NEW YORK— More than 1,000 hard-to-manage inmates ages 18 to 21 will be moved to a single Rikers Island facility by the end of the year and will be required to take hours of classes, receive counseling and be exempt from solitary confinement.
The plan, to be detailed publicly before the jail oversight board Tuesday, comes as officials continue to be frustrated by increased levels of violence across the lockups. It departs from a long-standing practice of housing young adult inmates among more hardened, experienced prisoners — and builds on an inmate management strategy commonly used in juvenile jails across the country to promote and reward good behavior.
“We strongly believe that the 18- to 21-year-old brain is about the same” as a juvenile’s, jails Commissioner Joseph Ponte told The Associated Press in an interview this week. “I’m very confident that this model will work well for us in New York.”
The new young adult housing plan was born in part out of a series of mandated reforms by city jail watchdogs and federal prosecutors, who this summer reached a settlement agreement with corrections officials after suing over pervasive violence in the jails. That deal, combined with a change in state law, requires, among other things, separating 18-year-old inmates from 16- and 17-year-olds.
Ponte said he included inmates ages 19 to 21 in the housing plan because neuroscientists say that the brain isn’t fully formed until age 25 and that subjecting young adult inmates to 23-hour isolation to punish bad behavior is harmful. About 50 young adult inmates are now in solitary confinement, down from 162 when Ponte was appointed last spring, officials said.
Other lockups around the country, including in Florida, Maine and Massachusetts, have facilities exclusively for inmates who are 18 to 25.
Experts say young adult inmates are a particularly difficult population to manage.
At Rikers, about 400 of the 1,200 18- to 21-year-old inmates are gang members, responsible for about 34 percent of inmate assaults where a weapon is used, though they make up just 12 percent of the roughly 10,000 inmates in the jail system, according to jail statistics.
Overall there have been 98 stabbings and slashings so far this year — nine more than in all of 2014, the statistics show.
