An investigation into the deaths of four people held at the Rikers Island jails this spring found a pattern of lax supervision by correction officers, including some who skipped required rounds, left their posts for long stretches or kept inaccurate logbooks.
The report released by the city’s jail oversight board on Friday paints a familiar picture of a department in crisis, where even simple safeguards, like an officer walking the units and checking in on detainees, are ignored. The board has noted similar issues in other deaths in custody reports for years.
Earlier this year, a federal judge overseeing the city’s jails appointed a remediation manager with broad authority to bring the Department of Correction into compliance with long-standing court orders. In his first plan, filed in July, the manager wrote that the department struggles to perform basic correctional functions, like staffing posts and securing housing units.
Neither the Department of Correction nor Correctional Health Services responded to a request for comment. The Correction Officers' Benevolent Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report covers the deaths of Barry Cozart, 39; John Price, 49; Rajpattie Ramkellawan, 41; and Umais Khan, 40. At least eight people have died in Department of Correction custody this year.
“The death reports BOC has issued over the past several years point out a tragic pattern — officers too often leave their posts to congregate with other officers, and when they are on post, fail to fulfill their most basic responsibility to check that people in their care are safe,” said Darren Mack, the cofounder of the Freedom Agenda, a group that has long pushed to close Rikers Island.
In the latest report, the city's Board of Correction found that rather than walking the housing areas and checking on detainees, officers instead relied on quick glances through cell windows or simply watching from their desks. In some cases, floor officers left their posts, and the area went unsupervised. This happened once for more than an hour. In one unit, the device officers are supposed to use to log their rounds remained broken for two days.
The board also found problems with observation aides, people in custody who are assigned to watch for signs of suicide risk and are supposed to tour the units at least every 10 minutes. In one unit, an aide made no tours during the night and instead helped people get out of their cells after the nightly lock-in. In another, an aide shared medication with others.
Unauthorized drugs may have played a role in three of the four deaths. One man died from the combined effects of methadone and gabapentin, neither of which had been prescribed to him by jail doctors, according to the report. In the other two cases, the causes of death are still pending. In the first case, a woman was seen on video crushing and snorting pills from other people the night before she died. In the second, a man’s preliminary toxicology report came back positive for opiates and methadone, though he had been receiving methadone through the jail.
The board found that officers failed to rein in drug use. In one case, the report notes, detainees passed around what appeared to be drugs in front of officers. In another, during medication distribution, nobody verified that the people prescribed the drugs had actually taken them.
Finally, the report describes a breakdown in getting detainees necessary medical care. In one case, an officer escorted a detainee with heart disease who appeared to be struggling to breathe to a clinic. He waited three-and-a-half hours before a medical provider saw him. The board found that correction staff never told the medical team that the man was in distress. After he was finally examined, he was taken by ambulance to Elmhurst Hospital, where he died the next morning of pneumonia.
In a response attached to the board’s report, the Department of Correction said it couldn’t substantively respond to the board’s findings while the state attorney general or the city’s Department of Investigation were still investigating the deaths. Correctional Health Services said it would work with corrections to create a protocol for relaying medical calls to clinical staff.
