Above photo: Samantha Max / Gothamist.
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Women who say they were sexually abused by staff at the Rikers Island jail complex urged officials to take their allegations seriously at a City Council oversight hearing on Thursday.
“You hear our stories, you hear our pain, you hear our trauma. We tell it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again,” said Donna Hylton, who alleges a female captain raped her when she was a teenager at Rikers in the 1980s. “When will we be heard? When will we be believed?”
Hylton is one of more than 700 women who have sued New York City, alleging they were fondled, raped or otherwise sexually abused while in custody over the last 50 years. The lawsuits were filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window to bring sexual assault suits outside the statute of limitations. Gothamist has reported extensively on the lawsuits, prompting a review by the Bronx district attorney’s office and calls from elected officials for an independent investigation into alleged patterns of sexual abuse.
Over more than four hours on Thursday, councilmembers grilled Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie and other city officials, often citing Gothamist’s investigation. The correction commissioner pledged to do more to prevent and address sexual harassment and assault, both of incarcerated people and staff.
She also said she believed the accounts of the women who testified before the Council — after Councilmember Sandy Nurse repeatedly pressed her.
“I ask you, with all these allegations and what you heard today, do you believe that there’s a problem at Rikers?” Nurse asked. “Do you believe these stories?”
“Sitting here and listening to it, it really, it is concerning,” Maginley-Liddie told councilmembers. “And as a department, we have to really address these issues.”
The commissioner expressed support for two bills the Council is considering. One would require the department to implement an electronic case management system to keep track of sexual abuse allegations. The other would require the jail system to develop a “comprehensive” sex crimes training program.
Maginley-Liddie said the department is already in the process of procuring and implementing a system to manage investigations within the jails and that the sexual abuse unit will be the first to start using it. She said the agency has already started to train all of its staff on investigative procedures for sexual abuse cases and that she supports formalizing it as a requirement in city law.
“We take this issue extremely seriously,” Maginley-Liddie said. “We are committed to making improvements to ensure that we are not only in compliance with prior standards, but more importantly, that all people who live, work in or visit our facilities are safe. I am personally committed to continuing this work.”
Maginley-Liddie said the department hopes to hire 14 additional staffers to investigate allegations of sexual abuse who would join the 19 already in the unit. She said jobs are posted and the department is conducting interviews.
Several councilmembers questioned officials about delays in the investigative process and the department’s incredibly low substantiation rates for sexual abuse allegations. Gothamist has reported that more than 45% of investigations last year weren’t completed within the locally and federally mandated 90 days. Department of Correction data shows investigators found evidence of sexual assault or harassment for only 3.4% of complaints against either staff or detainees during that time, compared to a national average substantiation rate of 6%.
Ingris Martinez, deputy director of investigation for the department’s sexual abuse unit, attributed the backlog and low substantiation rate to a handful of factors, including high turnover among investigators. She said the department has also started to conduct more thorough investigations at the outset of a complaint, which sometimes slows down the process.
“We take our time,” Martinez said. “We ensure that all the information is documented that one time, not to re-victimize our persons in custody.”
Martinez added that decisions about whether to substantiate allegations are based on various forms of evidence, including rape kits, electronic monitoring and surveillance video. She said sometimes those sources of information aren’t enough to determine whether someone has been sexually abused, especially if the person is alleging verbal harassment, because the surveillance cameras don’t capture sound.
Maginley-Liddie said the department is buying body-worn cameras, which would also record audio. She said she expects the department to have enough for every officer by December.
Councilmember Tiffany Caban, a former public defender, asked why people’s testimony isn’t enough to substantiate an allegation, given that investigators only have to find a preponderance of the evidence — meaning it’s more likely than not that the allegation is true.
“The thing that is troubling me is that it sounds like the individual testimony of survivors, because they are incarcerated people, that very strong, powerful evidence is not being weighed the same way it would be weighed for others,” she said, as several formerly incarcerated women in the audience snapped and waved in agreement. “And that’s a problem.”
That was just one of several contentious back-and-forths during the hourslong hearing. Council members also repeatedly asked officials about their plans to protect jail staff from sexual abuse, which is also regularly reported. Maginley-Liddie and other officials provided few details on their plans to improve how the department handles such allegations — prompting allegations of elusiveness — but said they are working to provide more trainings and bolster their peer support program.
“Trust me when I tell you, this is of extreme importance for me,” the commissioner said.
Nurse also repeatedly pressed Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber whether her agency, which conducts independent investigations into allegations of official misconduct, would conduct a comprehensive review of the hundreds of Adult Survivors Acts lawsuits. So far, the mayor has declined to ask for a third-party investigation into the allegations, outside the city legal department’s standard review. Strauber said that although it’s something her department is “thinking about,” it currently lacks enough staff to do so.
“I certainly think it’s worthy,” she said. “I just have to be realistic about what I can do with what I have.”