With the holidays fast approaching, families across New York are rushing to get packages to loved ones on Rikers Island — gifts of new winter clothes, books and art supplies.
But public defenders say a troubling number of even the most benign deliveries will get caught up in the jail's mail system and never arrive.
Packages are routinely delayed for months, rejected for what advocates describe as arbitrary reasons, or lost entirely. They say that’s true even when the senders follow rules outlined on the Department of Correction website, leaving people inside without essentials during the coldest months of the year — and families out of the money they’ve spent on items that never make it.
“With the holidays coming up, this is always a concern,” said Rebecca Kinsella, the social work director at Brooklyn Defender Services. “It's really difficult for us to guide families and provide advice about what they can and can't send when no one has a source of information that seems accurate.”
The problem, Kinsella and others say, speaks to the larger issue of a department that doesn’t follow its own rules.
Patrick Rocchio, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Correction, didn’t respond to specific issues the advocates raised. Instead, he sent a statement noting that Rikers Island is “a secure environment and occasionally packages, or certain items within packages, are sent that present a risk to individuals in custody and the safety and security of facilities.”
The department tries to balance “safety and security” with the “needs of the people in custody,” he added.
The department gets between 2,100 and 2,800 packages a month, according to correction records. About a quarter include items that aren't allowed. Most of those items are returned to the sender, according to the department data. About 11% of packages identified as having non-permissible items are either donated or destroyed.
But attorneys and social workers said items that should be permitted — such as books, colored pencils or pants without pockets — are rejected with no explanation and never returned. In theory, prisoners are notified when an item is rejected and given the option of having it returned to sender at their own expense, donated or destroyed, but the people working with prisoners said that rarely happens.
This is not an economy in which we can be spending 50 bucks willy-nilly, sending stuff to people that is never going to arrive.
The department’s publicly available policies add to the confusion, advocates said: Its main “permissible items” list appears to mirror a department directive dated July 2016, but neither reflects what officers enforce. And updates to the policy, such as the allowance of chest binders for gender nonconforming prisoners two years ago, have not been reflected on the list.
Natalie Fiorenzo, a senior corrections specialist at New York County Defender Services, estimated about 30% of the packages her organization sends never make it to the intended recipients. Standards can vary from facility to facility, and so does the advice for making sure items are delivered. At one point, Fiorenzo said, she was advised to stop using Amazon delivery services though no such suggestion exists in published guidance.
At the moment, Fiorenzo and others with her office are having a particularly difficult time getting items delivered to the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s facility. While speaking at a Board of Correction hearing in November, she told a story about trying to send a pair of sweatpants to one client.
The first attempt was rejected without explanation and the package was never returned. The second attempt was rejected because, she was told, sweatpants were outside clothes, though she noted there was nothing on the department’s website barring outside clothes. On the third attempt, she sent pajamas instead. A week later they were refunded to the Amazon account, though she received no explanation why. On the fourth attempt, the pants were finally delivered to her client “after 90 days of waiting for something she desperately needed to keep her warm.”
When these sorts of failures happen, Fiorenzo said, her organization loses money.
“I can only imagine how frustrating and money consuming that is for the families of our clients. This is not an economy in which we can be spending $50 willy-nilly, sending stuff to people that is never going to arrive.”
Aubree Aguinaga with Bronx Defenders gave testimony along the same lines. She said her office had spent “thousands of dollars on items that never reach our clients and never get returned to sender.”
She added: “We are talking about items that are meant to meet the needs of clients during the freezing cold months when the housing areas are not properly heated or in the summer when the temperatures in the facilities are unbearable."
The issue isn’t limited to clothing, according to attorneys. Michael Klinger with the Brooklyn Defender Services told the board that one client reading the Harry Potter series had no issues receiving the first two books.
The third installment, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” however, was deemed "impermissible."
In the end, the client was able to read part three – he borrowed the book from another person in his housing unit.
