When a federal judge ordered City Hall to make major structural improvements to its jails and release some people facing low level charges to alleviate overcrowding, reformers hailed what they described as a major legal victory.
Yet the case — known as “Benjamin v. Malcolm” after the lead plaintiff and jail commissioner when it was filed in 1974 — has dragged on for 50 years and counting.
The litigation appears to be the longest open court case on the Manhattan federal docket, according to lawyers involved in it.
The case initially revolved around poor conditions tied to overcrowding as the population on Rikers Island and the city’s other jails swelled to approximately 13,000.
While space is no longer a major issue, the case has gradually morphed into federal oversight over environmental conditions such as fire safety, sanitation, and ventilation.
Over the years, a string of six mayors and their top jail officials have been unable or unwilling to meet the basic benchmarks negotiated as part of the legal agreement, court records show.
In 1982, lawyers for the detainees filed a contempt motion alleging that the city was failing to comply with most of the provisions of the consent judgements. As a result, the Office of Compliance Consultants which has essentially worked as a court monitor. That office researches conditions and releases quarterly reports.
The office’s budget is paid by the city and has staff members who are some Correction Department DOC employees approved by all parties. The team has shrunk from 26 in 2007 to just a handful of people now, with no one serving in the director role.
The office’s latest report, filed in July, revealed that some detainees were being held in a housing unit where the only ventilation vent was totally blocked after it was painted over during some prior fix-up. It also showed that multiple areas on Rikers lacked operational fire alarms and at least one housing unit was overrun by rodents.
‘An Important Question’
As Malcolm case oversight stretches into its fifth decade, a similar case with a separate longstanding federal monitor is nearing a major decision which could take control of jails away from the Department of Correction.
Last month, Laura Taylor Swain, the judge in that case, ordered each side to come up with a game plan for a possible third-party receiver overseen by the court to take over the troubled jail system.
“It is clear that court orders alone have not effectively accomplished improvements on safety,” she said during a Sept. 25 hearing in lower Manhattan.
The so-called receiver could be given control over the entire department including the physical conditions on Rikers, essentially taking over the responsibilities of the Benjamin case.
But the receiver, if appointed, may also be limited, according to legal experts.
In California, for instance, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson appointed Robert Sillen as a receiver in June 2005 to operate and reform medical care for state prisoners.
Additionally, in Cook County, Ill. the court-appointed receiver just had control of the facility for juvenile offenders.
In both cases, local officials retained control over the rest of the system.
As for the Benjamin case, there have been so many court orders people involved can’t even begin to tally them.
That’s not what public defenders thought would happen when the case was started.
“If you could have gone back in time and talked to people who were really knowledgeable 50 years ago, they would have said, ‘The courts are really doing a terrific job of raising consciousness about this,’” said Michael Mushlin, who was a staff attorney and project director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society when an agreement in the Benjamin was negotiated with the Koch administration.
“It seemed that it was an obtainable, not idealistic, you know, utopian goal,” he added. “Why we were not successful is an important question.”
Judge Roulette
The case has gone on so long that two judges who once oversaw it have since passed away.
The case was initially handled by Manhattan federal court judge Morris Lasker who “forced the city to clean up jails,” according to the headline of his 2009 New York Times obituary.
When Lasker left the Manhattan bench in 1995, Judge Harold Baer picked up the case and took pride in staying on top of all the outstanding issues, according to Veronica Vela, a supervising attorney with the Prisoners’ Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society who’s been the lead attorney on the case over the past 15 years.
“For many years, we had a very involved judge who was very knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the cases and knew, like, what was the most recent thing that had been done in fire safety and where we were on lighting,” Vela told THE CITY. In 2007, Baer even wrote an article detailing the history of the case and his 12-year role in the ongoing litigation for the New York Law School Review.
“The changes that were necessary to protect the constitutional rights of detainees have now been accomplished or are within reach,” he wrote in a 51-page essay. with 339 footnotes.
“While it took considerable time and effort by the court and the parties, such changes were unlikely to be accomplished through legislative action,” he added.
Nearly 17 years later, the case remains open and neither side is even talking about some type of permanent solution being within reach.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska is currently handling the case.
Clean Your Cell
Under the long negotiated agreement, jail officials promised to maintain sanitary spaces with working toilets, some type of window, and proper ventilation inside of jails.
But the lack of basic sanitary conditions remains an ongoing problem in part because the facilities are aging and the city has neglected to properly maintain them over the years, court records show.
“The infrastructure is crumbling,” Vela said. “And because there’s not a lot of oversight, or keeping people accountable for not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and keeping the jails clean, they’re just not clean and in some regards not cleanable.”
Martin Horn, who was the city Correction Department commissioner from January 2003 until August 2009, tried to meet the requirements set by the court as part of the Benjamin case.
“Look, there were things about Benjamin that were good,” he told THE CITY.
“Certainly the initial filing of the case was warranted, and it led to improvements.”
When he first became commissioner, he devoted time to ensuring compliance with the longstanding oversight case, he said.
“I sort of set a goal for myself to be the guy that got us out from under it,” he recalled.
Mushlin credited Horn with making the effort but noted former Mayor Michael Bloomberg rarely cared about the city’s lockups.
“I think Marty was a very professional, very sincere, very decent person who really did try to do the right thing,” Mushlin said. “I consider him a friend.”
“But you know, Marty also told me that he met with Bloomberg, I think, twice in eight years,” he added. “How was it that he was able to run this department for eight years and the mayor had no need to meet with him? To me, the answer to that question is because the federal courts didn’t require him to make the changes that were necessary to avoid this horror show that we now have on Rikers Island.”
Close Rikers
Horn said the ongoing case was one of the reasons he was an early supporter of a plan to close the decrepit facilities on Rikers and replace them with so-called borough based jails closer to criminal courthouses in each borough.
“The big environmental issue that we couldn’t resolve was fire safety,” he said. “In some respects, it led to my determination that we had to get out from under those facilities because you just couldn’t make those facilities meet the current fire safety standards.”
In October 2019, the City Council voted to close Rikers Island by 2026. The deadline has since been pushed back to at least 2030 with no concrete date in sight as plans for a new jail in lower Manhattan remain in flux.
The push to close Rikers has complicated a long standing push to improve conditions for people currently incarcerated on the island by the East River, according to Vela.
“It created a problem for those of us who work on conditions issues,because we knew that in the meantime people still have to be safe on the island,” she said. “And so there was a real tension there.”
But only top level jail officials are dealing with the plan to create new jails, she added, arguing that the frontline maintenance staff should still be able to repair lockups on Rikers.
“The people who are in charge of making sure that sanitation is maintained in the jail are not the same people trying to close it down and get the population down, and get the new jails open,” she said. “So it’s not really having to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Horn contends the compliance consultants who operate like a court-appointed monitor have a built-in interest to keep the case going so they remain employed.
“They really were asking for a standard that in that setting I’m not sure was realistic,” he said. “And again, the physical plant worked against you at every turn.”
Vela maintained that the goals set by the case are modest.
“I think some of this is very basic stuff that that really should be expected of any large city institution or agency,” she said. “For jail officials to say it’s just too much work for us to make sure that it’s clean and make sure that the fire safety systems are up to code, and make sure that people don’t die of heat exhaustion. I mean, it’s just kind of ridiculous, right? Like you have a budget of over a billion dollars a year.”
Meanwhile, Adams administration jail officials have made a renewed effort to comply with fire safety codes following a major blaze inside the medical unit on Rikers in April 2023. The fire injured some 20 people and spread because a water sprinkler in the area had been turned off for at least a year, according to a report by the city’s Board of Correction, which oversees the DOC.
“They’ve been pretty engaged on fire safety recently because there was that big fire,” Vela said.
The ongoing Benjamin case is a microcosm of the push to reform conditions in city jails throughout the country, according to Mushlin.
“It’s a sad, sad story,” he said. “I think when you cast your eyes beyond New York and see what the condition of the typical American prison and the typical American jail is, abysmal.”
“And I think in a larger way,” he continued, “it even reflects the larger social forces that have been at play in this country over my professional lifetime.”
