Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz, Rikers: Where Mental Illness Meets Brutality in Jail. The New York Times, 14 July 2014. “After being arrested on a misdemeanor charge following a family dispute last year, Jose Bautista was unable to post $250 bail and ended up in a jail cell on Rikers Island. A few days later, he tore his underwear, looped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from the cell’s highest bar. Four correction officers rushed in and cut him down. But instead of notifying medical personnel, they handcuffed Mr. Bautista, forced him to lie face down on the cell floor and began punching him with such force, according to New York City investigators, that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery.”
Just a few weeks earlier, Andre Lane was locked in solitary confinement in a Rikers cellblock reserved for inmates with mental illnesses when he became angry at the guards for not giving him his dinner and splashed them with either water or urine. Correction officers handcuffed him to a gurney and transported him to a clinic examination room beyond the range of video cameras where, witnesses say, several guards beat him as members of the medical staff begged for them to stop. The next morning, the walls and cabinets of the examination room were still stained with Mr. Lane’s blood.
The assaults on Mr. Bautista and Mr. Lane were not isolated episodes. Brutal attacks by correction officers on inmates — particularly those with mental health issues — are common occurrences inside Rikers, the country’s second-largest jail, a four-month investigation by The New York Times found.
Reports of such abuses have seldom reached the outside world, even as alarm has grown this year over conditions at the sprawling jail complex. A dearth of whistle-blowers, coupled with the reluctance of the city’s Department of Correction to acknowledge the problem and the fact that guards are rarely punished, has kept the full extent of the violence hidden from public view.
But The Times uncovered details on scores of assaults through interviews with current and former inmates, correction officers and mental health clinicians at the jail, and by reviewing hundreds of pages of legal, investigative and jail records. Among the documents obtained by The Times was a secret internal study completed this year by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which handles medical care at Rikers, on violence by officers. The report helps lay bare the culture of brutality on the island and makes clear that it is inmates with mental illnesses who absorb the overwhelming brunt of the violence.
The study, which the health department refused to release under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, found that over an 11-month period last year, 129 inmates suffered “serious injuries” — ones beyond the capacity of doctors at the jail’s clinics to treat — in altercations with correction department staff members.
The report cataloged in exacting detail the severity of injuries suffered by inmates: fractures, wounds requiring stitches, head injuries and the like. But it also explored who the victims were. Most significantly, 77 percent of the seriously injured inmates had received a mental illness diagnosis.
Covering Jan. 1, 2013, to Nov. 30, 2013, the report included no names and had little by way of details about specific cases. But The Times was able to obtain specific information on all 129 cases and used it to take an in-depth look at 24 of the most serious incidents, including Mr. Bautista’s and Mr. Lane’s. The Times also examined numerous other attacks on inmates by jail employees uncovered independently of the report.
What emerges is a damning portrait of guards on Rikers Island, who are poorly equipped to deal with mental illness and instead repeatedly respond with overwhelming force to even minor provocations.
The report notes that health department staff members interviewed 80 of the 129 inmates after their altercations with correction officers. In 80 percent of the cases, inmates reported being beaten after they were handcuffed.
The study also contained hints of efforts to cover up the assaults. More than half of the inmates reported facing “interference or intimidation” from correction officers while seeking treatment after an altercation.
In five of the 129 cases, the beatings followed suicide attempts….
…[N]one of the officers involved in the 129 cases have been prosecuted at this point, according to information from the Bronx district attorney’s office. None have been brought up on formal administrative charges in connection to the cases so far either, though that process can sometimes be lengthy, and the Correction Department does not comment on pending investigations….
Rikers now has about as many people with mental illnesses — roughly 4,000 of the 11,000 inmates — as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined. They make up nearly 40 percent of the jail population, up from about 20 percent eight years ago….
The violence continues to worsen, even as Mayor Bill de Blasio and his new reform-minded correction commissioner have vowed to bring Rikers Island under control. Correction officers used force on inmates 1,927 times in the first six months of 2014, an increase of more than one-third compared with the same period last year, according to Correction Department data. Use of force by officers is up nearly 90 percent over the last five years, even as the jail population has declined….
Conditions inside Rikers have rarely been a priority for city officials, but several recent episodes involving mentally disturbed inmates have heightened scrutiny of the jail complex and spurred calls for change. In February, a mentally ill homeless veteran died after the temperature in his cell reached more than 100 degrees. A month later, federal authorities indicted a correction officer on charges of violating the civil rights of an inmate with schizophrenia who swallowed toxic detergent and died, despite begging for medical attention for hours.
Those cases, however, reflected indifference and neglect. What the health department study documented was different: It showed that violence committed by guards against inmates is pervasive and routine.
Among the 129 inmates the study was based on, 45 had to be transported off the island to the emergency rooms of local hospitals for treatment. The rest were referred to an emergency service on the island….
Rikers is far from alone as a correctional institution struggling with an influx of inmates with mental illnesses. According to some studies, correctional facilities now hold 95 percent of all institutionalized people with mental illnesses.
Some jails have learned to cope. In San Francisco, for instance, officers are taught to use “verbal judo”— tactics to talk an inmate down in order to de-escalate a crisis — and to ignore an inmate’s taunts if that is what it takes to keep peace.
In New York, by contrast, guards’ responses sometimes look more like street justice.
At a recent City Council hearing about problems at Rikers, Joseph Ponte, who took over as the city’s correction commissioner in April, acknowledged the department he inherited was “deeply troubled.”
He came to New York with a reputation as a reformer after spending three years as the correction commissioner in Maine, where he reduced the use of solitary confinement and overhauled mental health care in the state prison system….
In January, the Department of Correction announced it was ending the use of solitary confinement for the inmates classified as “seriously mentally ill,” because it can exacerbate their conditions, and instead would provide them with more therapy. But the definition of “seriously mentally ill” includes only a small percentage of inmates who have received particular diagnoses, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and meet certain criteria relating to their condition. A vast majority of inmates with mental health issues, even significant ones, can still be sent to solitary and make up more than half of the inmates in those cellblocks….
There is little chance for significant change at Rikers without the correction officers’ union on board, and Norman Seabrook, its president, has made it very clear that he is not. He has accused the health department of undermining security at the jail with its efforts to curtail the use of solitary confinement and divert more inmates to therapy….
Tensions over how to handle inmates with mental illnesses surfaced recently while Mr. Ponte, Mr. Seabrook and Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, the health commissioner, were touring the Central Punitive Segregation Unit at Rikers. Inmates there are locked in solitary for 23 hours a day. As health officials were explaining the screening process that is supposed to be used before an inmate with a mental illness is placed in segregation, Mr. Seabrook erupted, according to two people who were there.
He asked Dr. Bassett how she would feel if his officers suddenly disappeared from the cellblock, leaving her alone with 100 vicious inmates — and then he answered his own question.
You’d be soiling your pants, he told her. (His words were more graphic.)
“This jail belongs to us,” Mr. Seabrook yelled. “It does not belong to the department of mental health.”…
What is clear from the health department study is that assaults on inmates in the solitary confinement units are especially common, accounting for nearly a third of the serious injuries. Inmates there are so desperate to be let out of the cell that some will pound on their doors, scream, even cut themselves in hopes of getting a meeting with a social worker and an hour out of their cells….
Correction officers are supposed to show restraint, but in a place that has been growing more violent by the year, a code of behavior based on an eye for an eye appears to have taken hold….
Related investigative articles:
Trey Bundy and Daffodil J. Altan, For teens at Rikers Island, solitary confinement pushes mental limits. The Center for Investigative Reporting, 4 March 2014. This story was produced in collaboration with Medium.
Jennifer Gonnerman, Before the Law: A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life. The New Yorker, 6 October 2014. “…a rare account of life inside the notorious jail for adolescents on Rikers Island.”
Updates:
Michael Schwirtz, Solitary Confinement to End for Youngest at Rikers Island. The New York Times, 28 September 2014.
Jennifer Gonnerman, A Lawsuit to End Abuse at Rikers. The New Yorker, 19 December 2014. “[On 18 December] Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that the Justice Department is planning to sue New York City over the treatment of adolescent inmates on Rikers.”
Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz, Even as Many Eyes Watch, Brutality at Rikers Island Persists. The New York Times, 21 February 2015. Reporters at The New York Times have identified 62 cases “in which inmates [at Rikers Island] were seriously injured by correction officers between last August [2014] and January [2015], a period when city and federal officials had become increasingly focused on reining in violence at Rikers.”