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Two assemblywomen visited Rikers Island last week.
By Forum Staff
Following their recent unannounced visit to Rikers Island on Friday, Assemblywomen Jessica González-Rojas (D-East Elmhurst) and Nathalia Fernandez (D-Bronx) called out the NYC Board of Correction’s plan to implement solitary confinement by another name and urged the board to amend its proposed rules to truly and fully end solitary confinement in City jails.
González-Rojas and Fernandez’s visit included a walkthrough of the National Institute of Corrections Structurally Restrictive Housing Units, where people in alternatives to solitary under the board’s proposed rules will be locked up alone 24 hours a day.
Photo Courtesy of Assemblywomen
González-Rojas and Fernandez
An NIC Structurally Restrictive Housing Unit
According to the pols, while purporting to end solitary confinement, the Board of Correction’s proposed rules create a new form of solitary confinement by another name, where people can be held alone 24 hours a day, indefinitely, and can be placed in, and kept in, such confinement through DOC proceedings with no opportunity to be represented by counsel. If the board’s proposed rules were enacted as currently written, they would violate the recently enacted HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which applies to all state prisons and local jails in New York State, including New York City jails, and which prohibits solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days in all circumstances, requires all people in solitary up to those 15 days to have four hours of out of cell programming, and generally requires that people in alternatives to solitary have at least seven hours of out-of-cell congregate activity with other people that is comparable to the general jail population.
“No matter what name we give it, solitary confinement is torture and has no place in our city. The mayor promised to end solitary confinement and he must fulfill his promise. During our unannounced visit to Rikers Island this past Friday, we saw the NIC Structurally Restrictive Housing Units that are meant to be alternatives to solitary confinement under the Board of Correction’s proposed rules. Being locked in these cages alone for 24 hours a day is nothing more than solitary confinement by another name,” González-Rojas said.
