New York City Council and Mayor Adams Reach Impasse Over Solitary Confinement

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams talks about a report on how to end homelessness by 2026 in Manhattan on July 29, 2022. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

New York’s City Council is girding for a legal showdown against Mayor Eric Adams if a ban on solitary confinement that the council pushed through over the mayor’s veto fails to go into effect as scheduled on July 28.

Bill 549-A, which enjoyed the sponsorship of Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and support from members of the council’s majority, bans the use—in most circumstances—of solitary confinement on Rikers Island and in other city jails, mandating that inmates have at least 14 hours per day among the facilities’ general populations. It also seeks to establish due process protections for inmates before prison officials can place them in isolation for any period of time.

Mr. Williams and other progressives hail the legislation as a humane response to a practice they say has extremely deleterious effects on inmates’ mental health and contributes to isolation and suicidal thoughts.

But some criminal justice experts say the bill ignores the realities that they have personally witnessed on Rikers Island and in other prisons in the New York area, where some inmates are already so mentally ill that they cannot safely interact with fellow prisoners or with correctional staff.

A Controversial Bill

Mr. Williams has been a passionate critic of solitary confinement, calling it a cruel, “indefensible” practice that does nothing to advance public safety and a relic of “failed systems.”

On Dec. 20, 2023, the city council approved Mr. Williams’s proposed ban on solitary confinement by a wide majority, with 39 members voting in favor and only seven against.

The bill then went for signing to Mr. Adams, who instead vetoed it in January 2024, along with another bill, 586-A. Known as the “How Many Stops Act,” it would require police officers to document the details of every interaction with a member of the public, keeping records of the race of each person they stop and question.

In vetoing 549-A, Mr. Adams maintained that his administration does not support solitary confinement and that New York prisons generally do not practice it, but that, in some instances, corrections officers may isolate individuals to protect themselves and other prisoners.

But the city council’s majority refused to budge. On Jan. 30, the council passed both 549-A and 586-A by strong majorities, 42–9, rendering the mayor’s veto invalid.

Just before the Jan. 30 vote, in a statement attributed to spokesperson Rendy Desamours, the council blamed harsh conditions on Rikers Island for the deaths of two inmates in the space of three weeks and argued that it was necessary to strike a balance between protecting the safety of prison staff and concern for inmates.

“The dangerous status quo and dire conditions that have placed Rikers in the position of federal receivership cannot continue unabated and must be confronted,” the city council stated.

Mr. Adams still did not give up. On June 5, an administration lawyer wrote to Judge Laura Taylor Swain asking for a hold on enforcing 549-A.

This prompted the city council to dig in its heels even more. On July 18, the council voted to pass a resolution empowering Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to pursue legal action against the mayor if he does not back down.

With the July 28 implementation deadline approaching and the mayor still not changing his position, legal action on the part of the city council remains a distinct possibility.

Rikers Island, home to the main jail complex, is situated in the East River between the Queens and Bronx boroughs in New York on Oct. 19, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A Dangerous Environment

The city council’s strong stance against solitary confinement enjoys considerable grassroots support. Its views on the subject are in harmony with public policy organizations such as The Remedy Project, a New York-based advocacy group that seeks to address what it calls on its website “one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time—the U.S. prison system.”

In the view of Anna Sugrue, a co-founder of The Remedy Project, solitary confinement amounts to torture, and the abuses it inflicts take myriad forms.

“Aside from its well-documented psychological consequences, solitary confinement provides an extra cover of darkness for some of the most heinous abuse by correctional officers, including physical and sexual assault, malnourishment, medical neglect, and illegal restrictions on correspondence,” Ms. Sugrue told The Epoch Times.

“Placement in solitary confinement is also totally at the discretion of prison staff, and we’ve seen it used countless times in retaliation for filing, or attempting to file, complaints.”

Others vehemently disagree. In reality, they say, isolating inmates is sometimes necessary given the severe mental health problems that afflict some prisoners and the impossibility of their safely interacting with others.

That’s the view of Harvey Kushner, chair of the criminal justice department at Long Island University in Brookville, New York, who helped the Department of Corrections run literacy and English-as-a-second language programs for Rikers Island inmates in the 1980s and 1990s when overcrowding was sometimes a serious issue in the city’s prisons.

Reflecting on that time, Mr. Kushner said he had many experiences with inmates who were violent and had to be kept separate for the safety of other prisoners as much as that of the prison staff.

“Quite frankly, they don’t really practice traditional ‘solitary confinement,’ as the term would imply; they call it restrictive confinement, and it is totally necessary. When you think of the population that correction officers have to deal with on Rikers Island, or any facility that the Department of Corrections runs, it’s a monumental task,” Mr. Kushner told The Epoch Times.

New York Mayor Eric Adams speaks during his weekly press conference at New York City Hall on Nov. 14, 2023. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

A Critical Juncture

Mr. Kushner praised Mr. Adams for taking a firm stance on an issue vital to the safety of corrections officers.

“I think that he wants to be known as more ‘law and order,’ he wants to run on that issue,” he said referring the mayor’s reelection next year.

Michael Alcazar, a former New York City police detective who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, agreed that the issue of crime, whether inside prisons or on the streets, is of the utmost importance to voters in the city.

“If Adams and his team struggle to reduce crime, especially in the summer months,” this could pose problems for the mayor, Mr. Alcazar told The Epoch Times.

One potential challenger to the mayor is New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, whose general stance on public safety is more in line with city council than with Mr. Adams.

The comptroller supports “policies focusing on police reform and reallocating resources to social services, which contrasts sharply with Adams’s moderate approach, blending reform with traditional law enforcement strategies,” said Mr. Alcazar.

Neither Mr. Adams nor Speaker Adrienne Adams responded by publication time to a request for comment.