In July 2022, the city Department of Correction opened “de-escalation units” in almost every facility on Rikers Island to transfer detainees after fights or slashings. 

The specialized individual cell housing areas were supposed to serve as a safer and healthier alternative to solitary confinement, where detainees could be thrown into 22 hours a day of total isolation. 

People in the de-escalation units would get counseling and only remain locked up in the individual rooms with bathrooms and sinks for a few hours, according to the plan. They are also supposed to be monitored every 15 minutes by correction staff. 

But the de-escalation units have rarely been used and are now almost totally empty, according to the latest report by a federal monitor overseeing the DOC. 

Instead, some detainees are punished by being sent back to an intake area where they can get stuck for days without a bed. Some are simply moved to other housing units away from whomever they fought with, said Steve Martin, the federal monitor. 

“That DOC abandoned the use of de-escalation cells is typical of how the city jails blend waste, dysfunction, and inhumanity,” said Kayla Simpson, staff attorney with the Prisoners’ Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society.

The department’s failure to properly use the de-escalation cells foreshadowed Mayor Eric Adams’ emergency declaration blocking many key components of a new law to strictly limit the use of solitary confinement. 

Advocates for people behind bars are furious the mayor has halted significant parts of the solitary ban and they contend his istration has done little to actually implement much-needed reforms. 

“In abandoning de-escalation units, DOC abandons yet another initiative purported to solve a longstanding problem,” Simpson said. 

She and others at the city’s largest public defender organization are trying to convince a federal judge overseeing the Correction Department to appoint a third-party receiver to run the city lockups. 

They contend that jail officials have failed to implement comprehensive reforms — and cite the failure of the de-escalation cells as one example. 

“DOC abandoned these units, failed to inform their own internal compliance auditors of the change, and now has no apparent consistent approach,” Simpson said.  “In a jail setting, this disorganization breeds incompetence and harm.” 

Annais Morales, a DOC spokesperson, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. 

Strategic Flaws

A top jail supervisor who works on Rikers told THE CITY that the de-escalation units were poorly designed because many were far away from medical clinics in each facility. 

Officers say they are also required to fill out copious amounts of paperwork when detainees are placed in that specialized area, according to the supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. 

“The best operational thing would be to convert some cells in intake to de-escalation units,” the jail official said. 

The so-called intake areas of each of the nine facilities in Rikers are typically used to house new detainees before they are sent to larger general population areas. 

But jail officials have also sent detainees they view as problematic to these entry areas, where people sometimes languish for days without beds. 

Notably, Martin, the federal monitor, said the DOC has recently done a better job tracking detainees in intake — and keeping them safe. 

“The Department has taken important steps and utilized considerable resources to improve the conditions intake,” Martin said in April. “However, additional work remains to reduce the utilization of intake after the use of force as it is still used more frequently than is necessary.”

The DOC has revamped how it monitors people inside the intake areas, according to Martin. 

Currerntly, one jail staffer from the facility operations team watches a live feed of all the intake units, the federal monitor said. A report detailing who is in intake and how long they have been in that area is generated every four hours and shared with jail officials, Martin said. 

If someone is in that location for more than four hours, jail officials are expected to explain why that happened, the federal monitor’s report said.

But some long-term issues remain, such as people being transferred to and from court not being ed in the DOC’s system, the report added. 

When confronted with those cases, jail staff “often reported” that the detainee “just got here,” according to Martin’s report. 

Also, no top jail official is currently in charge of making sure incarcerated people move in and out of intake within a few hours, the federal monitor noted. 

The largely empty de-escalation units come as the jail population has steadily increased since Adams became mayor in January 2022. 

The population has gone from roughly 6,000 detainees at the time to 6,425 as of Monday, according to jail records. 

That has created a need for added space, according to the jail supervisor. 

“The stigma over intake is so great nobody wants to even mention it. But the reality is we need space,” the jail official said. 

Meanwhile, the City Council has said they are looking into possibly taking legal action to force the DOC to enact the solitary ban despite the mayor’s emergency declaration. 

“The istration’s failure to meaningfully improve the crisis on Rikers is not a valid argument to ignore a law aimed at actually making city jails safer for people on both sides of the bars,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the lead sponsor of the solitary bill. 

“We will not allow people to continue to suffer in prolonged isolation as the mayor misleads the city,” he added, “rather than even attempt to carry out the law the Council enacted.”