City Lowballs Number Of Serious Injuries In Jails, Report Says

NEW YORK — The agency that runs New York City's jails routinely lowballs the number of times its inmates get broken bones, deep cuts and other serious injuries, a new report says.

The Department of Correction consistently reports 80 percent fewer serious injuries than NYC Health + Hospitals’ Correctional Health Services, or CHS, the office that manages health care in the jails, says the report published Monday by the Board of Correction, a jail oversight agency.

In 2017, for instance, CHS counted 816 serious injuries while the DOC reported just 158, the report says. Reports for some serious injuries are not generated when they're related to other "unusual incidents" such as stabbings, slashings or uses of force, the board found — though those incidents don't account for all of the discrepancy.

"This means the Department does not have a single metric from which to determine the actual number of serious injuries occurring to people in its custody," the report reads.

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The Board of Correction also found remarkably long waits for serious injuries to be treated. It took an average of about two hours for hurt incarcerated people to get medical attention after a DOC supervisor learned of the injury, the report says.

But the board found 13 cases in which more than four hours passed between the injury and treatment. The longest wait time in the report was staggering — 13 hours and 45 minutes.

The DOC's definition of a serious injury includes breaking or fracturing a bone, (except for fingers and toes), damaging or losing an organ, and anything else that a physician considers serious or that "creates a substantial risk of death or disfigurement," the report says.

The CHS' definition is a bit broader, but includes a similar catch-all for any injury a medical professional judges as serious, according to the report.

Nine in every 10 serious injuries in a three-month period that the Board of Correction reviewed involved a fracture or a cut that required stitching, according to the report. More than half were caused by an "altercation" between inmates and 80 percent happened in housing areas, the report says.

The Department of Correction says it tries to get hurt inmates treated as quickly as possible whenever incidents occur. The Board of Correction's findings will help the department and CHS "improve our information sharing so that we may better report, investigate and prevent serious injuries," DOC spokesman Peter Thorne said.

"We make sure that anyone injured in our custody has access to healthcare, and we are committed to ensuring that they get it in a timely and appropriate manner," Thorne said in a statement.

(Lead image: A sign at the entrance to Rikers Island is seen in March 2017. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)