New York City on Wednesday settled a lawsuit for $53 million with thousands of pretrial detainees on Rikers Island who were wrongfully sent to solitary confinement, where they were locked in a small cell for up to 23 hours a day.
It’s one of the largest city payouts involving the Corrections Department, which is facing multiple other lawsuits.
NYC RIKERS OFFICER CLEARED OF WRONGDOING IN REACTION TO VIOLENT ASSAULT
Detainees accused of breaking the rules or not following orders while awaiting trial in city jails are entitled to hearings before they are transferred into restrictive housing. However, the Corrections Department failed to grant those mandatory hearings to 4,400 prisoners between March 2018 and June 2022.
“The department brazenly ignored the Constitution,” Eric Heckler, one of the lawyers who filed the class-action lawsuit, told the New York Times. “They knew this was highly restrictive housing, and they knew it was illegal, but they kept using it anyway.”
A spokesman for New York’s Law Department cited safety as one of the city’s highest priorities and said the decision to place some people in the cramped, isolated cells “reflected these safety concerns.”
Advocates across the country have argued that prolonged isolation does more harm than good and claim it creates long-lasting psychological damage. Several states have considered legislation banning the practice though there has been little progress made.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This isn’t the first time New York’s Corrections Department has been in the headlines.
Last year, the city agreed to pay as much as $300 million to thousands of people who were kept in jail for hours or, in some cases, days after they made bail. In that case, the city said it would pay $3,500 to every person who claimed that his or her release was delayed beyond three hours. Since 2014, the number of people who claimed to be detained longer than they should have has hit the 72,000 mark, though some detainees were delayed more than once.
