New York Awards Up to $53 Million to Detainees Wrongly Held in Solitary

New York City has agreed to pay as much as $53 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of thousands of pretrial detainees on Rikers Island and in Manhattan who were wrongfully isolated and held in small cells for up to 23 hours per day, according to documents filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

People who are accused of breaking certain rules while awaiting trial in city jails are entitled to fair hearings before they are transferred from communal areas to restrictive housing, which sometimes includes solitary confinement, according to the settlement and Board of Correction rules.

The city Correction Department did not grant those mandatory hearings to about 4,400 detainees between March 2018 and June 2022, denying due process to people who had not been convicted of crimes, according to Eric Hecker, one of the lawyers who filed the class-action lawsuit.

“The department brazenly ignored the Constitution,” Mr. Hecker said in a statement. “They knew this was highly restrictive housing, and they knew it was illegal, but they kept using it anyway.”

Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for New York’s Law Department, called safety on Rikers one of the city’s highest priorities, and said that the decision to place some detainees in restrictive housing had “reflected these safety concerns.”

“The practices that led to this litigation have been modified,” he said. “This settlement is in the best interests of all parties.”

The deal, whose final size depends on how many wronged detainees claim their share, would be one of the largest city payouts ever involving the Correction Department. In November, the city agreed to pay as much as $300 million to thousands of jailed people whose releases were delayed for hours or even days after they made bail.

The agreement filed on Wednesday comes as legislative efforts to end solitary confinement are stalled. Advocates and researchers say prolonged isolation does long-lasting psychological damage to prisoners and impedes their rehabilitation.

In September, the City Council held a hearing to consider a bill that would end the practice, known in the jail system as punitive segregation, under which those accused of infractions that include harming staff or other detainees are held in a cell for most of the day. The Council has yet to hold or schedule another public meeting on the bill.

The multimillion dollar payout is also another blow to the agency as it tries to fend off a federal takeover. Lawyers representing people detained in the jail complex on Rikers Island argued in November that the city had mismanaged the lockup for years, and asked a federal judge to appoint an outsider to run it.

The judge, Laura T. Swain, has so far refrained from stripping the city of its control over Rikers. The next hearing on the matter is scheduled for April 27.

Thursday’s settlement ends a federal case in which, lawyers argued, jail officials sidestepped the Board of Correction.

The board, an oversight body, increased its efforts to limit restrictive housing for pretrial detainees in 2016. To circumvent this, the department put detainees they considered dangerous in three facilities, two on Rikers and one in Manhattan, according to court records.

In West Facility on Rikers, detainees could be kept alone for 23 hours a day, according to court records. In North Infirmary Command, also on Rikers, and 9 South, a unit in the now-shuttered Manhattan Detention Complex, detainees were kept in a cell with access to a separate room they shared with one or two other people.

But a jail rule makes clear that detainees who are presumed innocent should have reasonable leeway behind bars unless they have been formally found to have committed a serious infraction.

The settlement, lawyers in the case said, reinforces that pretrial detainees are entitled to live in communal housing, to be in common areas 14 hours per day and to eat together. They are entitled to engage in religious worship and other programming together too.

To revoke those rights, the lawyers said, would require formal notification and a fair hearing.

Cesar Rivera, 35, of the Bronx, was held at Rikers for about four years awaiting trial on homicide charges of which he was ultimately acquitted. He said that jail officials had labeled him a problem during previous stays and so he was wrongfully housed for 485 days — 14 months at West Facility, and two months at North Infirmary Command — during the period covered by the settlement.

Mr. Rivera said he spent most of that time alone. Some nights, he said, he was given a bowl of cereal without milk and would wait 24 hours to eat again.

He said he spent his days writing music and watching the news, turning up the television so that he could drown out the yelling and clanging of metal doors in the unit. Most of the time, he tried to imagine that he was somewhere else.

“I don’t like noise. I don’t like arguing. This changed me in so many ways that I need therapy to cope,” Mr. Rivera said.

“No human should be able to punish another human being like that, no matter what they did,” he added.