flattered each other.
For several minutes, the mayor spoke in praise of Mr. Seabrook.
“Norman is a friend,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Norman has been a great leader in
this town. I want to thank him for all he does.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: At Rikers, a Roadblock to Reform.
At Rikers, a Roadblock to Reform, NYT, 14.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/nyregion/at-rikers-a-roadblock-to-reform.html
Mass
Imprisonment and Public Health
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
NOV. 26, 2014
The Opinion
Pages | Editorial
When public
health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that
can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.
But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding
another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration.
This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of
modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of
Justice.
For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of
society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious
diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much
higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities
also tends to be poor or nonexistent.
The experience of being locked up — which often involves dangerous overcrowding
and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems, or
creates new ones. Worse, the criminal justice system has to absorb more of the
mentally ill and the addicted. The collapse of institutional psychiatric care
and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison,
where they rarely if ever get the care they need. Severe mental illness is two
to four times as common in prison as on the outside, while more than two-thirds
of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the
general public.
Common prison-management tactics can also turn even relatively healthy inmates
against themselves. Studies have found that people held in solitary confinement
are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or
attempt suicide.
The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on
the already unstable communities most of the 700,000 inmates released each year
will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars,
families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless, and poverty and
homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison, which
increases their own risk of incarceration down the road.
If this epidemic is going to be stopped, the report finds, public health and
criminal justice systems must communicate effectively with one another. That
requires comprehensive electronic health records that can be shared among
agencies, increasing the likelihood that those who leave prison with health
problems will not fall through the cracks.
Better health outcomes also depend on giving newly released inmates a real
chance to find jobs and housing. The report calls for the end of laws that keep
punishing people after they have been released from prison, like denying public
housing and food stamps to those with drug felony convictions.
Finally, the Affordable Care Act — which provides more coverage for mental
illness and substance abuse, and expanded Medicaid for childless adults — is a
big step in the right direction.
Like any epidemic, mass incarceration must be tackled at many different levels.
It is an opportune time for such an approach, as states around the country are
thinking more broadly, pulling back on harsh sentencing laws and focusing more
on alternatives to incarceration. But the moment may not last long. Public
health professionals should seize a unique opportunity to help guide criminal
justice reform while they have the chance.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 27, 2014, on page A34
of the New York edition with the headline: Mass Imprisonment and Public Health.
Mass Imprisonment and Public Health, NYT, 26.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/opinion/
mass-imprisonment-and-public-health.html
Four
Decades of Solitary in Louisiana
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York
Times
The Opinion
Pages | Editorial
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
Richard Nixon
was president when Albert Woodfox landed in solitary confinement, along with
another inmate, both convicted of the 1972 murder of a Louisiana prison guard
named Brent Miller.
Mr. Woodfox is still there.
Now 67 years old, he has maintained his innocence of the murder from the start.
He has been held in isolation longer than any prisoner in the United States, and
perhaps in the nation’s history.
For 23 hours a day — 23 hours and 45 minutes on weekends — he sits by himself in
a closet-size, windowless cell. He eats all his meals alone. He has no access to
the prison’s educational or religious activities. His contact with visitors is
extremely limited.
Over the past year, he has endured visual body cavity searches up to six times a
day, even though he is under constant supervision and is shackled and
accompanied by guards whenever he is removed.
Mr. Woodfox, who was serving a sentence for armed robbery at the time of the
murder, would most likely have been released from solitary many years ago if he
had pleaded guilty to the murder. But he has consistently denied any
involvement, believing that he was targeted because of his political activism as
a member of the Black Panther Party.
The facts of the case were on his side: There was no physical evidence linking
him or his co-defendant, Herman Wallace, to the murder, and prosecutors did not
reveal that their main witness had been bribed to testify against the men. Mr.
Woodfox, by all accounts, has been a model prisoner, and under Louisiana prison
policy this should have earned him his exit from solitary confinement years ago.
Finally, on Thursday, a federal appeals court panel in New Orleans unanimously
voted to overturn Mr. Woodfox’s murder conviction because his 1998 retrial was
tainted by racial bias in the grand jury selection process. (His original, 1973
conviction was overturned because of his lawyer’s ineffectiveness. In 2008, a
federal judge overturned his second conviction on grounds of bad lawyering, but
that ruling was reversed because of a federal law that dramatically restricts
review of state court decisions.)
Mr. Woodfox is the last incarcerated member of what became known as the Angola 3
— three prisoners who each spent decades in solitary, mostly at Louisiana’s
notorious Angola prison. Robert King, who was put into isolation also in 1972,
was released in 2001. Mr. Wallace was released last year, and he died of liver
cancer days later.
In 2005, a federal magistrate judge wrote in a report that the amount of time
the men had spent in solitary was “so far beyond the pale” that she could not
find “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American
jurisprudence.” Yet in 2008, 36 years after the guard’s killing, the Louisiana
attorney general was still calling Mr. Woodfox “the most dangerous person on the
planet.”
State officials insist their case is solid and have already said they intend to
retry him, though the prison guard’s widow believes he is innocent of the
killing and most of the potential witnesses in the case are dead.
Even comparatively brief solitary confinement can cause severe mental and
emotional trauma; a United Nations expert has said that more than 15 days may
amount to torture. When it is imposed for more than 40 years, it is barbaric
beyond measure.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A20 of the New
York edition with the headline: Four Decades of Solitary in Louisiana.
Four Decades of Solitary in Louisiana, NYT, 21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/
four-decades-of-solitary-in-louisiana.html
The New
York Jail Scandal Continues
SEPT. 22, 2014
The New York
Times
The
Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
A Justice
Department investigation that last month uncovered a chamber of horrors at the
Rikers Island jail in New York City was bad enough in its depiction of
corruption and brutality in the city jail system. Now comes the news that the
Department of Correction had sanitized a 2012 report that it later turned over
to federal investigators, eliminating passages recommending demotion for two
officials who were derelict in their jobs and failed to supervise the jail they
oversaw.
The missing information included the fact that hundreds of fights had been
omitted from jail statistics. The report said that the warden, William Clemons,
and his deputy, Turhan Gumusdere, had “abdicated responsibility” for reporting
inmate fights and violence statistics and “turned a blind eye” when the staff
submitted false data to make conditions seem better than they were. There is no
reason to believe that Mr. Clemons and Mr. Gumusdere, who were recently
promoted, can carry out their responsibilities.
As The Times reported on Monday, all this was expunged at the order of the
corrections commissioner at the time, Dora Schriro, who not only ordered the
scrubbing of information damaging to the two officials but promoted Mr. Clemons
to assistant chief of administration, despite an internal investigation raising
questions about his conduct. This outrageous behavior lends credence to the
charge that the department historically protected and empowered people who were
comfortable with misconduct and a deep-seated culture of violence.
The problems did not stop with Ms. Schriro. According to The Times article,
Joseph Ponte, who was appointed corrections commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio
to clean up the troubled department, promoted both men. Mr. Gumusdere became
warden of the largest jail at Rikers Island. Mr. Clemons was named the
department’s highest-ranking officer, despite the advice of the Department of
Investigation, which had reviewed his record and advised against it.
The mayor’s office insists that Mr. Ponte never saw the original report. It also
says that after inspecting their work, Mr. Ponte determined the two men to be
the best of the pool eligible for promotion. If true, that says volumes about
the Bloomberg administration’s inattention to the problems at the corrections
department and the mediocre staff it bequeathed to Mr. de Blasio. The city says
it is reviewing the issue in light of the latest revelations.
The report, issued in August by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet
Bharara, depicted Rikers Island as a horrific place where teenagers routinely
suffered injuries during sadistic beatings by correction officers who acted
without fear of being reported or punished. The report said that “inmates are
beaten as a form of punishment, sometimes in apparent retribution for some
perceived disrespectful conduct,” adding, “correction officers improperly use
injurious force in response to refusals to follow orders, verbal taunts, or
insults, even when the inmate presents no threat to the safety or security of
staff or other inmates.” The Justice Department has called on the city to
completely overhaul departmental operations and recommended that it remove
adolescents from Rikers.
Mr. Bharara said in a statement on Monday that news of the suppressed
information and “questionable promotions” did not instill confidence that the
city would quickly meet its constitutional obligation to change the climate at
Rikers. He further noted that the Justice Department stood ready to take legal
action to compel long-overdue reforms at the city jails.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on September 23, 2014, on page A28 of the New
York edition with the headline: The New York Jail Scandal Continues.
The New York Jail Scandal Continues, NYT, 22.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/opinion/
the-new-york-jail-scandal-continues.html
North
Carolina Cuts Jail Time
for
Probation Violators, and Costs
SEPT. 11, 2014
The New York
Times
By ERIK
ECKHOLM
ROANOKE
RAPIDS, N.C. — André Duckett, 43, had an unpleasant surprise when he came in to
see his probation officer. After missing some previous appointments, he had just
failed a drug test, the officer told him, and he was going to spend the next
three days in jail.
He was dismayed that day in March, Mr. Duckett said. But in the end he was
grateful that his violations had provoked only this sharp jolt.
A few years back, they might well have led to formal revocation of his
probation, stemming from an assault conviction, and sent him to prison for
months. Instead, after experiencing what officials call a “quick dip,” Mr.
Duckett was able to keep his job as an electrician and, so far at least, to
avoid more violations.
“It was a wake-up call that this is serious business,” Mr. Duckett said in an
interview here in rural Halifax County, near the border with Virginia.
The quick dip is one of a battery of new policies, adopted in the name of
“justice reinvestment,” that have helped North Carolina reverse the costly
increase in prisoners, and that officials hope will help curb crime and
recidivism as well.
Criminal justice officials knew that something had to give. The number of prison
inmates had climbed to 41,000 by 2011, with further increases projected, even
though crime was declining. The adult corrections budget had climbed to more
than $1.3 billion.
As they considered their next steps, officials made a startling discovery: More
than half of all prison admissions involved offenders whose probation had been
revoked. And in a large majority of those cases, the offenders had not committed
any serious new crime but rather had committed so-called technical violations:
missed appointments, failed drug tests, failure to attend drug treatment.
“We were filling very expensive prison beds with low-level felons for technical
probation violations,” said W. David Guice, the commissioner of adult
corrections and juvenile justice.
As a legislator, Mr. Guice was the primary sponsor of a 2011 law that set the
state in a new direction. In addition to the quick dips and a related decline in
probation revocations, the new approach includes the use of 90-day jail stays,
still without formal revocation, for probationers with more serious crimes;
efforts to focus probation and parole supervision on offenders judged at highest
risk of trouble while easing the monitoring of others; and at least some
oversight and services for those re-entering society after serving prison time.
Prison admissions have declined by 21 percent in three years, to 23,000 in the
year that ended June 30, 2014, down from 29,000 in 2011, according to state
data. The overall prison population shrank over the same three years to 38,000,
and 10 prisons have closed, although significant further declines in prisoner
numbers do not appear likely. The adult corrections budget, instead of rising as
once projected, has dropped by $50 million per year, officials say.
“North Carolina demonstrates that there are ways to increase public safety while
also saving a lot of money by shrinking the prison system,” said Michael
Thompson, director of the Justice Center of the nonpartisan Council of State
Governments. His group helped North Carolina devise the new approach and has
promoted similar measures in several states, many of which have achieved modest
reductions in prison populations.
Some of the savings here are being used to hire 175 more probation and parole
officers to reduce caseloads. Their jobs have been redefined to focus less on
catching miscreants and more on helping probationers break the pattern of crime
by mandating services like behavior therapy, while imposing brief jail stints on
those who drift.
Probation and parole oversight is being focused most intensely on offenders
considered most likely to commit new crimes, such as those with chronic drug
addiction, mental illness or a serious criminal history. Contacts with low-risk
offenders are held to a minimum, in part because research shows that intensive
oversight can be counterproductive.
New efforts also aim to fight recidivism by those who do spend months or years
in prison. Under “truth in sentencing” laws, most prisoners were serving out
their full terms, but then going home with no parole supervision. If combined
with needed treatment or other assistance, supervision can reduce the chance of
new crimes, research suggests.
North Carolina’s answer has not been to shorten sentences, which seemed
politically impossible, but to add at least nine months of mandatory parole to
existing sentences for some felonies, ensuring that every departing convict has
some time under supervision.
Compromises like that have led to criticism from groups like the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Sentencing Project as well as from some independent
criminal justice experts. The policy changes here and in other states that are
pursuing justice reinvestment, while mostly useful, do not go nearly far enough
to curb the toll that high incarceration is inflicting on society, these critics
say.
In this view, more politically contentious steps to curb lengthy drug and other
mandatory sentences will also be essential to achieve a large drop in prisoners.
The critics also lament that more of the funds saved by closing prisons are not
being redirected to poor and minority populations for social programs.
“There’s a consensus among criminologists that our exceptionally high
incarceration rates have become problems in and of themselves,” said Todd R.
Clear, an expert on criminal justice and provost of Rutgers University-Newark,
who calls himself a “friendly critic” of justice reinvestment programs so far.
While reducing probation revocations can provide quick gains, he said, they are
limited and “low compared to what we could achieve with changes in sentencing.”
But officials in North Carolina may have pushed to the edges of the politically
possible.
The new system, while not easing criminal penalties, does allow probation
officers to give offenders a second chance, and even a third.
Kourtnie James served time on felony firearms, drug and credit-card-theft
charges, and he is now at his home in rural Enfield, under three years of
supervision.
Twice since his release, after failing drug tests, missing required therapy and
failing to pay restitution, he was reimprisoned for 90-day periods under the new
“confinement in response to violation” policy, or C.R.V., as ordered by a judge.
He knows he is now on very thin ice.
At the house among soybean fields he shares with his stepfather, Mr. James
recently admitted that “I wasn’t thinking” when he courted revocation by using
drugs, but he said he was now determined to attend welding school.
“I’m 23, and I’ve been in prison three times, around guys who’ve been in there
for 20 or 30 years,” he said. “I don’t want to end up like that.”
A major weakness of the C.R.V. program, colloquially known as “the dunk” among
corrections officials, is that offenders usually spend their 90 days sitting
idly in cells.
As a next step in reinvesting its savings, the state plans to create two
residential facilities for those receiving 90-day warning stints, said Anne L.
Precythe, the director of community corrections.
The facilities will have probation officers on site and provide cognitive
therapy and other services, Ms. Precythe said. “That will help show the value of
C.R.V.,” she said.
A version of
this article appears in print on September 12, 2014, on page A14 of the New York
edition with the headline: A State Cuts Jail Time for Probation Violators, and
Costs.
North Carolina Cuts Jail Time for Probation Violators, and Costs,
NYT, 11.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/us/
north-carolina-cuts-jail-time-for-probation-violators-and-costs.html
U.S.
Inquiry Finds a ‘Culture of Violence’
Against
Teenage Inmates at Rikers Island
AUG. 4, 2014
The New York
Times
By BENJAMIN
WEISER
and MICHAEL
SCHWIRTZ
In an
extraordinary rebuke of the New York City Department of Correction, the federal
government said on Monday that the department had systematically violated the
civil rights of male teenagers held at Rikers Island by failing to protect them
from the rampant use of unnecessary and excessive force by correction officers.
The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, released
its findings in a graphic 79-page report that described a “deep-seated culture
of violence” against youthful inmates at the jail complex, perpetrated by guards
who operated with little fear of punishment.
The report, addressed to Mayor Bill de Blasio and two other senior city
officials, singled out for blame a “powerful code of silence” among the Rikers
staff, along with a virtually useless system for investigating attacks by
guards. The result was a “staggering” number of injuries among youthful inmates,
the report said.
The report, which comes at a time of increasing scrutiny of the jail complex
after a stream of revelations about Rikers’s problems, also found that the
department relied to an “excessive and inappropriate” degree on solitary
confinement to punish teenage inmates, placing them in punitive segregation, as
the practice is known, for months at a time.
Although the federal investigation focused only on the three Rikers jails that
house male inmates aged 16 to 18, the report said the problems that were
identified “may exist in equal measure” in the complex’s seven other jails for
adult men and women.
In just one measure of the extent of the violence, the investigation found that
nearly 44 percent of the adolescent male population in custody as of October
2012 had been subjected to a use of force by staff members at least once.
Correction officers struck adolescents in the head and face at “an alarming
rate” as punishment, even when inmates posed no threat; officers took inmates to
isolated areas for beatings out of view of video cameras; and many inmates were
so afraid of the violence that they asked, for their own protection, to go to
solitary confinement, the report said.
Officers were rarely punished, the report said, even with strong evidence of
egregious violations. Investigations, when they occurred, were often
superficial, and incident reports were frequently incomplete, misleading or
intentionally falsified.
Among more than a dozen specific cases of brutality detailed in the report was
one in which correction officers assaulted four inmates for several minutes,
beating them with radios, batons and broomsticks, and slamming their heads
against walls. Another inmate sustained a skull fracture and was left with the
imprint of a boot on his back from an assault involving multiple officers. In
another case, a young man was taken from a classroom after falling asleep during
a lecture and was beaten severely. Teachers heard him screaming and crying for
his mother.
“For adolescent inmates, Rikers Island is broken,” Mr. Bharara said at a news
conference announcing the findings. “It is a place where brute force is the
first impulse rather than the last resort, a place where verbal insults are
repaid with physical injuries, where beatings are routine while accountability
is rare.”
The federal investigation was conducted by the civil division of the United
States attorney’s office. Officers involved in specific incidents were not
identified by name. But the report listed more than 10 pages of remedial
measures, and it warned that if the city did not work cooperatively to develop
new policies and procedures, the Justice Department could bring a federal
lawsuit asking a judge to order the imposition of remedies. Mr. Bharara said the
city had 49 days to respond to the findings.
Joseph Ponte, the city’s new correction commissioner, said in a statement that
his agency had “cooperated fully” with the Justice Department, and would work
with it to carry out whatever changes were “appropriate and feasible.”
The report, which covers 2011 through the end of 2013, touched on many of the
same issues raised in an investigation by The New York Times into violence by
guards at Rikers, particularly against inmates with mental illnesses, published
last month.
The Times
article documented 129 cases in which inmates of all ages were seriously injured
last year in altercations with correction officers, including several attacks
that were also singled out in the report.
New York is one of just two states in the country that automatically charge
people aged 16 to 18 as adults. That population, which averages close to 500
inmates at Rikers Island, is among the most difficult at the jail complex, the
report said. In the 2013 fiscal year, about 51 percent received a mental illness
diagnosis, compared with about 38 percent for the overall population. And nearly
two-thirds were charged with felonies.
Even so, the report found that adolescents were overseen by the least
experienced correctional staff members, who, often out of frustration or malice,
lashed out violently against them. The violence against teenage inmates has
steadily increased year by year, the report found. In the 2013 fiscal year
alone, inmates younger than 18 sustained 1,057 injuries in 565 reported uses of
force by correctional staff members.
Moreover, the report found, many violent episodes go unreported.
Officers and supervisors used coded phrases like “hold it down” to pressure
inmates into not reporting beatings. “Inmates who refuse to ‘hold it down’ risk
retaliation from officers in the form of additional physical violence and
disciplinary sanctions,” the report said.
One inmate said that he was continually harassed by the correctional staff after
reporting that he was raped by a guard and that he was warned by guards not to
speak about the episode in an interview with a consultant on the investigation.
The report also found that civilian staff members, including doctors and
teachers, also failed to report abuse and faced retaliation when they did.
One teacher told an investigator that when abuse occurs, civilian employees know
“they should turn their head away, so that they don’t witness anything.”
Even when abuse was reported, the report found, the investigations typically
went nowhere. The federal inquiry was highly critical of the Correction
Department’s investigative division, which is overseen by Florence Finkle. The
report described the investigative division as overwhelmed, understaffed and
reliant on archaic paper-based record keeping. Investigations, which are
supposed to take up to five months to complete, often take more than a year.
There is also a substantial bias in favor of correction officer testimony even
in cases when evidence clearly indicates a guard is lying, the investigation
found. And when guards are disciplined, the punishment is rarely severe. Most
are sent to counseling or “retraining,” the report found. Sometimes, punishments
recommended by supervisors are overruled by those higher in the chain of
command.
In one January 2012 episode, a correction officer became incensed after an
inmate splashed her with a liquid and began punching him in the face after he
had been restrained by other guards. A captain ordered her to stop, and she
punched another officer who tried to pull her off the inmate. An investigating
captain later concluded that the officer’s use of force was “not necessary,
inappropriate and excessive.” But a superior, backed by the investigative
division, overruled the captain, concluding that the use of force was necessary.
The consultant to the investigation labeled the finding “astonishing.”
The report found one officer had been involved in 76 uses of force over a
six-year period and had been disciplined only once.
Because the Correction Department fails to properly investigate and hold the
staff accountable, the report found, “a culture of excessive force persists,
where correction officers physically abuse adolescent inmates with the
expectation that they will face little or no consequences for their unlawful
conduct.”
Norman Seabrook, the president of the correction officers’ union, said he
welcomed some of the report’s suggestions for reform. But he defended guards’
responding forcibly against inmates who became aggressive.
“There may be a few that react with what you might think is excessive force, but
in defense of an officer being assaulted by an inmate, a correction officer must
use whatever force is necessary to terminate the assault,” he said in a
statement.
The report pointed out that the new correction commissioner, Mr. Ponte, had only
recently assumed his position and “was not present when the misconduct” found by
the investigation had occurred. Mr. Ponte noted in a statement that since he
took office in April there had been a 39 percent drop in uses of force by guards
against adolescents, in part to better recruiting and screening of the staff. He
said the department has been “cooperating fully” with the inquiry.
“I have made it clear that excessive use of force, unnecessary or unwarranted
use of punitive segregation and corruption of any kind are absolutely
unacceptable, and will not be tolerated under my watch,” Mr. Ponte said.
The report acknowledged the department had undertaken steps to stem the
violence. But none of these measures, the report said, address the core
problems: abuse by correction officers and a lack of accountability.
In one case documented in the report, a correction officer wrapped metal
handcuffs around her hand and punched an inmate in the ribs after he had fallen
asleep during a class, according to witnesses. The inmate told investigators
that when he yelled an obscenity, the officer pulled him out of class and began
to beat him. She was joined by other officers who kicked him while he was
sprawled on the floor. The inmate said one officer sprayed pepper stray directly
in his eye from about an inch away.
In their reports, the officers offered contradictory versions of what happened,
the investigations found. But all concluded that the level of force that was
used was appropriate.
One of the teachers interviewed said he heard “thumping” and “screaming” during
the altercation and said he heard the inmate “crying and screaming for his
mother.”
When he looked out the door after the episode, the teacher reported that he “saw
blood and saliva on the floor.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2014,
on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Teenage Inmates Pay Painful Price.
U.S. Inquiry Finds a ‘Culture of Violence’ Against Teenage Inmates at Rikers
Island,
NYT, 4.8.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/nyregion/us-attorneys-office-
reveals-civil-rights-investigation-at-rikers-island.html
|
