Mayor Eric Adams signed an emergency order Saturday blocking part of a controversial City Council bill banning solitary confinement in city jails, according to information obtained by the New York Post.
The City Council’s ban was set to take effect Sunday. The new rules would ban punitive segregation in jails for more than a four-hour “de-escalation” period and would also change how guards transport prisoners from location to location by ending the practice of leaving them handcuffed or shackled while on buses and other vehicles.
“What do they expect from passengers? Just to sit there like school kids,” one police source said. “The city council president is going to get on the bus? This is totally insane.”
Local Law 42, passed in December, seeks to limit the amount of time inmates can be separated from the general prison population, including at the troubled Rikers Island jail.
The mayor’s order modifies the ban and allows the city Department of Corrections to tailor solitary confinement time to individual inmates’ needs, eliminating the need to return inmates in the middle of violent brawls to the general inmate population just four hours later, officials said.
The law also prohibits shackling or handcuffing inmates on city jail buses and other vehicles that transport them to court or medical appointments. The mayor’s emergency order would remove part of that prohibition.
Law enforcement sources said 20 to 40 Department of Corrections vehicles transport about 500 inmates each day.
City officials said the mayor issued a “narrow and tailored order” because the ban poses danger to people who live and work in the prison system.
“The Department of Corrections has been committed to reducing violence in our prisons to protect both those in our custody and the correctional officers who so bravely serve our city,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
Federal monitors appointed to oversee the city’s jails, which have been plagued by violence and drugs, wrote in a letter earlier this month that the law “may actually increase the risk of harm to other inmates and staff.”
The Prison Officers Benevolent Association opposes the ban, saying it would put prison officers at risk.
“It is shocking that Speaker Adams, the daughter of a former corrections officer, is spearheading this bill that would have put her mother’s life at risk if it had been passed while she was still a corrections officer,” said COBA President Benny Bosio, adding, “We thank Mayor Adams for enacting this important executive order, and we will continue to fight vigorously to completely repeal this dangerous bill.”
A third of Rikers Island detainees are accused of murder, and the vast majority are for violent offenses, city officials say.
According to law enforcement sources, between Dec. 20 and June 19, the most recent data available, there were 258 assaults on prison staff, 189 serious injuries to inmates and 152 slashings and stabbings on Rikers Island.
State lawmakers in 2021 limited the use of solitary confinement in other facilities to no more than 15 consecutive days.
The city banned the practice for all inmates under the age of 21 after the 2015 death of Kalief Browder, who served a three-year sentence at Rikers Island, most of which was in solitary confinement.
