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+--- Thread: Deteriorating Conditions at Rikers Island (/showthread.php?tid=7419)
Deteriorating Conditions at Rikers Island - Charon - 07-06-2023
ny daily news.
yeah but its rikers island. they are not there for being good people. the whole city is deteriorating.
and, they are closing rikers in 2027.
where the hell are they gonna put those kinds of people? ny is filled with those released from mental hospitals. to no where. and we got the migrants that no one knows a damn thing about yet.
But we see in news accounts, all violence. They had a good time in the olde town tonight, as they say, round here and Fourth of July noise and balderdash round here and where...
people close to me, things tossed as them as they drove. Pretty sure no one is being liable. Lots of chaos.
But we need a damn prison. and not for the unvaxxed sorta thing, but for real, live, carrying weaponry type criminals.
Frig their safety. Did they think about the safety of the mother and child they so horribly raped and killed? no. they did not.
Great time to shut down Rikers. where are they gonna be released?
A new report documents widespread deterioration of fire safety, sanitation and building infrastructure at Rikers Island and the rest of the aging New York City jails system, the Daily News has learned.
A sprinkler failure during a near-deadly fire was among thousands of examples cited in the new report covering January through April filed Wednesday by a court-appointed monitor responsible for tracking conditions in the city jails.
The blaze started when Rikers Island detainee Marvens Thomas used wires attached to a battery to spark a fire in his cell April 6 that soon grew out of control as the sprinkler system meant to protect his housing unit sputtered and fell silent.
Fire damage seen after a April 6 blaze at North Infirmary Command at Rikers Island.
Fire damage is pictured after an April 6 blaze at North Infirmary Command on Rikers Island. (Office of Compliance Consultants)
As the fire raged that day in Rikers’ North Infirmary Command, smoke blackened the walls, and rescuers seemed nowhere to be found. One detainee, Hector Rodriguez, got what air he could by sticking his head in a toilet bowl, and then scooped water from the bowl to try to douse Thomas, who was on fire.
“The entire time I felt sure I was going to die,” Rodriguez, 26, told the Daily News.
The sprinkler system failed because it was shut down after one sprinkler head was damaged by a detainee and never repaired or turned back on, investigators concluded. The Correction Department couldn’t say how long the system had been turned off.
“It appears that the department’s failure to track its work orders — an evergreen issue — was a primary cause of the inability to extinguish the fire quickly,” lawyers with the Legal Aid Society wrote.
Marvens Thomas
Marvens Thomas (Obtained by Daily News)
The systemic breakdown exposed in the North Infirmary Command fire is one example of endemic problems in critical systems in the city jails like fire safety, sanitation, heating and air conditioning, and ventilation, the new monitor report says.
“Inspections conducted during this monitoring period recorded thousands of violations distributed across all facilities,” the report said, a sentence previously repeated in a March monitor report and reports prior to that.
Inspectors found a “strong sewer smell” in five different jails, along with “hundreds” of instances of chronic pooling of water, standing water, clogged drains and leaks, the report found. Fruit flies, drain flies and roaches were spotted 176 times in recent inspections.
January - April 2023 Report on Environmental Conditions, Benjamin v Molina 75 Civ. 3073 by New York Daily News on Scribd
Separately, more than 150 photos obtained by The News taken recently in nine city jails show a system decaying from the inside — rusted fixtures, cracked ceiling tiles, crumbling masonry, missing floor tiles, moldy, water-stained walls, dust-caked air vents, electrical outlets with exposed wires, and filthy toilets, sinks and showers.
The 57-page report was compiled by the Office of Compliance Consultants, which has monitored fire safety, building safety and similar issues in the jails as part of Benjamin v. City of New York, a lawsuit first filed by the Legal Aid Society in 1975.
A Correction Department spokesman said the agency is “always working with the monitor to address concerns.”
The department is developing software to track compliance with fire safety, and through the work of staff and vendors is “actively repairing” fire safety systems as they are broken, the spokesman said. Additionally, said the spokesman, the department is “developing a new program which will be led by our new fire safety director and fire response coordinator.”
Monitors have been appointed in several federal lawsuits over conditions at Rikers Island and other city jails.
The report filed Wednesday comes as talk of putting the city jails under a court-appointed receiver has once again gained momentum.
Decaying jail conditions at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
Decaying jail conditions at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
Forty-eight years after the Benjamin suit began, Legal Aid Society lawyers handling the case have come to believe the jails as they exist today are irreparable.
“Even if [Correction Commissioner Louis] Molina and his staff were extremely competent and they cared about these things, the facilities just are what they are,” said Robert Quackenbush, a lawyer with Legal Aid. “These problems won’t be solved without new facilities. There is no universe where a new team of administrators comes in and makes these facilities safe.”
With the plan to close Rikers Island by 2027 haltingly going forward, the Correction Department has little incentive to fix existing problems in the jails, said Quackenbush’s colleague Veronica Vela.
But delays in building the new jails means that detainees will live in ever worsening conditions for an unknown number of years to come.
“In order to make these buildings safe, it would take a huge infusion of cash, and nobody has the motivation to do it because they are relying on the fact that these jails are going to close anyway,” Vela said.
“That’s just an excuse. Meanwhile people are living in unsanitary, unsafe conditions.”
Decaying jail conditions at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
Decaying jail conditions at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
An example of that indifference, they say, is that Correction Department was supposed to come up with an “interim” plan to fix fire safety issues in four jails over the short-term. But after a year of talks, the agency has allocated $2.5 million for the fix, records show — a sum the lawyers believe is too little to get the job done.
For months, the fire safety posts at the West Facility on Rikers Island — the only bulwark against blazes in the absence of smoke detectors and sprinklers in that jail — have often sat empty, log entries reviewed by the Daily News show.
In the period spanning June 2022 through March 2023, fire safety posts in the West Facility, which consists of temporary structures called “sprungs,” were unstaffed at least 82 times for periods ranging from three hours to 18 hours, the log books show.
Earlier records seen by The News from 2020 and 2021 show a similar pattern of unstaffed fire safety posts at the same jail.
“It seems like a very cushy job. Your job is just to show up and smell and look around for smoke, but they can’t staff it reliably,” Quackenbush said. “For the past few years, the records show, they often abandon those posts.”
Decaying jail conditions at the Eric M. Taylor Center.
Decaying jail conditions at the Eric M. Taylor Center.
Confronted with the data, lawyers with the Correction Department rejected the assertion the posts were abandoned and blamed staffing troubles during a period they were claiming publicly that staffing had improved, records show.
The monitoring report also found hundreds of lights throughout jail housing areas were broken, but DOC had failed to fix them in a timely manner, the monitor found.
Repairs to the heating and ventilation systems are way behind and there are a large number of inoperable windows, the report found.
City health inspectors found 337 violations during a recent tour of the jails, including evidence of sewage contamination, of mold and mildew and of broken bathroom fixtures, the report said.
Decaying jail conditions at the Eric M. Taylor Center.
Decaying jail conditions at the Eric M. Taylor Center.
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In the meantime, the agency has become more stubborn about turning over data in the Benjamin case, the monitor’s report suggested. In just one example, Vela said DOC didn’t want surveyors to check water faucets or look inside food pantries claiming those were outside the purview of the case.
Meanwhile, the process in federal court is painfully slow and prone to delay. An example: a motion in the Benjamin case over dangerously excessive heat in the Otis M. Bantum Center has been pending for nine years, court records show.
”Despite being hindered by the department’s now chronic practice of withholding information and failing to produce mandated reports, [the monitor report] describes jail conditions are that are unacceptable and downright dangerous,” the Legal Aid lawyers wrote.
LAS Comments to Jan April 2023_June 12 2023 by New York Daily News on Scribd
As for the April 6 fire — last Thursday, Bronx DA Darcel Clark’s office hit Thomas, the 30-year-old detainee who started the blaze, with arson and assault charges.
Meanwhile, the Public Integrity Bureau in Clark’s office is looking into potential misconduct in the management of the failed sprinkler system and allegations of delays in the emergency response, a spokeswoman told The News.
Decaying jail conditions at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center.
RE: Deteriorating Conditions at Rikers Island - Mr. HIND - 07-07-2023
In California, Gavin Newsom looking to close at least 4 prisons and probably more. But yeah were to put those inmates at Rikers is a good question...
"At the inmate population’s peak in 2006, California incarcerated 165,000 people in state prisons.
Today — after a decade of sentencing reforms and a surge of releases tied to COVID-19 — California prisons house a little more than 95,000 people."
RE: Deteriorating Conditions at Rikers Island - IceWizard - 07-07-2023
With our borders being invaded, our laws being disregarded and when they do
enforce the laws, reduced sentences, or none at all ... Revolving door ..
So to "fix" the "system" lets just let all these knotheads loose...
What could possibly go wrong ...
All I know, with the price of ammo skyrocketing,
I will NOT be firing a warning shot ...
Living so close to these bayous and swamps...
Well someone could lose their way out there...
So good luck with all the nonsense
Ice