New York City’s Jails Continue to be Violent and Uncontrolled
www.vitalcitynyc.org
New York City’s jails are in a state of perpetual crisis, documented over many years in a steady flow of reports on the violent and inhumane conditions inside for both people in custody and people working in the facilities. Violence, unmet needs, sexual abuse, mismanagement, and the unsanitary and decrepit nature of the buildings themselves have all featured prominently in the news, in our own reports, and in the reports of the federal monitor overseeing the jails as the result of Nunez v. City of New York and Benjamin v. Maginley-Liddie, among many others. The entrenched nature of these problems is now in stark relief as the judge overseeing the Nunez case has ordered the parties to begin developing a proposed structure for a federal receiver. Appointment of a federal receiver to take over control of the jails is an extraordinary measure, and the fact that New York City is the closest it has been to one in its history is a marker of both the seriousness of the problems and their resistance to change.
Yet while we know things are bad, the picture of conditions in the jails remains woefully incomplete. The information that does exist is fragmented — held in different locations, sometimes by different entities, which often conflict with one another. While there are exceptions, much of it is made available only in PDF format, making it much more labor-intensive to identify trends, and there are often inconsistencies in when it is made available. And, of course, some information becomes public only when it makes it into a monitor or news report, which makes it less likely that it will be tracked consistently.
With all of that said, here we present a picture of conditions in the jails as we know them: Who’s being held, what it’s like to be inside, and who’s responsible for oversight.
Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/UBCUX
Incidentally, this article comes from a whole special issue this NYC based magazine did recently devoted to Riker's Island - https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/inside-rikers-jails-can-be-safer-and-more-humane