Mayor Defends Sending Youths to Jails With Solitary Confinement

NEW YORK — The city has banned solitary confinement for inmates under 22, a policy that helped cement Mayor Bill de Blasio’s national reputation as a criminal-justice reformer. Yet late Monday the mayor defended the city’s practice of “occasionally” sending inmates who pose a security or safety risk to county jails where they can be held in solitary confinement.

His remarks were in response to a Times investigation this week that found that transfers of young inmates spiked in 2015, the year the ban was implemented, and that this year alone eight inmates under 21 are being held in isolation in a jail outside of the city.

“Occasionally we have to remove a prisoner from our correction system because there is an immediate threat to them and something that requires them being moved to another jurisdiction temporarily,” de Blasio said during “Inside City Hall,” a live broadcast on NY1. “That’s a very small number of prisoners each year.”

Still, defense lawyers, advocates for inmates and some elected officials continued to criticize the practice, calling it an end-run around the city’s ban, and urged the mayor Monday to review its use for young inmates. Others said the city should simply stop transferring youths to county jails where the ban does not exist.

The revelations this week highlighted the challenges de Blasio faces in reforming New York City’s criminal justice system and exposed the limitations of one of the mayor’s most celebrated reforms.

There is little doubt the city’s ban on solitary for young people and reductions in its use for others has kept hundreds of inmates out of isolation in the last few years, accomplishing, in the mayor’s words, “something that no other jurisdiction had done and that many other administrations in the country had not done.”

Yet the mayor has also has faced setbacks at every step of his effort to turn the city’s notoriously violent jails around. In 2014, de Blasio ushered in Joseph Ponte, a reformer who had recently overhauled the state prison system in Maine, signaling that fixing the city’s jails was a top priority for him. But three years later, Ponte was engulfed in a scandal of his own and resigned.

The city’s plan to close Rikers Island — its troubled jail complex — also has proved difficult to implement. Residents have objected to having new jails built in their neighborhoods. Efforts to move young inmates out of Rikers to comply with a new state law that raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18 have run into resistance from the correction officers’ union, which contends youth detention centers that would house young inmates are not covered by its contract.

And the mayor has been unable to completely protect the city’s young inmates from isolation, which has been linked to suicide and depression.

Joanne Page, president of the Fortune Society, which helps former inmates make the transition back into society, commended the mayor’s overall efforts, but criticized the practice of transferring young inmates to places like Albany County where they can be held in solitary confinement.

“I think it’s wrong,” she said. “They should be doing something different in a way that is keeping them safe and not being placed in solitary confinement in upstate New York.”

A spokesman for the mayor, Eric Phillips, said there are no plans to review the city’s long-standing policy.

De Blasio said the city could not dictate how the eight inmates under 21 being held in Albany County Correctional Facility are treated. Those inmates are being held in isolation and say guards have beaten them. During the televised interview on Monday, de Blasio said other jurisdictions should scale back their use of solitary and ban it for young offenders, but he stopped short of saying the city would bring the inmates who have complained of abuse back to Rikers.

As for the practice of transferring inmates, he said, “This is something we will look at to see if there are any actions we can take to improve upon it.”

Nicholas Turner, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal-justice research organization, said he was encouraged by the city’s move to stop isolating its young inmates, as were many other advocates for jail reform. “Yet, the possibility of our city regressing is disheartening,” he said, adding that the city has alternatives that do not involve sending young people “to another jurisdiction to endure the same practice.”

The continued use of transfers to dispatch inmates to jails far from the city stands in contrast to the city’s plan to close Rikers and bring inmates closer to their communities and to legal services. Jonathan Lippman, the state’s former chief judge, who oversees the panel that came up with the city’s plan, said the transfers were an example of the difficult choices facing the city as it seeks to create a fairer, safer criminal justice system. Keeping a youth in the city jails who might be attacked also carries a risk, he said.

“If they keep to the regulations and the kid gets brutalized, did we accomplish anything?” Lippman said. “And on the other hand, if you send the kids outside of the city and they are brutalized, what was accomplished? I think there are no easy answers here.”