NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — The head of the New York City Department of Correction bailed on a Board of Correction oversight meeting on Tuesday — the second consecutive meeting Commissioner Louis Molina and his staff have missed.
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Molina had asked the oversight board to approve his decision to extend cell confinement to 17 hours per day at a Rikers Island building dedicated to the “inmates most prone to violence.”
The board indicated their authority was being subverted by the mayor, who used an executive order to grant the DOC’s request without subjecting the department to scrutiny from the BOC.
“Although those requests have been withdrawn, the DOC still had the authority under the mayoral [executive order] to override that minimum standard … so the department says it will be locking people in for 17 hours a day at GRVC,” Medina said, according to reporting from the New York Post.
The commissioner pulled the proposal late last week and told the board he would be skipping the hearing on Monday, the day before the meeting.
The commissioner’s decision to skip two consecutive oversight hearings comes amid an ongoing crisis at Rikers.
A court ordered report found prisoners were subjected to unsanitary conditions, unchecked violence, overcrowding and chronic absenteeism among staff.
Sixteen people have died at Rikers so far this year — the same amount as died in custody or shortly after release in all of 2021.
Comptroller Brad Lander, the elected official responsible for New York City’s finances, called for a federal judge to appoint a receivership that would take control of Rikers away from the DOC last week.
The court is slated to revisit the issue in November after it accepted the city’s reform plan in place of a court-ordered receivership in June.
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