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NYC Crime



WIDESPREAD DETERIORATION AT RIKERS ISLAND UNCOVERED IN NYC JAILS MONITOR REPORT,
NEW PHOTOS


By Graham Rayman
New York Daily News
•
Jul 05, 2023 at 4:36 pm




ExpandAutoplay
Image 1 of 20


Deteriorating conditions seen inside the Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC)






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 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 (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.

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.

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.

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.


THE DAILY NEWS FLASH

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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.

Rodriguez intends to sue the city over his near-death experience in the fire.

“The way that the system is set up, there are supposed to be all these safety
measures. But none of that is real,” he said. “You hope that someone will come
to help you, but you stop expecting it to happen.”






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




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