Guards nearly missed saving life of Rikers inmate in suicide try, says federal monitor arguing for outside help to fix NYC jails

From just feet away, two Rikers officer somehow overlooked a detainee hanging himself in a cell, a federal monitor said Friday as he called for outside help in the humanitarian crisis in the city’s jails.

The monitor, Steve Martin, described video of the incident during an online Manhattan federal court hearing.

Martin said the city Correction Department needs schooling in “basic correction 101″ and questioned whether its leadership could address the problems without outside help.

“There were officers literally within six feet of a hanging inmate in their direct line of sight and they did not detect that,” Martin said of the incident, which occurred Monday in the Rikers jail that houses younger detainees.

“An officer walked directly in front of the cell and did not detect it,” Martin said.

The officer had to take a second look to see what was happening in the cell. “He then turned around and saw that the inmate was in serious distress,” said Martin, who has been monitoring city jails as part of a 2015 federal court consent decree.

Martin described some of what he called “basic correction 101″ problems at Rikers:

“Staff has failed to secure doors that must be secured, failed to control movement, and we’ve seen too often officers and staff literally absconding from their posts,” he said.

Correction officials need to fix hundreds of cell doors and beef up monitoring of security cameras, Martin told Judge Laura Taylor Swain, a Manhattan federal judge who is overseeing the consent decree in a federal court case brought in 2014 that alleged brutality by Rikers staff.

Martin also proposed the hiring of an outside security consultant, and a search for new prospective supervisors from outside Rikers’ current uniformed staff.

The Legal Aid Society and the U.S. Attorney’s office pushed Swain to immediately order the city to comply with those recommendations, saying that the city’s failure to follow the monitor’s recommendations long predates the recent crisis.

“There’s ample evidence in the record to support the imposition of those remedies,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Powell. “They are narrowly drawn to address the noncompliance and to address the use of force.”

In a letter filed with the court Thursday night, Martin reported that uses of force on detainees jumped last month by 171% — to 190 in August 2021, up from 70 in August 2020 — and was centered in the intake sections where the Correction officials have let detainees fester without a bed for a week or more.

Meanwhile, stabbings and slashings jumped to 39 in August 2021, from seven in August 2020, Martin’s team reported.

And since December, 12 detainees have died on Rikers including by suicide, while self-harm incidents have skyrocketed.

“This is an urgent matter of life and death and it needs immediate intervention today,” said Mary Lynne Werlwas, director of Legal Aid’s Prisoners Rights Project.

Kimberly Joyce, the city’s lawyer, detailed an array of actions Mayor de Blasio’s administration has ordered to address the crisis. She said the city needs more time to review the recommendations, but balked at the hiring someone outside the Department of Correction to run security.

“We have serious concerns with bringing in an external consultant to do security,” Joyce said.

Swain gave the parties four days to work out an agreement on fixing Rikers’ problems.

“These are immediately and pressing problems,” the judge said. “It is absolutely unacceptable not to intervene in observed self-harm behavior.”

Correction officials have said they are in the process of speeding up processing of incoming inmates, which should reduce the number of detainees held in fetid holding cells.

They also say they are increasing access to medical treatment, leaning on staff to return to work, and lessening the population through limited releases and moving sentenced inmates upstate.

But Martin claimed in the letter correction officials “rebuffed” his team’s pleas over the past month to improve security.

“I have not heard a single concrete response from DOC to date as to how they are going to address these security issues,” Martin said in the hearing. “That this should have to come from the monitor speaks for itself about that agency. This is such a redline, where encouragement is not an issue. It’s a compelling need.”