Rikers Island jails are so disgusting a federal judge should tour them and see for herself their black mold, plastic bags used as toilets, and near unmanageable roach and bedbug infestations, lawyers for detainees said Friday.
One unnamed Rikers inmate was held five days in a cell best described as a “cage covered in feces,” said a letter by Legal Aid lawyer Veronica Vela.
“The appalling conditions were worsened by the overcrowding caused by the intake backlog [of detainees waiting for beds] and the lack of access to functional showers during the entire five-day period,” reads the letter to the Office of Compliance Consultants, an organization created by federal courts to monitor city jail conditions.
The inmate ended up at Bellevue Hospital with a severe blood infection — and he’s still at the hospital months later, the letter said.
Legal Aid Society lawyers want Manhattan Federal Judge Loretta Preska to tour the jails next month with sanitation experts.
For years, Legal Aid says, the city Department of Correction has neglected to file to the Office of Compliance Consultants reports on ventilation, safety, sanitation, and other environmental conditions at Rikers and in other city jails.
That lapse violates a series of federal court rulings in 2001 made as part of a decades-old federal court court case, the lawyers say. The city is supposed to produce several reports each month from its jails that detail its compliance with aspects of the court case’s terms.
According to Legal Aid, since December 2018 the city has failed to file 700 of the regularly-required reports. Legal Aid says the city should be found in contempt of court for violating the 2001 rulings.
Fourteen inmates have died in custody at Rikers Island this year as a staff shortage and allegations of a work slowdown have deteriorated conditions so badly that one elected official labeled Rikers “Horror Island.”
The city Law Department said late Friday it would accommodate Preska if she choses to visit Rikers. The city also said it agrees to city Health Department inspections of the jails.
But the city lawyers said they’d respond further next week to the Legal Aid complaints.
Judge Preska has never toured the city jails during the seven years she has presided over the case.
Her predecessor, Manhattan federal court Justice Harold Baer Jr., visited them once a year from 1994 when he became involved with the case until he died in 2014, according to an article the late justice wrote in 2007.
Baer’s forerunner on the case, the late Judge Morris E. Lasker, toured the jails regularly during the decades he presided over the case, court documents say.
