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Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Rise In NYC Jails, Increasing Pressure To Release People In Custody
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Mar 22, 2020
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By
Sydney Pereira
Published Mar 22, 2020
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Thirty-eight people have tested positive for COVID-19 in New York City's jail system, including at Rikers Island, according to the Board of Correction.
21 people in custody, 12 Department of Correction employees, and five Correctional Health Services [CHS] employees have tested positive for coronavirus in the city's jails, the oversight agency said in a letter to district attorneys, the chief judge, and the city and state departments of correction, imploring them to reduce the jail population. Fifty-eight people are currently in quarantine units, according to the Saturday letter.
"Fewer people in the jails will save lives and minimize transmission among people in custody as well as staff," the board's interim chair Jacqueline Sherman wrote. "Failure to drastically reduce the jail population threatens to overwhelm the City jails’ healthcare system as well its basic operations."
City Hall spokesperson Avery Cohen and Department of Correction spokesperson Patrick Rocchio confirmed 19 people in custody have tested positive for the virus. BOC's count is as of Saturday morning, the board confirmed.
City Hall and DOC have not divulged in which city jails the virus has spread, so it remains unclear if there are cases of the virus in city jails besides Rikers. The CHS did not immediately respond to questions. Mayor Bill de Blasio also did not have an answer during his press briefing on Sunday.
Criminal justice advocates have demanded de Blasio release vulnerable people who are locked up to mitigate the virus's spread in jails, where close-quarters and little to no hygiene supplies heighten concerns about the spread of the virus.
"Given the nature of jails (e.g. dense housing areas and structural barriers to social distancing, hygiene, and sanitation), the number of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 is certain to rise exponentially," Sherman wrote.
The mayor said on Sunday that another 200 inmates with little time remaining on their sentences are being reviewed for release. This is in addition to 40 people already identified for release, of which 23 were being released Sunday, according to the mayor. An update on how many of those 200 people would be released is expected Monday.
"We have to balance all of the factors here, and the health conditions of people is absolutely a crucial factor," he said. "It's a tough, tough equation we have to work through very, very quickly."
The first detainee at Rikers began showing symptoms more than a week ago, later confirmed as having the virus on Wednesday.
The city's jail population is currently comprised of about 7,000 men and women. Of those, more than 900 are older than 50, according to BOC. About 62 people are housed in a hospital on Rikers because of an underlying health condition that requires a higher level of care, and 666 are in custody for technical violations—like missing a parole curfew or a meeting with a parole officer.
551 are serving a city sentence of less than one year for low-level offenses, according to BOC, which said the mayor "must use his executive powers to release these people."
When asked about whether he has an idea of how many more people could be released, the mayor said he does not have an exact number beyond the 200 people under consideration.
"We're gonna strike that balance," de Blasio said, noting he doesn't want to "create a new problem trying to solve an original problem." People who are released would be a part of a supervised release program and require monitoring, de Blasio said.
Last week on Rikers Island, a DOC officer and a detainee were confirmed to have the virus, and eight others were removed for medical treatment after showing symptoms. Another DOC investigator died a week ago after contracting the virus, though the city has said the 56-year-old man from the Bronx hadn't been inside any jail facility in recent days. An inmate at a federal jail, Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, marked the first positive case of the virus in the federal prison system, according to the Associated Press.
At Wende Correctional Facility in western New York, convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein has tested positive for COVID-19, the Niagara-Gazette reported. Unnamed officials told the newspaper that Weinstein is believed to have been positive since Wednesday, when he entered the state prison system from Rikers Island.
The city jail oversight board has previously recommended that people over 50 years old, with underlying health conditions, detained for administrative reasons like parole violations, or those serving one year or less should be released.
The former medical chief officer of Rikers Island, Homer Venters, warned of a "looming disaster behind bars" that will disproportionately "fall on people of color and poor communities."
The CHS "is the nation's most sophisticated, and they are better prepared than anyone else," Venters told Gothamist/WNYC in an interview. "However, what they have said—and we should listen to them—is that they cannot do the job that we expect of them. That is to say, they are working in a place where they know that their patients will become ill and will die because of the place that they are at—which is inside the jails."
Based on Venters time at CHS, he says, "they will be unable to prevent deaths that could simply be prevented by not having people behind bars."
"We're poised to make great sacrifices in the wider community to try and slow or flatten the curve of this epidemic," he said. "But every correctional setting is a place that can push that epidemic curve up."
On Friday, the Legal Aid Society sued for 116 people incarcerated on parole violations or awaiting trial who have underlying medical issues to be released.
District attorneys in each borough as well as judges have to approve of individuals' release. So far, district attorneys have approved 28 in the Bronx, 21 in Brooklyn, 189 in Manhattan. Queens has approved six people to be released and another five for review. Staten Island's district attorney's office did not immediately respond to an email Sunday morning.
The oversight board said after monitoring Rikers and the borough jails for 60 years, the board knows that the DOC's and the CHS's "best efforts will not be enough to prevent viral transmission in the jails" and that those agencies' work must be supplemented by district attorneys, state judges, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, as well as the DOC using its release authority.
With Yasmeen Khan.
This article has been updated with additional information.
Tagged
jails
Rikers Island
COVID-19
coronavirus
Sydney Pereira
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