LOCK UP PRISONERS OF RIKERS ISLAND PROFESSIONAL

Punitive segregation comes with a price tag, new correction officers. So we are moving to a model of punitive segregation,” he told reporters. “You know what it’s for? All those who stated they wanted to end the solitary confinement.

(As was the Health Department.) His most recent budget proposal is less draconian, but still adds 570 corrections officers-the ex-cop mayor’s answer to the widespread opposition that greeted his proposal to reintroduce solitary confinement in New York City jails. Adams’s first budget proposal, released in February, would have required nearly every city agency to cut spending by 3 percent while the Correction Department was exempted. If you ask Eric Adams, his Correction commissioner Louis Molina, or Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA) president Benny Boscio Jr., the solution to the problems at Rikers begins with hiring more guards. “Within a second there were 15 guys on me, just beating me.” One of the organizers of the Rikers hunger strike, Ervin Bowins, said that guards moved him into a gang-controlled unit in retaliation for his activism: “The guard brought me into the unit and said, ‘Here’s your snitch,’” he told Curbed.

LOCK UP PRISONERS OF RIKERS ISLAND PROFESSIONAL

Tiffany Cabán, the NYC council member whose district includes the island, relayed one detainee’s story to the Board of Correction: the only way he could get access to a mental health professional was by committing self-harm and being placed on suicide watch. Since the start of the Covid pandemic, New York City’s jails have become significantly more dangerous and miserable places to be: stabbings and slashings more than tripled last year, while guards reported more than seven thousand use-of-force incidents rates of self-harm spiked dramatically and sixteen people died in city jails last year, including fifteen on Rikers itself. Bundled under whatever layers they could find to protect against the cold creeping through the jail walls, the strikers were protesting a lack of medical care, unhygienic conditions that had proliferated even in the midst of a pandemic-driven lockdown, and escalating violence throughout the facilities, driven as much by guards’ neglect as by their brutality. Verso Books, 448 pages.Įarly this year, as New York City’s latest, weirdest mayor assumed office and the winter Covid wave began to recede, hundreds of detainees on Rikers Island embarked upon a hunger strike. Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage by Jarrod Shanahan.

Lock up prisoners of rikers island