Rikers Island Visitors Put Through Hell To See Loved Ones: Report

RIKERS ISLAND, NY — New Yorkers face harsh conditions ranging from long waits to sexual abuse when trying to visit incarcerated loved ones on Rikers Island, prison reform advocates say in a new report released Tuesday.

Visitors to Rikers say jail guards often treat family members who make the trek to the complex like prisoners themselves, subjecting them to prohibted strip searches and forcing them to expose body parts, according to the Jails Action Coalition's report, titled "'It Makes Me Want To Cry': Visiting Rikers Island."

The Department of Corrections makes visiting the infamous island unnecessarily hard, even though visits can reduce recidivism and make prisons safer, says the report, which is based on interviews with more than 100 Rikers visitors conducted throughout last year.

"My dad felt so traumatized by the process that he decided he wasn't going to come back to visit Rikers Island again," said Umar Ali of the Urban Justice Center, who first visited a cousin Rikers with his father at age 16.

At least 45 women have filed lawsuits against the DOC accusing correction officers of strip-searching them, the report says. Their attorney told advocates that officers move visitors out of view of surveillance cameras to perform such banned searches, the report says.

The DOC says correction officers can only give visitors a pat-down search — which doesn't require them to remove any clothing — and must get written consent before performing one. A guard of the visitor's gender has to be present for any such searches.

But women and men told advocates stories of guards forcing them to strip to their underwear and show guards their genitals and other body parts — sometimes in view of other visitors — even though DOC policy bans such practices.

"Correction officers have verbally violated me, threatened to put their hand in my vagina and gone as far as to expose my breast in an open space to search me," Kamilah Newton, who visited her child's father on the island, said in testimony an advocate read to the Board of Corrections. "I shouldn’t have to give up my rights just to visit someone."

Correction officers also act generally "disrespectful and rude" toward visitors, treating them like they're inmates themselves, the report says. Guards often "make up thier own rules" about what visitors can wear and sometimes send them home without offering a cover-up, according to the report.

Candie Hailey-Johnson, who spent three years in solitary confinement on Rikers, said guards once ridiculed her visiting sister for serving in the U.S. Air Force, suggesting it was lesser than other military branches.

"My sister’s visit was supposed to be very special to me, but my sister was very sad," Hailey-Johnson said.

Sometimes officers cut visits short or cancel them, despite the fact that visiting Rikers can take a full day away from inmates' loved ones, the report says. The trip to and from the island on the Q100 bus from Queens Plaza takes half an hour each way. Long waits to go through a central metal detector, more waiting to see the inmate in the jail itself, make visits even more arduous, the report says. Some visitors reported spending up to eight hours to see their incarcerated loved ones.

The long tables and scratched-up glass in Rikers' often "dirty and uncomfortable" visiting rooms disconnect visitors from the inmates they're there to see, making the process even more frustrating, the report says.

"Visits continue to be discouraging, challenging and even traumatizing for those visiting their friends and family incarcerated on Rikers," said Laura Fettig, a Jails Action Coalition advocate, said at Tuesday's Board of Corrections meeting.

The 100 people the Jails Action Coalition interviewed represented a very small sample of Rikers visitors, DOC spokesman Peter Thorne said. The island saw more than 1,000 visitors on the average day in just the first three months of the current fiscal year.

"The Department has taken steps to ensure that all visitors are treated with respect, and we have made it easier for visitors to file complaints and have installed cameras in the search areas for greater transparency," Thorne said in a statement. "We take all visitor complaints seriously."

The DOC says its screening processes have helped root out contraband that visitors sometimes try to bring inside. Officers confiscated weapons 882 times in the 2017 fiscal year, up sharply from 194 in 2016. Drugs were found on 732 visitors in 2017, up from 364 in 2016.

The department recently placed civilian greeters at Rikers' central visitors' center to guide visitors through the process. There are also new kiosks that help visitors find inmates more quickly.

Elias Husamudeen, president the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, the labor union representing jail officers, called the report unfair to correction officers, who he said face attacks from inmates on a daily basis.

"There's nothing in here that has anything to do with the safety of running the jail," Husamudeen told the Board of Corrections.

(Lead image: People board a Q100 bus headed to Rikers Island in March 2017. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)