New York, NY – New York City plans to end the use of solitary confinement to punish teenage inmates at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex by the end of the year, according to a Department of Correction memorandum.
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The policy shift comes less than two months after the U.S. Department of Justice said its investigators had found a pattern of abuse of 16- and 17-year-old inmates that breached their constitutional rights.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in January, has promised reform and blamed his predecessors for what he calls the “broken” situation at Rikers, one of the world’s largest jail complexes, holding some 14,000 prisoners on an average day.
The three-page memo by Joseph Ponte, the city’s new corrections commissioner, is addressed to de Blasio and says the correction department is “committed to eliminating punitive segregation for adolescent inmates by the end of the year.”
Instead, Ponte wrote, the department will look at “alternative options, intermediate consequences for misbehavior, and steps designed to pre-empt incidents from occurring.” He did not provide further details.
The existence of the memo, which is dated Sept. 25, was first reported by the New York Times on Sunday. The Department of Correction provided a copy to Reuters on Monday, but declined to comment on it.
Ponte’s memo also says he has increased the number of guards and other staff at the adolescent jails, and that he is changing staff training to reflect the view that teenagers are “developmentally different from adults and need to be managed differently.”
The department is also doing more to help teenage inmates and their relatives outside the jail stay in contact, and Ponte is seeking to create new housing dedicated to inmates 18 to 21 years old, the memo said.
Last week, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for New York’s southern district, said he may still sue the city if it does not address the problems seen by the investigation by his office, which found a “deep-seated culture of violence” pervading Rikers’ adolescent jails.
The probe, findings of which were released last month, said guards beat teenage inmates with “extraordinary frequency,” sometimes when they were cuffed and defenseless.
It also said teenage inmates were punished with solitary confinement “at an alarming rate and for excessive periods of time,” adding this may harm the many young inmates who already have mental illnesses.