The more than 700 claims of rape and sexual assault recently brought by women once incarcerated in Rikers Island’s jails went largely unaddressed by a federal monitor paid $21.2 million to ensure compliance with a court order to keep detainees safe.
The monitor, Steve Martin, was appointed in 2016 after the federal Justice Department described city jails as a place where “a culture of violence endures even while a code of silence prevails.” He was hired with the initial goals of reducing officers’ use of force and improving the treatment of teenage detainees.
But data shows that most rates of violence and disorder at the jails have only worsened over his eight-year tenure, which has involved dozens of court filings and tens of thousands of pages of findings on conditions at the jails.
And one glaring measure of abuse went mostly unexamined. A recent Gothamist analysis found hundreds of lawsuits filed by former detainees – the majority of them women – alleging sexual assault by staff. These claims were neither documented nor investigated by the federal monitor because the original legal settlement installing him specified that he would only address allegations of assault on detainees younger than 19 — a cohort whose numbers dropped dramatically when teenagers were moved out of the jails and into youth detention facilities two years later.
Of the few allegations of sexual abuse that Martin was charged with examining, he found that the Department of Correction grossly mishandled the investigations. Still, even as he expanded the scope of his oversight over time to include issues like fires and suicides, his reports never examined the issue of sexual assault for those older than 18.
Martin does not speak to the media, in accordance with a provision in the consent judgment barring public comment. The cost to city taxpayers for the monitor, his team and related expenses is $21.2 million, according to updated figures from the city law department.
The federal judge overseeing the original 2011 lawsuit that led to the settlement and the monitor — known as a consent judgment — is now considering whether to bolster oversight. This could mean stripping control of the jails from the correction commissioner and handing the reins over to a federal appointee known as a receiver.
The Legal Aid Society, which filed the original lawsuit, is among the entities advocating for this.
“If the city had met its obligations in [the settlement], I think we would have seen a significant reduction in sexual assault because the city would’ve invested in supervision, and a culture of accountability would have reverberated throughout the agency,” said Mary Lynne Werlwas, director of Legal Aid’s Prisoner Rights’ Project. “They did not make these investments … and the ripple effects of the lack of leadership and lack of supervision and impunity for misconduct is seen in all aspects of staff brutality.”
From October 2015 until the end of 2016, the monitor reported 17 sexual abuse allegations made by young detainees against officers, and he excoriated the Department of Correction for how those cases were handled. None were investigated by department staff within the required 60 days, he wrote, and “investigators failed to interview witnesses to the alleged events.” One Department of Correction investigator even cited an alleged victim’s positive drug test as a reason to discount the alleged victim’s claims — a factor that the monitor concluded was “irrelevant.”
“These deficiencies are troubling,” concluded Martin and his team.
In 2017, Martin’s assessment of the handling of young people’s allegations of sexual abuse was just as damning, citing department investigators’ failure to interview witnesses, “ask key follow-up questions” and “collect relevant evidence.”
Martin’s conclusion that the DOC mishandled the sexual assault claims of young detainees is echoed in the 719 lawsuits recently filed under the Adult Survivors Act and analyzed in a Gothamist investigation. They allege that correction officials knew or should have known about rampant sexual abuse on Rikers Island and failed to properly supervise and discipline employees accused of assault.
By 2018, very few sexual abuse investigations were being reviewed by the monitor. That’s because a newly enacted law, Raise the Age, meant 16- and 17-year-old detainees were transferred out of New York City jails and placed in youth facilities. And because the initial consent judgment only addressed sexual abuse for those in the jails under the age of 19, for the last several years the monitor has only examined complaints of sexual assault brought by those who are exactly 18 years old.
In 2019, the monitor reported 10 allegations by 18-year-olds of staff-on-youth abuse. He concluded that investigations of these complaints and those alleging sexual harassment had improved: “investigators’ practices were sound, the findings were reasonable, and cases were closed in a reasonable time period.”
But his evaluation was based on allegations from a small fraction of Rikers’ overall population. There were no allegations of sexual abuse by 18-year-old detainees in 2020 or 2021, the monitor said, and so the Department of Correction was deemed in “substantial compliance” in how it handled such probes — even though none were actually conducted during those years. There have been no monitor reports with such compliance ratings filed since.
Elizabeth Glazer, a former city and state criminal justice official who keeps tabs on the monitor’s findings, said the list of issues documented by the monitor as causes of the skyrocketing violence has expanded over time. The monitor has “diagnosed [the problem] as the complete collapse of management, discipline and accountability” among staff, Glazer said, so “the things that the court is following and that the city is responsible for fixing has grown.”
But sexual violence has not come to the fore as one of those issues, she said. “The issues were all about use of force, about head strikes, about deaths, about stabbings and slashings, assaults and fights,” she said. “But this undercurrent of persistent sexual assault has not been a marker. And that’s one reason why the [Gothamist] story was so shocking… It appears to be embedded in the culture and management of the jails.”
Glazer said it was “tragic” that “this was never raised as a feature of the depravity of life inside” despite the numerous entities that now monitor what’s happening inside the jails, such as the state Commission of Correction, the city’s Board of Correction and the federal monitor.
Part of the reason why sexual assault by officers against adults wasn’t included in the initial legal settlement that initially established the monitor’s role, according to lawyers involved at the time, is that rape is always illegal. The monitor’s role was to navigate behavior like use of force, which had existed in a murky space requiring more specific guidelines and rules.
But while sexual assault wasn’t under the consent judgment’s purview, it should still be relevant for the federal monitor, Glazer said, because “it’s a reflection that management is broken, accountability is gone and it’s a free-for-all inside.”
The headline of this story has been updated to reflect the latest cost of the federal overseer.
