Class Action Alleges Dire Staffing Issues at New York’s Rikers Island Have Created Crisis for Pre-, Post-Trial Detainees

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A proposed class action alleges the rights of thousands of pre- and post-trial detainees in New York City’s jails have been violated as a result of long-simmering, well-known staffing issues and ineffective leadership within the city’s Department of Correction (DOC). 

The 37-page lawsuit alleges “absenteeism” is on the rise in New York City’s jails, specifically at Rikers Island, which the city announced it would close entirely by 2027, and is due in part to the “antiquated ways” in which the DOC staffs and manages the city’s jails. The suit charges that despite knowing for decades that New York’s jails lack adequate staffing to perform essential, and often lifesaving, tasks, the DOC has made no meaningful attempt to hire or properly train new officers, creating a dangerous, inhumane environment in the process. Moreover, the case claims the DOC has also failed to ensure that officers who are currently employed actually show up for work, and has failed to address its archaic staffing system to ensure those who report for work “actually end up in the posts where they are needed.” 

“Put simply, if the City of New York, politicians, and district attorneys insist on detaining thousands of people in jail before they have even been convicted of a crime, then the City also needs to pay to make sure there are sufficient numbers of well-trained correction officers in the posts where they are needed, ready and capable of doing the job,” the complaint says.

According to the lawsuit, the conditions created by the apparent long-standing staffing problems in New York City jails violate inmates’ constitutional rights. The suit alleges years of “neglect and poor management, as well as the overreliance on uniformed staff who lack effective leadership,” are largely to blame for “untold suffering” experienced by detainees. 

“The DOC knew this would happen, and the final policymaker blatantly admitted that he knew the same,” the lawsuit says. “But nothing was done to stop it.” 

As the case tells it, hundreds of lawsuits, decades of court-appointed reform, continual federal monitoring and extensive reporting on the “deteriorating conditions” at Rikers Island have failed to create a situation that comports even minimally with constitutional standards for pre- and post-trial detainees. The case pins the “rapid decline” of the conditions at Rikers on the DOC’s apparent “persistent failure” to screen correction officers before they’re hired and train them on how to keep detainees safe while ensuring they receive the care and services to which they’re constitutionally entitled. 

“The obvious and correct solution is to stop sending people to Rikers Island,” according to the suit. “But if the City and its law enforcement apparatus refuse to decarcerate the Island, they must bear the cost of having the proper staff and officers necessary to manage the jails there.”

The suit goes on to allege the COVID-19 pandemic significantly worsened the conditions at Rikers, “compounding existing violations with new and worsening issues of overcrowding, failure to separate people known to be ill from those who are not sick, rising numbers of staff absenteeism, crumbling infrastructure, a lack of medical care, the near evisceration of recreation, services and programming, decreased access to lawyers and the court system, and abysmally unsanitary conditions, where human waste and vermin are commonplace.”

The lawsuit looks to represent all detained persons who entered or were housed on Rikers Island on or after April 1, 2021. The case asserts violations of proposed class members’ rights under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. 

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