Rikers Island Detainees Live Among Dead Roaches, Fire Hazards: Monitor

QUEENS — The Correction department recently spent $190,000 on sniper rifles and submachine guns but failed to provide Rikers Island detainees basic supplies to clean up dead rodents, filthy toilets, and a strong sewer smell, according to monitors and critics.

This slew of gruesome conditions — which include mice droppings in jail cells, dead roaches in the shower and skipped fire inspections — appear in a new report from New York City's federally-appointed jails monitor released Wednesday.

Critics from the Legal Aid Society were quick to point out the Correction department recently spent $93,845 on “long-range M-10 rifles and magazines” but failed to allocate cash to key safety measures.

"There is not a single dollar in the capital budget for fire safety basics, like fire alarms in West Facility," noted Robert Quackenbush, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Prisoners’ Rights Project.

Rikers officers are supposed to conduct weekly inspections to watch over fire hazards, but the court-appointed monitor cited a report by Legal Aid counsels that found fire watch shifts were "frequently abandoned for entire shifts and sometimes even for two consecutive, uninterrupted shifts.”

The report arrived three months after a blaze broke out at the city's jail complex, and left 20 people injured.

"We are in the process of updating all our internal policies and standards, developing our own tracking and compliance software to ensure that we are current on compliance items in fire safety, actively repairing fire systems as they are reported broken with our in-house repair teams and through a fire protection vendor, and developing a new program which will be led by our new Fire Safety Director and Fire Response Coordinator," a DOC spokesperson told Patch.

Correction officials said the firearms would be used by a specially trained team in extraordinary, high-risk situations, and are not for everyday use.

"Our members of service are also first responders who deploy when needed to critical incidents as needed to Department facilities both on and off Rikers Island," the spokesperson said.

The report also states the jails have insufficient cleaning products and are missing cleaning equipment, which Veronica Vela, supervising attorney with the Prisoners’ Rights Project, argued made Rikers an unfit space to detain New Yorkers.

“It is a collection of crumbling buildings rendered unfit for human habitation by the decades of accumulated filth, Vela said.

“This reflects a Department ... wholly unconcerned with providing safe and humane living conditions for the people in its custody."