New York City’s Correction Department has failed to take detainees to medical appointments thousands of times every month, in some cases never notifying them and later saying they “refused care,” according to a court filing on Thursday by groups that have sued over access to health care in the city’s jails.
Detainees are blocked from medical care in myriad ways, according to the filing. They include lack of transportation to medical appointments and a dearth of staff to accompany them. Sometimes, where people are in cells under lockdown, the Correction Department prevents detainees from leaving their units for medical care and limits phone access to ask for it, they said.
Since the case was brought in 2021, access to medical care in the city’s jails “has only worsened, and the department lacks both the basic competence and willingness to rectify this situation,” said Veronica Vela, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project, which is representing the detainees along with Brooklyn Defender Services and the law firm Milbank LLP.
“We’re asking a court to hold them once again in contempt for this abject cruelty,” she said.
A spokesman with the Correction Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The filing on Thursday came less than a month after the death of Charizma Jones, a 23-year-old woman who was being held at Rikers Island when, health records show, guards failed to take her to an appointment. Over two days in May, medical workers tried to check on her in her cell, but correction officers stopped them from entering.
Ms. Jones later died in a coma at the Weill Cornell Burn Center, according to the Legal Aid Society, which called the case an “an egregious denial of access to medical care.”
The filing is the most recent legal move against the troubled jail complex. Over the past year, a federal monitor appointed to oversee the jails as part of a 2015 agreement has pointed to what he called persistent dysfunction and dangers. In November, the federal government joined the Legal Aid Society and a private law firm that represents detainees in asking a federal judge to strip the city of control of Rikers Island.
The judge who will decide, Laura Taylor Swain of Federal District Court, set a September date for a hearing on whether the Correction Department will be held in contempt for failing to stem jail violence.
The groups of lawyers who represent people jailed in New York City in 2021 filed a class-action lawsuit against the department that said that their clients were being denied access to health care. Months later, they filed court papers calling for the Department of Correction to be held in contempt for failing to comply with a court order to provide timely care.
A state judge held the department in contempt in May 2022. But the delays and failures have increased, the groups said on Thursday.
In October 2021, when the groups first sued, officers had failed to take people to their medical appointments 7,671 times that month, according to the filing. That number increased to 12,224 in May 2024, representing about a quarter of all scheduled appointments, the groups said in a news release.
Kevin Gamble, a prisoner who has diabetes, a chronic illness, said in an affidavit that he had missed care daily over seven months in 2023. Mr. Gamble, 62, said he needs two “finger sticks” a day to check his blood sugar, as well as insulin injections.
During that period, the Correction Department had apparently told Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides medical care in the jails, that he had refused 44 appointments, Mr. Gamble said. “I did not refuse any of those appointments.”
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