New York City officials and civil rights advocates criticize mayor’s order repealing new law banning solitary confinement | Nation

“This is a shameful tactic, another desperate abuse of power by this administration to ignore laws it opposes. The abuse of the ‘state of emergency’ is dangerous, especially by a mayor who claims to care about public safety,” said public advocate Jumaane Williams, who helped introduce the law.

“Now the mayor wants to override yet another of our city’s laws to maintain a status quo that threatens people on both sides of the bars. At the last possible moment, he declares a ‘state of emergency’ without public notice or legitimate justification.”

The mayor’s order removed the four-hour limit on how long inmates can be held in “de-escalation custody.” Instead, corrections officials are allowed to release inmates “as soon as possible” once they no longer pose a danger to themselves or others, the order states.

The mayor also scrapped a section of the law that restricts the use of shackles in the transport of prisoners.

A City Hall spokesman said the DOC has been “focused squarely” on reducing violence in the city’s jails and argued that the mayor’s “narrowly tailored” order aims to continue doing so.

“The federal overseer appointed as part of the Nunez settlement has now stated in writing on multiple occasions that attempting to implement Local Law 42 at this time would be ‘dangerous’ to the people who live and work in our prisons,” the spokesman wrote.

Williams, on the other hand, called the move “inexcusable” and vowed that the council would “explore all means” to ensure that the city fulfills its “duty” to implement a law that has already been passed by the council twice.

City Councilwoman Sandy Nurse also vehemently criticized the order on Sunday.

“I am disappointed but not surprised that Mayor Adams has not made any effort to develop an implementation plan, even a phased plan. In the meantime, his Department of Corrections has repeatedly prevented Charizma Jones from receiving treatment, effectively killing her,” Nurse said, referring to a 23-year-old inmate who died on July 14.

Jones died of unknown causes after medical records showed that correctional officers repeatedly prevented nurses from entering her cell to check on her on May 5 and 6, even though she was suffering from a rash covering much of her body.

Members of the #HALTsolitary campaign, an organization that helped create the law, pointed to the deaths of Layleen Cubilette-Polanco in 2019 and Kalief Browder in 2015. Both inmates died in solitary confinement on Rikers Island.

“The mayor and the Department of Corrections must stop playing legal games with people’s lives and instead implement Local Law 42 to finally end solitary confinement and implement alternative forms of segregation that are proven to reduce violence and improve the safety and health of all,” Anisah Sabur of #HALTsolitary said in a statement.

The bill, which passed in December after a year of debate, was vetoed by Adams in January. The City Council immediately overrode the veto. The city then sent a letter to U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain asking her to suspend parts of the law, saying the law makes prisons unsafe.

Swain is presiding over Nunez v. City of New York, a 2011 class-action lawsuit that led to the appointment of a monitor in 2015 to oversee staff violence and use of force in the prisons. The monitor, Steve Martin, wrote a letter in January expressing his own concerns about the solitary confinement ban, saying it would “exacerbate already dangerous conditions.”