Rikers Island Inmates Will Ride Out Hurricane Irene, Despite Living On Rikers Island

Via Wikicommons

While residents living in Zone A areas head to shelters, and the rest of the city hunkers down for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, one group of New Yorkers who live on a tiny island between Queens and the Bronx are staying put: prisoners at Rikers Island. In a press conference yesterday, Mother Jones reports that Mayor Bloomberg said, "We are not evacuating Rikers Island." As the city's Department of Corrections tells the New York Times, "no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day exists."

Of the 12,000 prisoners on Rikers, many are those with mental illnesses, and juveniles and pre-trial detainees (those who have not been convicted of a crime) are also housed there. Three-quarters of the jails at Rikers are built atop a landfill, "which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters." Lest we wonder why failing to evacuate prisoners is a problem, here is an excerpt from an ACLU report on Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans, which was not evacuated during Hurricane Katrina.

[A] culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain “where they belong,” despite the mayor’s decision to declare the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.
As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests …

Prisoners went days without food, water and ventilation, and deputies admit that they received no emergency training and were entirely unaware of any evacuation plan. Even some prison guards were left locked in at their posts to fend for themselves, unable to provide assistance to prisoners in need.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Christopher Robbins in News on August 27, 2011 11:30 AM

Comments [rss]

Oswald Cobblepot

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg dodged a bullet with the weakening of this storm. If those inmates had been forced to drown or starve in their cages while hundreds of thousands of free men were compelled to flee their homes, he would have a lot of explaining to do. Here's Jim Ridgeway, the reporter who broke the story, being interviewed on Democracy Now!: http://www.democracynow.org/20...

SFNY

If this non-evacuation goes awry, it's going to be a serious shitstorm with many possible consequences, from lawsuits to loss of life.

(And then it will be made into a horrible movie starring Nicolas Cage and Ice Cube, with Ernest Borgnine as Det. Lt. Mike Rogo.)

jamieob256

This s
On a sort of related note, the following is posted on Gothmist's Newsmap:

Unusual Incident | Person Walked Into The Police Station With Handcuffs On And Needs Pd Assistance With Taking Them Off, Esu Requested To The scene. 155-09 Jewel Ave Queens, NY | 8/27/2011 9:29 a.m.

Mayrae Ventura

SOOOOOOOOO THIS IS THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION ALEX........BUMMER MAN, I PRAY THEY ARE SAFE

SonnyBobiche

Murderers and rapists included?

Dakota Summers

2/3 of the inmates are pretrial detainees who have been charged but NOT convicted of a crime. Coffin v. United States established presumption of innocence in 1895.

anon435254

I think that 2/3 is not the correct number. The article says, "many are those with mental illnesses, and juveniles and pre-trial detainees". Many typically means less than half. I am all for universal human rights, but when you make up statistics out of thin air it undermines the argument of those who agree with you, especially in a forum where all of your responses will be read in close association.

Dakota Summers

I got that statistic from the book Inside Rikers (2002) by Jennifer Wynn, not thin air.

SFNY

Rikers is a jail, not a prison, which means higher %s of pre-trial detainees. According to this link, the Rikers population is 80% pre-trial detainees, which includes stop & frisked teens who couldn't make bail. And 25% are mentally ill.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/a...

"At any one time on Rikers, there are approximately 14,000 inmates, adding up to about 100,000 admissions in a given year.

They are not mass murderers, but alleged drunk drivers or drug addicts, among others convicted of misdemeanors, and about 80 percent are being detained prior to trial.

About a quarter are mentally ill, according to the health department, and a third are seen as extremely frail, plagued by severe drug addictions or chronic illnesses.

An average inmate stays 40 days, but the most frequent discharge from Rikers Island is on day one. The population is constantly changing, moving from facility to facility or from imprisonment to freedom."

Patricia Lutz

Rikers Island, "world's largest penal colony," is a small island in the East River and would seem to be at especially high risk of flooding. Apparently, Mayor Bloomberg--while fueling the City's panic by shutting down the subway and announcing that power may be "preemptively" cut off in Lower Manhattan--is not concerned about the fate of those stuck on Rikers Island, who are disproportionately poor and Black or Latino.
Note: The first sentence of 2nd paragraph has a typo: "pre-trail detainees" should be "pre-trial detainees."