Rikers Island Struggles With a Surge in Violence and Mental Illness
With dry bureaucratic precision, the daily incident reports from Rikers Island chronicle a surge of violence and disorder churning within the vast New York City jail complex.
Since New Year’s Eve, according to the internal reports, at least 12 inmates have been slashed or stabbed, eight of them in the face or neck. Inmates and correction officers suffered lacerations, concussions, punctured eardrums, and fractures to noses, eye sockets, jaws and hips. In one recent brawl, a chunk of an inmate’s ear was bitten off, according to the confidential reports, which were obtained by The New York Times.
Not since the gang riots of the 1980s and early 1990s has violence at Rikers Island so alarmed oversight officials, union leaders and inmate advocates. Over the past decade, the use of force by correction officers has jumped nearly 240 percent, even as the daily population has declined by almost 15 percent over the same period, according to data from the city’s Correction Department obtained under the Freedom of Information Law.
Rising Violence at Rikers Island
250
Use-of-force incidents by correction officers
Annual rate per 1,000 inmates
200
150
100
50
0
’90
’13
The mayhem inside city jails is especially striking given the historic declines in rates of homicide and other violent crimes outside of them. At the heart of the rising violence is an inmate population that has changed significantly in recent years and has in many ways grown more volatile.
In particular, correction officers have struggled with an increasing concentration of mentally ill inmates who experts say often respond defiantly or erratically to the harsh, zero-tolerance disciplinary measures successfully employed in the past.
While conditions today are far from the near-anarchy of 20 years ago, the tools used to bring that era of violence under control may now be partly responsible for creating further disorder.
Reports of Abuse
In interviews, current and former inmates described arbitrary and wanton abuse by other inmates and correction officers.
Robert Hinton, who takes medication for aggression and paranoia, said he and another Rikers prisoner were set upon by correction officers. “I was cuffed, they kicked us, punched us, threw garbage on us, and Maced me all at the same time,” Mr. Hinton said in an interview.
In another confrontation, Mr. Hinton said, he was beaten by at least 10 correction officers in April 2012 after he refused to leave his cell. He had a fractured nose and vertebra and said he was choked until he passed out.
He said one officer told him: “You’re going to die today.”
Mr. Hinton, 26, who is suing the city over the altercation, was brought back to Rikers last week on a parole violation.
A spokesman for the Correction Department said the agency would not comment on Mr. Hinton’s lawsuit because it was active litigation.
Another inmate, Rodney Brye, 40, was acquitted after spending nearly four years at Rikers Island for a weapons charge. He left in 2012 with two fused vertebrae and a plate in his neck and now walks with a cane as a result of a what he says was a beating by correction officers. He is also suing the city.
“They will hit you with anything; they’ll hit you with a radio,” he said. “You can actually take somebody’s life like that, and they do it on a regular basis.”
Norman Seabrook, president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said officers were overwhelmed by a difficult and often violent inmate population. Officers are routinely punched and kicked, and sometimes doused with urine and feces, Mr. Seabrook said. This month, an officer was stabbed in the face with a pen.
The violence has simmered behind the walls and barbed wire of Rikers Island, overshadowed by other priorities at City Hall.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who entered office in January vowing to curtail abuses in the Police Department and to enact education reform, has spoken little of the jails, though he has acknowledged the need for changes. Last week, he appointed Joseph Ponte, a longtime corrections official known for reforming violence-plagued prisons and jails around the country, to lead the Correction Department.
In introducing Mr. Ponte, the mayor said the department had “sadly lagged behind other corrections systems in terms of updating its practices and procedures.”
The situation at Rikers Island mirrors an “epidemic of violence” in big-city jails across the country, said Dr. James Gilligan, a clinical professor of psychiatry and co-author of a 2013 report that found the treatment of mentally ill inmates at Rikers Island violated the city’s mental health standards. He said an overreliance on solitary confinement and force at Rikers Island and elsewhere perpetuated violence among inmates, particularly the mentally ill, who have crowded the nation’s correctional facilities as mental hospitals and other institutions have closed.
“A jail like Rikers Island has a subculture of violence,” Dr. Gilligan said. On a recent tour of a juvenile solitary confinement unit at Rikers, he said, “We saw young kids who had been really beaten to a pulp.”
One young inmate, Dr. Gilligan said, had been handcuffed by correction officers, who then banged his head against the floor. The inmate, he said, had a concussion and had lost a tooth, and he was vomiting and urinating blood. The inmate was taken to a medical unit for treatment, he said.
A Vulnerable Group
With 10 jails housing an average daily population of nearly 12,000 inmates, Rikers Island — on an East River island of the same name, near La Guardia Airport — is one of the largest jail complexes in the country. Though primarily a pretrial center, it houses some sentenced inmates.
Inside, the tension is acute. Rival gangs — the Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Kings and Trinitarios — wage bloody power struggles like a cellblock game of thrones. Vicious fights erupt over the telephone or the television channel, inmates and correction officers said. The officers, wearing body armor and armed with pepper spray and clubs, resort to force frequently and, critics say, overzealously.
In this environment, mentally ill inmates are particularly vulnerable, experts say. The proportion of inmates with a diagnosed mental illness has grown to 40 percent, from 20 percent, over the last eight years, according to the Correction Department. These inmates are responsible for about two-thirds of infractions at city jails, the department said.
The monotony, the isolation and the aggression of officers and inmates can worsen mental illness, causing inmates to lash out, said Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University who specializes in violence at prisons and jails.
“Right now, jails and prisons are grappling with a population they are not prepared to deal with,” Dr. Lee said. “It is not so much a fault on the part of the correction system. They are simply not equipped and have not been able to adjust quickly enough.”
Inmates who receive mental health treatment were five times as likely to require an “injury visit” to a jail clinic after a violent altercation with officers or inmates, according to a 2012 study by the city’s health department. They also stay in jail much longer than those not treated for a mental illness and have higher rates of recidivism.
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Shateek Bilal, 40, who has paranoid schizophrenia, has been in and out of Rikers Island since 1991, mostly for drug crimes and parole violations. Last year, he served three stints in custody, two at Rikers and one in the Manhattan Detention Complex, another city-run jail, for a total of seven months. He was released on Dec. 12 and now lives with his sister.
The jail time, he said, “exacerbated my mental illness, made me paranoid, made me more apt not to take the medication.”
Changes to Punishment
The Correction Department has enacted reforms to cope with the changing population.
Since the 1990s, new correction officers have received a 35-hour course on mental health and suicide prevention, the department said. In recent years, officers assigned to mental health units at city jails have received additional training from the health department.
The addition of video surveillance in many sections of the jail has made officers and inmates think twice about resorting to force, officials said.
In January, the Correction Department announced that it would no longer punish mentally ill inmates with solitary confinement, which had expanded under the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Instead, the department plans to send such inmates to therapeutic units that have been set up over the last few years and are staffed by mental health professionals.
But while the most seriously mentally ill inmates now receive some therapy, isolation remains a widespread punitive tool, oversight officials said.
Solitary confinement and some therapeutic units are rife with abuse and neglect, city officials and inmate advocates said. They described walls that are covered with feces and body fluids, and inmates who scream incessantly and throw themselves into walls and doors. Inmates are housed in the units 22 to 24 hours a day, while inmates in the jails can watch television, work out and interact with others.
At a January meeting of the Board of Correction, which oversees city jails, Bryanne Hamill, one of its members, said that on a recent visit to a specialized housing unit, she and other board members knocked on the door to a cell after noticing the window had been covered in feces. After failing to get a response, they asked correction officers to open the door.
Ms. Hamill said it took over an hour before a medical team arrived, opened the door and found the female inmate, naked, wrapped in a blanket with some kind of ligature around her neck.
“The medical, one in particular screamed, ‘She’s trying to kill herself; we need help,’ ” Ms. Hamill said.
Mr. Seabrook, the president of the correction officers’ union, faulted the department’s leaders for not adequately training officers to handle mentally ill inmates and then punishing his members when they use force to protect themselves. “The inmate can use and abuse and do whatever it is he wants, and when a correction officer attempts to restrain the inmate and use whatever force is necessary to defuse the incident, the officer goes to be charged with a crime,” he said.
Speaking of mentally ill inmates, he said: “They need medication, treatment, psychological help. They don’t need a corrections officer.”
Some of the most severe abuse of inmates appears to stem not from a lack of training, but from what critics have described as a culture of indifference.
On Aug. 18, 2012, a 25-year-old inmate named Jason Echevarria, who had bipolar disorder, swallowed toxic soap that had been given to inmates in a mental health unit. The inmates were expected to use the soap balls — which, according to court papers, contained bleach, sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride — to clean their cells after the toilets overflowed with raw sewage.
Over the next several hours, correction officers ignored Mr. Echevarria’s cries for help, even as he began vomiting blood, according to court documents. At one point, according to the documents, Capt. Terrence Pendergrass, who was in charge of the unit, told an officer who had come to seek help: “Don’t call me if you have live, breathing bodies. Only call me if you need an extraction, or if you have a dead body.”
Mr. Pendergrass has told city investigators that he did not know that Mr. Echevarria was sick, according to the union that represents Rikers captains.
Mr. Echevarria was found dead in his cell the next day.
The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, citing “neglect and denial of medical care.”
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