On Thursday, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York, announced that the Justice Department is
planning to sue New York City over the treatment of adolescent inmates on
Rikers. Credit Photograph by Bebeto Matthews / AP
For thirty-four years, a lawyer in New York City
named Jonathan Chasan has been trying to stop officers from beating up inmates
on Rikers Island. He started working at the Legal Aid Society when he was
thirty-one years old, in a unit known as the Prisoners’ Rights Project. The job
could be very depressing: fielding calls from inmates who reported being
attacked by officers; collecting medical records describing broken bones and
perforated ear drums; studying photos of prisoners’ bruised and battered bodies;
filing lawsuits that dragged on and on. For years, nobody paid much attention
to what he was trying to do; Rikers was off the radar of most politicians and
reporters. But this year that has started to change—due, in part, to aggressive
reporting by the Times—and finally, this week, Chasan acquired the
ultimate ally: the Department of Justice.
On Thursday, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York, announced that the Justice Department is
planning to sue New York City over the treatment of adolescent inmates on
Rikers. It will also be asking the court to consolidate its lawsuit with a
class-action suit filed by Chasan and several other attorneys in 2011. That
lawsuit—known as Nunez v. City of New York—seeks to put an end to the “unnecessary
and excessive force inflicted upon inmates” by staff in all of New York City’s
jails.
The ninety-six-page complaint in the Nunez case
(which was put together by Chasan and eight other lawyers) teems with horror
stories. There is Shameik Smallwood, who had to have facial surgery and a metal
plate inserted because, the complaint alleges, officers “punched, kicked,
stomped and maced Mr. Smallwood’s face, ribs, and back while Mr. Smallwood lay
handcuffed on his stomach.” There is Rodney Brye, who had a “ ‘handball’ sized
hematoma that was bleeding on his head” after he was allegedly struck by
officers and lost consciousness. There is Christopher Graham, who had his jaw
fractured and endured reconstructive surgery after, the complaint alleges, an
officer “brutally and viciously punched Mr. Graham multiple times on the right
side of the face.”
New York City has paid a very steep price for these
abuses in recent years. The Nunez complaint includes a long
list of settlements won by injured inmates. A prisoner who lost part of his
hearing and eyesight after he was beaten by correction officers was awarded
five hundred and fifty thousand dollars; another, who suffered a spinal
fracture, collapsed lung, and fractured ribs, was awarded three hundred
thousand dollars; another, who endured an orbital fracture, was awarded three
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. How did the correction officers at
Rikers become so abusive? “Under Mayor Bloomberg, a lot of staff members in the
Department of Correction who had problematic use-of-force histories—some of
whom had been disciplined—were promoted,” Chasan says. “This had not occurred
under his predecessor, Giuliani’s commissioner, Bernard Kerik.”
One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from
Chasan’s work is that Kerik—who oversaw the city’s Department of Correction
from 1998 to 2000 and later became an inmate himself, serving three years in
federal prison for tax fraud, lying under oath to White House officials, and
other felonies—was, at least in Chasan’s view, far more effective at weeding
out abusive staff members than his successors have been. This contention is at
the center of Nunez v. City of New York, which was brought by the Legal
Aid Society as well as two law firms, Ropes & Gray and Emery Celli Brinkerhoff
& Abady.
As Chasan and his fellow lawyers put it in their
complaint, “The same persons who were named as defendants in previous
complaints or cited administratively for excessive force violations when they
were correction officers or captains are named again in this Complaint as
deputy wardens, wardens, and in some cases stand near the top of the
Department’s administrative hierarchy.”
Looking back at his three decades of work on behalf
of the city’s prisoners, Chasan considers his most significant achievement to
be a class-action lawsuit that focussed on the main solitary-confinement unit
on Rikers, known as the Central Punitive Segregation Unit (CPSU). That
lawsuit, Sheppard v. Phoenix, was filed in 1993 and revealed that officers
had seriously injured at least three hundred prisoners held in the CPSU during
the prior five years. “The CPSU occupies the third ring of hell in the field of
corrections in the United States,” a jail expert who visited the unit wrote in
a report. “Staff’s behavior in this highly secure unit is . . . psychopathic
behavior.” The Sheppard lawsuit dragged on for five years, but
the final outcome was that the Department of Correction was forced to make
numerous changes in the CPSU, including adding three hundred video cameras in
the unit. The number of broken bones and perforated eardrums began to drop.
The legal agreement that grew out of Sheppard v.
Phoenix expired in 2002, and eventually, Chasan says, the situation got
worse all over again. Did he ever think about giving up? Maybe moving into a
less depressing line of work? “No, no, no, no!” he says. “I grew up in this
city. I wanted to vindicate the rights of the poor, the non-white, the people
who are going through hell in the New York City jails. It’s worse now than it’s
ever been.” The fact that the Justice Department is seeking to consolidate its
lawsuit with his latest case would seem to increase the odds that Nunez v. City
of New York might result in lasting reform. Nothing is certain, however, and
just yesterday—amidst phone calls from journalists trying to learn more about
his lawsuit—Chasan received a call reporting that several inmates had arrived
at Bellevue Hospital with injuries that appeared to have been inflicted by
correction officers.
Jennifer Gonnerman joined The
New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015.
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