In an attempt to mitigate widespread abusive policies in New York City jails, particularly at Rikers Island, city council members will introduce a bill to equip every inmate with a comprehensive bill of rights this week.
The bill, proposed by Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D) and Councilman Daniel Dromm (D), states,
The department shall provide every inmate a document summarizing their rights. Such document shall include information regarding inmate rights under federal, state, and local laws, and the board of correction minimum standards, including but not limited to the following topics: non-discriminatory treatment, personal hygiene, recreation, religion, access to legal services, visitation, telephone calls and other correspondence, media access, due process in any disciplinary proceedings, medical care, safety from violence, and the grievance system.
The written document would also outline the various rehabilitation, education, and counseling services available to them, and prison staff would be required to read the materials aloud upon prisoner entry.
The bill is one of 12 targeting city jails, including Rikers, which houses 10,000 inmates. Last week, Department of Corrections commissioner Joseph Ponte vocalized his support for the bill of rights, but legal groups in the city are concerned that teaching inmates about their rights isn’t enough to tackle systemic problems in the correctional system.
One problem is that informing prisoners of their rights neither expands those rights nor ensures that they will not be ignored. The Constitution grants inmates basic rights, such as access to food, clothing, and healthcare, and sanitation. There are state and local laws that jails are supposed to abide by, and prisons also establish their own polices. But according to John Boston, the director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the NYC Legal Aid Society, the NY Board of Corrections’s standards are hardly a panacea for prisoners.
“I don’t know if they’d be shocked to know any of [their rights]. All things considered, they’re not that great,” Boston told ThinkProgress. “State correction law has various provisions, very few of which provide anything stronger than local law or constitutional law. The Board of Correction’s minimum standards are considerably more explicit than anything you’ll find in the bill of rights, although they’re not necessarily more explicit than a ruling that xyz practice does or does not violate the Constitution.” And knowing what rights inmates do have won’t necessarily mean there will be renewed efforts to uphold them. “Certainly people who are incarcerated should know about and be educated on their rights,” Senior Staff Attorney Taylor Pendergrass of the NYCLU told ThinkProgress. “In our experience, however, the problem is less about incarcerated individuals knowing their rights, and more about the fact that those rights can be disregarded with impunity because there is no effective mechanism for seeking redress and accountability when those rights are violated. Educating incarcerated individuals on their rights will empower them to end abuses in a meaningful way if, and only if, it is also paired with robust oversight and accountability for jail staff who disregard those rights.”
Although it’s charged with oversight, the Board of Corrections is currently understaffed and under-resourced. “There is a major disregard for pretty much all standards of conduct within the city jail system. The Board of Corrections’s organizational ability to enforce anything, for example to go to court, is pretty much nonexistent at the moment,” Boston said.
Today, inmates (including juveniles) serving time in New York City jails are brutally beaten as a form of retribution. Use of force against prisoners has risen 240 percent in the last decade. Medical neglect is another pervasive problem, which has led to a number of preventable deaths, and health care staff recently reported having to jeopardize their ethics on the job.