Is There Medical Neglect in New York City Jails?

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at medical care in New York City jails, which lawyers for incarcerated people say is inadequate.

Sixteen people died in New York City jails in 2021, the most in years. The chief medical officer of Correctional Health Services, Dr. Ross MacDonald, attributed the deaths to a collapse in basic jail operations, including delays in medical care. With hundreds of correction officers not showing up for work each day, there are not enough officers to take detainees to scheduled medical appointments.

“If they don’t get to the clinic when they need to, when they don’t get the laboratory tests that they need, when they don’t get to the hospital when they need to, serious complications are inevitable,” said Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the city’s Board of Correction, a watchdog agency that monitors jails, and a former director of health services on Rikers Island.

Now lawyers for detainees who say they have been denied adequate care are demanding that the Department of Correction be held in contempt for failing to comply with a court order requiring such care.

[Medical Care at Rikers Is Delayed for Thousands, Records Show]

Veronica Vela, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project, said the city could not show that it was meeting its obligations to provide access to care. The Legal Aid Society is representing the detainees along with Brooklyn Defender Services and the law firm Milbank LLP.

The lawyers say that inmates risk extreme sickness and pain when treatable medical problems go unattended. Sometimes stab wounds and burns are left untreated. Sometimes bug bites swell to grotesque proportions.

And delays compound the problems. My colleague Jonah E. Bromwich writes that it took the city nearly a year to get a man with a toothache to a dentist. By then, he was in agony. His mouth had become infected and was leaking blood and pus, according to court records and the lawyers. He was told that he would need extensive surgery.

Another man said that despite being bitten in the face by another detainee, he had not received medical care for more than a week, and a correction officer falsely recorded that he had refused care.

Brooke Menschel, a lawyer with Brooklyn Defender Services, said there had been hundreds of reports over the last several years from people who said they were not offered medical care, though the Department of Correction said they had refused it.

“We’ve got people who’ve been asking to go to the clinic for months, begging for care,” Ms. Menschel said. “And then all of a sudden, D.O.C. is saying they’re refusing. Logically speaking, that doesn’t really make sense.”

Data published by the department shows that over the last six months, detainees have refused medical care an average of 6,400 times each month. But people with experience providing medical services say the department’s numbers are almost certainly misleading.

Dr. Rachael Bedard, the former director of Geriatrics and Complex Care Services for the jail system, said that some portion of the refusals were most likely miscategorized by correction officers. “The officers are going to put refusal a lot when refusal didn’t happen,” she said.

The detainees are also seeking compensation for every instance since early December in which a detainee was denied medical care.

A spokesman for the city Law Department said that the department was reviewing the contempt motion. A Department of Correction spokesman said that ensuring people in custody get timely medical care “is and always has been a priority for the department.” And Benny Boscio, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said that it was “categorically false” that officers were denying detainees access to medical care.

Weather

It’s a mostly cloudy day in the 40s. Expect a chance of rain at night with temps in the high 30s.

alternate-side parking

Suspended through Saturday for snow removal operations.

The latest New York news

• The last of five criminal investigations into allegations of sexual misconduct against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo ended on Monday.

• Thomas J. Barrack Jr., who was charged with illegally lobbying then-President Donald J. Trump, suggested that a delay in his prosecution was politically motivated.

He made progress in the fight against homelessness

Steven Banks directed New York City’s homelessness strategy from 2016 through the end of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.

But for 33 years before joining city government, Banks was a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, where he regularly sued the city on behalf of homeless people. The litigation he led at Legal Aid hammered together, from the outside, much of the current shelter-and-services system. It also made him one of city government’s most notorious adversaries.

When he left office at the end of last year, 45,000 people remained in shelters, but the average number of people in shelters had declined over three years after rising for decades. Many thousands had been spared homelessness, and New York had become the first city in the country to guarantee that every tenant in housing court would have a lawyer.

Our writer Alex Carp says the department had been more effective than at any time in its history, yet still not effective enough.

A day for the shadow prognosticators

An encounter between Maior Urbis Novi Eboraci and Marmota monax? Not this year.

The first of those Latin terms means “the mayor of New York City” in English, though some Latin scholars suggest “Praefectus Urbis Novi Eboraci,” “praefectus” being a term for a supremely powerful official. Marmota monax is the zoological term for the marmot genus.

It’s Groundhog Day.

But Mayor Eric Adams will not attend the early-morning ceremony at the Staten Island Zoo, avoiding the risk of dropping Chuck, as former Mayor Bill de Blasio, above, did in 2014, or getting bitten by Chuck, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg did in 2009. A City Hall spokesman said the mayor would be attending the funeral for Officer Wilbert Mora this morning. Mora was shot along with his partner when a man opened fire during a domestic disturbance call last month.

The zoo, which plans to livestream the event at 7:20 a.m., said Adams had sent a video.

As for the reason behind all the silliness — predicting whether the weather will deliver six more weeks of winter — the zoo says its groundhog had an 85 percent accuracy rate.

About the mayoral mishaps: Bloomberg and de Blasio were both wearing gloves. Perhaps upset at being roused from a long winter’s nap in 2009, Chuck chomped. Bloomberg countered that Chuck was “a terrorist rodent who could very well have been trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

Five years later, De Blasio lost his grip — or the groundhog wriggled free. “Chuck was a little bit nervous in new hands,” the general curator and veterinarian of the zoo, Marc Valitutto, said at the time.

Either way, Chuck hit the ground hard. The New York Post later revealed that the groundhog had died from “acute internal injuries” a week later — and had actually been a female named Charlotte. The following year, another groundhog took her place, summoned from its underground home and riding into view on a little elevator. It did its prognosticating untouched by de Blasio.

The incident was not forgotten. Last year, around the time of the Democratic primary in June, @CharlotteGHogg — a Twitter account with the label “Bill de Blasio killed a groundhog” — conducted an informal survey. The question was: “Will New York’s next mayor murder a groundhog?” Of 199 responses, 76.9 percent said yes.

What we’re reading

• Jazlyn Guerra has bantered with Alicia Keys, Tom Holland and Jay-Z. And she’s only 11.

• Hyperallergic reported on the union petition filed by nearly 200 workers in the American Museum of Natural History.

• “Hangmen” has been saved from the executioner. The dark comedy will open on Broadway, two years after the production was canceled.

Metropolitan diary

Lost luggage key

Dear Diary:

I was on a trip from Queens, where I was born and raised, to the Soviet Union in 1985. I was at the Intourist hotel in Bukara when I realized I had lost the key to my luggage.

I went to the lobby, hoping to find someone who spoke English and might be able to help me. Somewhere in the polyglot din of tourists, I detected a New York accent.

I approached the group the voice was coming from, explained my dilemma and asked if I could try their luggage keys to see if one might work on my suitcase.

One woman pulled out a key that looked just right. It was. I opened my suitcase and then tried to hand the key back to its owner. She insisted that I keep it.

Curious, I asked what kind of luggage she had.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I got it on sale at Alexander’s.”

— Mary White

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. Thanks to Richard Carli, the Latin teacher at the Bronx High School of Science, and Matthew S. Santirocco, the dean of the College of Arts and Science of New York University, for help on the Latinisms.

See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Jeffrey Furticella, Rick Martinez, Sheelagh McNeill and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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