Protesters Demand End To Solitary Confinement In City Jails

UPPER EAST SIDE — A coalition of criminal justice advocates, family members of the incarcerated and people who have been held in solitary confinement rallied outside of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Upper East Side mansion Tuesday morning to call on the mayor to immediately put an end to solitary confinement in New York City jails.

Activists gathered on the block opposite Gracie Mansion and erected a makeshift solitary confinement cell on the street. Protesters held signs and chanted for about an hour until de Blasio's SUV left Gracie Mansion and turned away from the FDR drive to avoid passing in front of the crowd.

The protest, organized by groups such as JustLeadership USA and the Jails Action Coalition of New York City, called attention to de Blasio's hesitancy to condemn the practice of solitary confinement as torture. Protesters contrasted de Blasio's stance on solitary confinement with progressive members of the city government such as Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams as well as national Democratic figures such as Bernie Sanders.

The city's jails currently hold more than 110 inmates in solitary confinement and about 450 more in similar forms of isolation, activists said.

"[Solitary] is torture, we know it's torture, we've known for years and decades that it's torture and it just has to stop," activist Scott Paltrowitz said at Tuesday's rally.

Olga Delgado spoke at Tuesday's rally about visiting her son who was held in solitary confinement for one year on Rikers Island. Her son, wearing shackles from his waist down to his feet, was chained to a table for entire days. The irons were so tight that if he moved too much he would suffer cuts on his wrists and feet.

"His back was hurting, on mother's day I could not hug or kiss him," Delgado said Tuesday.

People who had experienced solitary confinement also spoke at the rally. Vidal Guzman, now a community organizer with JustLeadership, said that his two years of solitary in an upstate facility are still affecting him today. Guzman described solitary confinement as "hell first hand."

"I know people who go into solitary confinement and don't come back in the same form as they went in," Guzman said. "I still have memory loss, a lot of my coworkers know when I ask them something or forgot something it's not because I don't remember it's because of what solitary confinement has done to me."

The Jails Action Coalition of New York City created a five-point "blueprint" to ending solitary confinement in city jails in October. The blueprint, released in the wake of Layleen Polanco's death in solitary confinement, includes recommendations such as immediately cutting solitary confinement units, setting deadlines on transitioning inmates out of segregation units and ensuring that standards for out-of-cell time apply to all inmates in city jails.