Why Does Rikers Island Still Lock People in Shower Stalls?

IN AUGUST, two inspectors touring the men’s new admissions facility at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex encountered a man pleading for help. He needed psychiatric medication, he said, and he’d been waiting for hours.

The man took a wet T-shirt, tied it to the top of a door, and, in front of the inspectors, began to hang himself.

The inspectors alerted an officer, who cut him down. (An assistant deputy warden later reported the incident as an “assault on staff,” as the man supposedly splashed the officer with the wet shirt.) The man survived, but not every incarcerated person in distress does: In the five weeks that followed, two men would die after hanging themselves with bed linens at the Eric M. Taylor Center, or EMTC, as the intake facility is known.

The near-hanging took place in EMTC’s “de-escalation unit,” a new type of Rikers module where officers send incarcerated people who’ve just been involved in a violent incident, including a “use of force” by staff. Previously, Rikers had been sending those people back to notoriously chaotic intake pens or to small caged shower stalls, which often resulted in further violence or self-harm. The new units are supposed to offer the calm and stability prerequisite for “de-escalation.”

Documents obtained by New York Focus via a public records request suggest that the new units have fallen short as a solution, and that they are plagued by much of the same chaos as their makeshift counterparts. The documents, along with federal court filings, also show that the city Department of Correction has been slow to use de-escalation cells, still relying on intake pens and caged showers. And they reveal further evidence of brutal conditions in the shower stalls, known as “decontamination units,” where people confined for hours have repeatedly been found screaming, injured, and wheeled out on stretchers.

The records surface as the DOC is preparing for a contentious City Council hearing this week, during which councilmembers — including Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is stepping in to chair the event — are expected to drill officials over allegedly slow-walking a plan to close Rikers.

The hearing comes shortly after the department escaped a potential contempt of court ruling in a nearly 12-year federal case over conditions on Rikers Island. The judge demanded basic reform measures to monitor Rikers intake in 2021, but the DOC still doesn’t have reliable systems to track how long people spend in intake pens, which have no beds and frequently lack working bathrooms. Excusing the department from contempt, the judge argued that Rikers has too many problems to apply “granular focus” to any one issue.

“It’s not like the wool is being successfully pulled over these [officials’] eyes,” said Sarena Townsend, a former DOC internal investigator. “They themselves know they’re being duped. They themselves have seen the evidence.”

In response to requests for comment, the DOC asked for copies of documents New York Focus obtained — then ignored repeated follow-ups.

EMTC’S DE-ESCALATION unit was in chaos on the August morning that officials from the New York City Board of Correction, a jail oversight agency, visited.

When they arrived, the floor was flooded, according to a memo obtained by New York Focus. And while all Rikers units are supposed to have at least two officers overseeing them — one in the control room and one on the floor — no one was staffing the floor post.

The man who tried to hang himself had two unit mates. One was asleep, and the other reported that he had recently “self-injured” after spending nearly nine hours in another type of de-escalation area: the small, caged “decontamination” shower in intake. Decontamination units are meant to quickly allow people to rinse off after getting pepper sprayed, per official policy. But the jail agency uses them to stash people after other violent incidents.

In September, photos uncovered by Gothamist showed a man having to be removed from EMTC intake’s decontamination cage on a gurney “due to self harm” after officers stashed him there for nearly 24 hours. DOC policy dictates that no one should be held in de-escalation confinement for more than six hours without “reauthorization.”

In June, Elijah Muhammad attempted to strangle himself in the EMTC decontamination cage, where officers had sent him even though he hadn’t been pepper sprayed, according to documents obtained by NBC New York. Just weeks after that suicide attempt, Rikers staff held Muhammad in a different de-escalation unit for 32 hours. Days later, he became the 10th of 19 people to die in DOC custody last year.

And less than a year before Muhammad, Brandon Rodriguez hanged himself in a decontamination unit at Rikers Island’s former new admissions facility.