the situation has only gotten worse<\/a>. Swain has held the city in contempt of her orders twice in recent years. Finally, earlier this year, she named Nicholas Deml, a former CIA officer who previously led the Vermont Department of Corrections, as \u201cremediation manager,\u201d vesting him with broad authority to finally enforce reforms.<\/p>\nBoth monitorships and receiverships are fairly rare, experts said; having both at the same time is nearly unprecedented. Add to that the city\u2019s push to close Rikers Island altogether \u2014 Mamdani named a \u201cClose Rikers Czar\u201d for that express purpose earlier this year \u2014 and the situation becomes even more complicated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe monitor has nothing to do with whether or not Rikers closes or stays open, or the borough-based facilities open up, none of that,\u201d Deitch said. \u201cThe monitor’s job is to make sure that the judge’s orders with respect to people who are incarcerated, you know, that their rights are not being violated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, she said, the correction department commissioner is \u201ckind of caught between those worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey may want to close down these facilities as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, they still have to make sure they are meeting the needs of the people who are there,\u201d Deitch said. \u201cI don’t think there is an easy role for any of these people. It is a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n
**<\/p>\n
A week after she received the monitor\u2019s letter, Swain issued her own order, a warning shot to correction department leadership.<\/p>\n
The judge noted two issues in particular. First, the department was required to consult the monitor at least three weeks before implementing any new policies. This hadn\u2019t happened. Perhaps more consequentially, the directives themselves appeared to run against orders the judge had issued years earlier. Specifically, the monitoring team is supposed to have \u201cunencumbered, direct access\u201d to every department employee, including the right to talk with them confidentially, outside the presence of supervisors. Deml’s remediation team was granted \u201cunlimited access\u201d when the court appointed him.<\/p>\n
This sort of access, Swain wrote, was “indispensable to the critical work\u201d of reforming the jails.<\/p>\n
Margo Schlanger, a University of Michigan law professor who has also served as a court-appointed monitor, said the rules around access are important because a monitor and remediation manager, unlike a judge, are working on the ground to get things faster and in a more \u201cinteractive way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf everything runs through the commissioner, then the monitor is getting a tilted, packaged, edited view of what\u2019s going on,\u201d she said. The job requires checking to make sure that what command staff describe matches what line staff actually experience. \u201cIf a monitor can’t do that, he can’t do his job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin made a similar point in his letter, noting that had the directive been followed, it likely \u201cwould have precluded the staff from confidentially reporting\u201d the directive to him in the first place.<\/p>\n
The requirement that staff take notes of every interaction with the court\u2019s teams and report them up the chain never took effect. A day after it went out, the chief of staff told leadership to hold off on implementation until the cabinet could discuss. According to Martin, that pause followed a warning from another department leader who worried that if Martin\u2019s team found out that the DOC was tracking conversations, \u201cit will be bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richards with Mayor Zohran Mamdani at a tribute to Department of Correction first-responders ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9\/11 earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Swain closed her order with a stern warning. The department’s obligations to work with the monitor and the remediation manager, she wrote, \u201care just that: Obligations, not suggestions.\u201d<\/p>\n
**<\/p>\n
Deml, the remediation manager, took action almost immediately. He ordered the new directives rescinded and told the city to issue written guidance, subject to his approval, to all staff on how to comply with the standing court orders. He also moved the staff responsible for making sure the department was complying with the consent decree to the purview of the department\u2019s general counsel.<\/p>\n
Richards, the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the Department of Correction, addressed the monitor\u2019s concerns head on. In a letter that became public in court filings this week, but was sent even before the judge had issued her own order, the commissioner acknowledged “missteps in recent weeks.\u201d He promised to develop a comprehensive communication plan for the monitor\u2019s review that would make sure staff were clear on their roles and responsibilities for responding to the court\u2019s orders.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s Law Department also sent a letter to the judge underscoring it had not been the correction department\u2019s \u201cintention to impede the free flow of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the policy journal Vital City and a former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, read the whole ordeal as \u201csort of a bump in the road.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it’s unfortunate,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it’s gonna work out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The monitor\u2019s reaction has to be understood, at least in part, as stemming from what came before, Glazer said. \u201cI think the court and the monitor \u2014 and the public frankly \u2014 felt very badly used by the Adams administration.\u201d Under that administration, the department had withheld information<\/a> about a death and serious injuries in custody.<\/p>\n\u201cSometimes things are malicious and sometimes they’re mistaken,\u201d Glazer said. \u201cI would very much put this down to unartfully phrased bureaucratic communications, not an intent to obscure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who has been heavily involved in Rikers oversight and previously served as chair of the council\u2019s criminal justice committee, agreed.\u200aThe commissioner \u201ccomes from the perspective of being someone who has gone through the system, has spent and dedicated his life to helping people through the system,\u201d she said. \u201cI cannot imagine that he is in any way working to undermine the goals of closing Rikers and improving the conditions of detention for people who are there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reform, she added, is going to take cooperation. \u201cAll parties are gonna need to work together in a good faith fashion in order to achieve the goals that we need to achieve here.\u201d<\/p>\n
During a press conference earlier this month, Mamdani said he had \u201ccomplete confidence\u201d in Richards and reiterated his administration\u2019s commitment to working with the court\u2019s oversight teams.<\/p>\n
Whether the various parties are back on the same page should be clear soon enough. Swain asked Martin to report back to her on the situation by the end of the month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in years, New York City’s jails looked like they might be on the verge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-350560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}