When Visitors Were Banned From Rikers Island, Even More Drugs Showed Up (New York: 2014)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Rikers is so corrupt. Some are even asking for the nat'l guard or Biden to step in. Apparently, it isn't only Rikers.
"The Texas prison system also stopped visits and limited mail but the guards found as many drugs and wrote up more detainees for that violation, the Marshall Project reported".
Last April, Thomas Earl Braunson III was found dead in his cell on Rikers Island. The 35-year-old had struggled with addiction throughout his life, family said, and in the end that battle proved fatal.
Braunson, who had become a father just three months earlier, succumbed to a deadly dose of fentanyl, heroin, and PCP, according to the city Medical Examiner.
Department of Correction investigators are still trying to determine how that contraband got to Braunson behind bars. But his access to drugs was hardly an outlier during the height of New York City’s pandemic when social programs were shut down and visitors were not allowed on the island.
In fact, internal jails numbers suggest that in that period — when only corrections officers, staff, and eventually certain contractors and service providers could enter — detainees may have had even greater access to drugs.
Between April of 2020 and May of 2021, correction department authorities seized banned drugs inside city jails more than 2,600 times, according to data obtained by THE CITY.
That’s more than double the number of such seizures made during the same time period from 2018 to 2019 when the jail population was larger and there were more people coming and going, Correction department records show.
Pointing Fingers
For criminal justice reform advocates, the statistics point to a longstanding accusation.
“This data confirms what we’ve known all along — it is corrupt DOC staff who keep drugs flowing into Rikers,” said Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, a jail reform organization. “But instead of swift action to root out this corruption, we’ve seen investigators fired, and discipline that is either absent or takes years to enact.”
80%+ of workers and supervisors aren't white nor Asian. So who's smuggling and white doesn't the doc crackdown?
If visitors are banned and presumably there is no meth cooking, or poppy growing operation going on at Riker's, then logic dictates it MUST be the staff smuggling in the drugs. When there is no crackdown, the clear implication is that those responsible for cracking down are in on the take.
Anything except corruption from bottom to top of the DOC running a big time drug smuggling ring is impossible to explain in any other way.
The same is probably going on in every prison in the country.
Days after taking over the city’s beleaguered Department of Correction, a senior official under Commissioner Louis Molina sought permission to ease a rule banning officers from wearing cargo pants with multiple pockets, THE CITY has learned.
The ban dates back to 2014 after an undercover city investigator was able to use those pockets to smuggle in drugs and alcohol. The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA) has been fighting to bring the casual attire back ever since.
In early January, the unidentified senior department official asked Dana Roth, the correction department inspector general at the city’s Department of Investigation, to rescind the recommended prohibition on cargo pants, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
“She told him no way,” the source said. “It’s a nonstarter.”
Diane Struzzi, a spokesperson for DOI, told THE CITY the agency “made clear to DOC that we stand behind the recommendation prohibiting the wearing of cargo pants by correction officers.”
COBA has long argued that its members are unfairly blamed for smuggling in drugs and weapons.
Drugs Spike When Only Guards Around
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
