NO NEW JAILS NYC: On the City Council Bills Proposed By Councilmembers Levin, Ayala, Powers, and Rosenthal to Whip Votes for the Jails Expansion Plan
On Wednesday, October 2nd, Councilmembers Levin, Ayala, Powers, and Rosenthal will present three new bills at a City Council committee hearing. The bills pertain to the Department of Correction and minimum standards in city jails. No New Jails NYC sees these bills for what they are: legally toothless and ethically spineless attempts to misdirect attention from widespread community opposition to Mayor de Blasio’s racist and violent plan to build new jails in NYC.
No New Jails NYC — and the thousands of community members who support the plan No New Jails has offered — know that we want to and can shut down Rikers immediately; divest money from the NYPD and Department of Corrections (DOC) and invest money in communities; and end the racist, classist, transphobic, ableist, and xenophobic policing and caging of our communities. We will not be assuaged by half-hearted and unenforceable attempts to “humanize” the caging of ourselves, our loved ones, and our community members.
Each of the three bills, discussed in detail below, is tied directly to Mayor de Blasio’s jails construction plan. They are all being rushed through Council committees in order to be brought up for vote on October 17, the same day City Council will vote on de Blasio’s jails plan. The bills’ timing and lack of consequence betray their true function: “seems-good” efforts to grease votes and manage public opinion for the increasingly unpopular jails construction plan.
Councilmember Levin’s bill to establish “a commission to make recommendations on reinvestment in communities impacted by Rikers Island”
Councilmember Stephen Levin’s bill holds communities’ basic needs hostage to building 4 new jails. For the last year, politicians have told the people that the city can only meet our communities’ needs by supporting jail construction and routing access to social services through jail, policing, and criminal court infrastructures. For example, the jail in Mott Haven is being designed with a grocery store inside to bribe a community living in a food desert into supporting the jail. Renderings of the Chinatown jail include space for a Chinese-American museum. This bill — which merely proposes a commission, not actual investments — is more of the same.
Instead of giving people what they need, which is the immediate closure of Rikers and divestment from systems of policing and caging with immediate direct investment in communities targeted by incarceration, Councilmember Levin is proposing a bill that would merely establish a commission to study what we already know: that safe communities have more resources and more autonomy, not more cops and cages.
We don’t need a commissions to study the root causes of incarceration (studies which have been done, and done, and done again): we need less incarceration, which means less jails and less cops. Predictably, Councilmember Levin’s legislation would do nothing but establish yet another panel of hand-picked experts from the city’s usual suspects — nonprofits, philanthropists, and elites — whose even paltry recommendations for “community investmen”’ can be ignored by city government, because nothing the commission produces would be binding. Moreover, because Levin’s bill does not address the root causes of incarceration by calling for divesting District Attorneys and the NYPD of some of their power and budgets, his bill merely tinkers at the margins of incarceration, while leaving fully intact the the carceral structures, agencies, policies, and practices, which cause the harm his commission would “study.” This is, at best, lipstick on a pig, meant to make community and councilmember buy-in on a jails construction plan more palatable.
Our communities won’t be fooled. They know they deserve and need the full $11 billion for capital projects that directly benefit their under-resourced communities. No New Jails NYC has already identified those projects in its plan and how to fund them long term.
If City Council were sincere in seeking to address the root causes of incarceration and support NYC communities targeted for policing and jailing, councilmembers would refuse to build more city jails, work to actually empty and close Rikers long before 2026, and reject Councilmember Levin’s meaningless commission bill.
Councilmembers Ayala’s and Levin’s bill to “require the Board of Correction to report on the impact on incarcerated individuals of closing jails on Rikers”
We have no idea why Councilmembers Ayala and Levin think that passing a bill requiring the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (and, by extension, the DOC, which will have to produce the reports and numbers required by the bill) to ‘report’ on anything having to do with conditions in city jails, the impacts of incarceration on people in jails, staffing, or Board of Corrections (BoC) compliance will do anything to substantively improve the conditions that incarcerated people are forced to survive in our city jails. Repeatedly, these entities prove themselves to be unreliable narrators, spinning their torture as safety and their violence as rehabilitative. They are not to be trusted with any plan for divestment or decarceration.
For one, much of the data this bill requires is already publicly available; yet, the availability of that data has done little to nothing to compel any significant changes in the DOC. Second, just because the city requires data does not mean that the data will be turned over, or that conditions will change in response to the data being public, as the NYPD and the DOC have repeatedly shown. The reporting bill also connects the fate of Rikers to the rate of progress with the new jails, yet again implying that the only way to shut down Rikers is by expanding NYC’s incarceration infrastructure. This is plainly false, and the closure of all facilities on Rikers must be separated from whether the city builds 4 new jails.
Additionally, without the courage or capacity to hold the DOC responsible for the harms and violence that it causes daily to incarcerated people and their families, more reporting doesn’t do anything. The Nunez Monitor has been reporting an increase in the rate of the use of force each year since it was established by federal consent decree — with no end to the violence. in fact, the violence is currently spiking. The BoC issues reports every year about conditions, the overuse of solitary confinement, the routine and illegal denial of admittance to the THU — and these abuses continue. In fact, as some legal scholars have argued, increasing reporting requirements and increasing standards in jails and prisons has led to an expansion of incarceration, rather than its diminution.
Finally, this bill includes mandatory reporting on “management systems for people in custody … and systems to replace paper-based logbooks and forms.” This technocratic faith that technology will make incarceration more ‘humane’ instead functions to make the system more efficient at criminalizing, not freeing, our people. The DOC doesn’t need a better electronic filing system: it needs to be dismantled.
Councilmembers Power’s and Rosenthal’s bill to “amend the administrative code of the City of New York in relation to amending the bill of rights for incarcerated individuals and ensuring minimum standards of design”
Historically, minimum standards have always been set to be ignored and broken. The DOC has rarely, if ever, been in compliance. This bill is aspirational, a palliative for liberal concern about jail conditions, backed with no enforcement will or power. Has City Council ever decreased DOC funding in response to their failure to comply with minimum standards?
The BoC issues variances, which allows the DOC to violate minimum standards, and the variance process is built into the minimum standards laws as written in the 1970s. In other words, minimum standards contain the recipe for their violation. The DOC can request, and the BoC routinely grants, any number of variances with the minimum standards as long as the DOC can assert that the variances are not due to ‘negligence’ but some other factor.
For example, overcrowding on Rikers in the 1980s was due to the BoC granting variances to the space per incarcerated person mandated by the minimum standards. This highlights that the new proposed minimum standards specifying a new cell size does not guarantee (and cannot guarantee) that each incarcerated person will even have access to the entire miniscule 75 square feet laid out in the bill.
To cite a more recent example, the DOC has been noncompliant with the Heat Orders governing the treatment of ‘heat sensitive’ incarcerated people since they were implemented (see Benjamin v. Horn). And, as with most DOC regulations, the department is allowed to violate them if it determines that following minimum standards would ‘jeopardize security or safety.’ This is a department that believes that ‘safety’ demands that Correctional Officers (COs) be allowed to use pepper spray against 16 and 17 year olds. Current laws also mandate access to timely medical care, which has not prevented the DOC from killing people in their custody due to medical neglect. Generally, you can find evidence of the DOC violating every current minimum standards. Just go wait outside the Brooklyn Detention Center (BKDC) someday and ask recently incarcerated people and/or their families.
Moreover, the minimum standards bill presumes that the problems with the conditions in the current jails can all be traced to the design of the facilities. For example, the bill states: “Each such facility shall be designed, where practicable, in accordance with best practices in humane jail design and prioritize the use of natural and aesthetically appealing materials, such as wood, fabric, ceramics, and plastic, and deprioritize the use of metal” (and please notice the huge carveouts: ‘where practicable’ and the vague language of ‘aesthetically appealing’), which fails to recognize that conditions in city jails are by nature torturous and life-threatening because there is no incentive to maintain facilities whose purpose is to warehouse and abuse Black and brown working class people.
Just as public schools in working class neighborhoods are literally falling down on top of students while hundreds-of-years-old-buildings at Harvard have been retrofitted for central air, just as NYCHA residents are without heat, water, and elevator access for weeks while Gracie Mansion never lacks for dignified and humane amenities, the problem with conditions in jails isn’t when they were built but the function they are intended to serve. Councilmembers can write a bill demanding A/C in a new Brooklyn jail, but that doesn’t mean that the A/C would be turned on next year, let alone ten years from now. They can demand that there be space for programs (BKDC has space for therapeutic programs, too): that doesn’t mean that any future city government will be compelled to fund them.
With specific regard to the section of the bill requiring the DOC to refer to people in custody by their names and preferred pronouns, Councilmembers Powers and Rosenthal have got to be kidding themselves if they think that City Council passing this law will have any effect on how the COs treat or identify people who are caged and solely subjected to their will and power. Current law also prevents “unjustified” use of force; requires timely access to medical care; prohibits solitary confinement for people with medical conditions; and outlines a “zero tolerance” policy towards sexual abuse — and yet the DOC routinely flauts these laws — and more — with impunity.
We do not know what world the City Council is living in if they think that this legislation will in any meaningful way alter the culture of DOC. All it suggests is that the City Council again is willfully failing incarcerated New Yorkers and their families while shamelessly reducing their mistreatment and traumatizing experiences at the hands of DOC to nothing more than empty words on a piece of paper, specifically here with the insidious mission to encourage votes in favor of the jails construction plan.
This portion of the bill also fundamentally and thoroughly misunderstands how trans and gender nonconforming people are treated outside of carceral institutions, where we are subjected to harrasment and misgendering, police violence, denied access to city services like shelters and medical clinics, and must fight to have our names and pronouns respected. We have no idea how the Council proposes to enforce “names and pronouns” in the city jails when they cannot stop the DOC from killing people.
Finally, the most obvious flaw in this legislation is the lack of any enforcement mechanism. As people who are employed by their constituents to write laws, it is laughable that the City Council does not understand what most ordinary New Yorkers do: there is no right without a remedy. If the right is unenforceable, it does not matter if one possesses it in the abstract because the right cannot be vindicated. Thus, the purported “protections” listed in the bill are worthless without any enforcement mechanism.
All three bills sponsored by Councilmembers Levin, Ayala, Powers, and Rosemthal serve as stark reminders of what history demonstrates: the City Council has time and again proven to be grossly disinterested in vindicating the rights of incarcerated New Yorkers, grossly disinterested in holding the DOC responsible for the harms that it causes to our communities, and grossly disinterested in disrupting the power structures and money streams that undergird incarceration in New York City. Incarcerated New Yorkers and their families deserve better, and the City Council must stop with the false promises and instead do the only things that will actually protect and vindicate our communities’ rights: end broken windows policing, close Rikers Island without new jails, divest from the NYPD and District Attorneys offices, and ultimately defund and disband the criminal legal system in NYC.
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No New Jails NYC is an all-volunteer, multiracial, intergenerational grassroots network of residents, community members, and activists, including incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, fighting against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s oppressive and violent jail expansion plan. We are calling for the immediate and expedient closure of Rikers without building new jails in any borough in New York City.
