In a report released Wednesday, a city jail oversight panel detailed a series of all-too-familiar breakdowns by Department of Correction staff that contributed to five jail deaths in the first three months of 2025.
The Board of Correction reported that, in some of the cases, medical staff were not immediately notified, cell doors were not secure, officers inexplicably wandered off post or did not conduct rounds and made inaccurate logbook entries.
The criticisms dovetail with similar board findings in death reports covering the past four years and once again raise questions about jail management as the city is on the verge of surrendering significant if not total control of the system to a court-ordered official.
“The long-running mismanagement of the jails has produced chronic staffing dysfunction, which unfortunately has had tragic consequences,” said Hernandez Stroud, a senior fellow at NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.
“Failure to notify medical staff after seeing people noticeably unwell, failure to secure cell doors, failure to supervise housing areas and conduct rounds — these failures, which have contributed to deaths, aren’t just persistent or unacceptable but they’re preventable. And they’re a direct result of the pervasive mismanagement.”
U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain — who is overseeing the Nunez class-action lawsuit consent decree on violence and use of force in the jails — is poised to name the outside official after previously finding the city in contempt of court orders last November and ordering outside control in May. A list of some 30 potential candidates have been under review since August, The News previously reported.
Some observers, though, are urging Swain to delay her decision until Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is sworn in.
“Given how different Mayor-elect Mamdani’s views of corrections are from Mayor Adams’, how important it is to have city buy-in for the process, and how close we are to his entering City Hall, it seems unwise to go forward with structuring and appointing a receiver prior to inauguration day,” said Vincent Schiraldi, a former Correction commissioner and Probation commissioner now a visiting fellow with the Pinkerton Foundation.
A representative for the Mamdani campaign did not reply to a request for comment.
Latima Johnson, a DOC spokeswoman, did not answer a question about why similar breakdowns keep recurring concerning jail deaths. In the written response to the board, DOC said it would respond when ongoing probes of the deaths are complete.
“The safety and well-being of those in our care is always our foremost concern,” Johnson said. “These investigations are open and we would refer to the report for our response.”
A total of12 detainees have died so far in 2025, compared to five in 2024, nine in 2023, 19 in 2022 — Mayor Adams’ first year in office — and 16 in 2021. Meanwhile, the jail population has swelled by 32% since January 2022, rising from 5,354 then to 7,076 through this October, DOC figures show.
The oversight board’s report covers five deaths, including those of Ramel Powell and Terrence Moore from synthetic marijuana, or “K2,” overdoses, Ariel Quidone of complications related to appendicitis and a delay in care, and Sonia Reyes, of a suicide by hanging.
The cause of death in the case of the fifth detainee, Dashawn Jenkins, is still pending but appears to be a overdose.
The deaths took place in four different jail facilities: the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, the Manhattan Supreme Court holding pen, the West Facility, and the George R. Vierno Center. Quidone died at Elmhurst Hospital.
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Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News The main entrance of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.
In Powell’s case, the board found that staff observed him unconscious but did not summon medical help for six hours. By then, he was foaming at the mouth and beyond help. More than 100 painkillers and synthetic marijuana were found in his cell.
Similarly, the board found staff observed Quidone in serious discomfort over the course of six hours before a detainee working as a suicide prevention aide triggered a medical emergency. By the time a medical team arrived, Quidone had no pulse, no spontaneous breathing and his skin was cold. He never regained consciousness.
The report reveals that Reyes hanged herself with an electric wire from her medical bed. An officer was given a reprimand for “failing to conduct meaningful tours.”
In Jenkins’ case, there was no floor officer for hours on the day he died, and detainees were allowed to smoke apparent narcotics in each other’s cells with impunity, the report found. When they checked on Jenkins, he was spitting up and then became unresponsive.
Two officers were suspended, with one later being fired, the report said.
In four cases, jail tour commanders delayed for roughly an hour making the required notification to the central operations desk, which would have triggered scrutiny from top officials, the report said.
In the report, the board also discloses a different definition of what constitutes a jail death than the one maintained by the Correction Department, a matter that has been contentious throughout the now-waning Adams administration.
DOC does not count deaths that occur at a hospital or outside the system when the person has been “compassionately released” or released on their own recognizance while in grave condition, the board states.
But the board, referring to Quidone’s death at Elmhurst Hospital, said it counts as a jail death since the “circumstances that led to his hospital visit and release occurred while in custody.”
