NYC Jails See Huge Backlog Of Sex Abuse Investigations

NEW YORK — Incomplete sexual abuse and harassment investigations are piling up in New York City jails. The Department of Correction has a backlog of 1,081 cases involving misdeeds by jail staff or inmates that have not been closed, a city official said Thursday.

That mountain of cases — 21 of which date back to 2015 — won't finally be closed until at least February 2019, said Sarena Townsend, deputy commissioner of the DOC's Investigation Division, at a City Council hearing on sexual abuse and harassment in the notorious jail system.

The figure includes cases that are reportable under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, such as sex acts between jail and detainees, sexual harassment by staff and abusive inmate-on-inmate sexual contact, Townsend said.

There are another 1,003 pending cases that don't fall under PREA's definitions of abuse or harassment, according to figures Townsend provided.

"I think it is a bad legacy for New York City to have left this open for so long," said Councilman Keith Powers (D-Manhattan), chairman of the Committee on Criminal Justice.

Townsend blamed the slow pace in part on an understaffed investigation force. There were just 19 PREA investigators as of June, each with an average load of 95 cases, she said. That staff is expected to grow to 30 investigators by early next year.

The investigators probe each complaint within 72 hours after it's lodged by interviewing the detainee and other potential witnesses and reviewing other evidence, Townsend said. The victim is also separated from the alleged perpetrator and given access to medical and other services, she said.

But each case takes far longer to close than the 90-day standard applied by the Board of Correction, which oversees the DOC, Townsend said.

"Because the Investigation Division is currently understaffed and because all of the steps just described take time, it is not unusual for a PREA team investigator to get called out to another allegation before he or she is able to close an investigation," Townsend told lawmakers Thursday.

The city's jails saw 229 allegations of sexual victimization from January through June, down from 332 in the six months before that, according to the DOC's most recent report. But more than 1,100 allegations were lodged in all of 2017, up from 823 in 2016, department figures show.

The Council hearing came about a week after an anonymous woman accused the city in a lawsuit of allowing a "culture of systemic rape" in the Rose M. Singer Center, the women's jail on Rikers Island.

(Lead image: Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)