Federal prosecutors plan to sue New York City on Thursday over its handling of violence against young inmates held on Rikers Island.
U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara in the Southern District of New York said in a filing Thursday that his office wants to speed reforms to the jail complex following a Justice Department report in August that found "Rikers is a dangerous place for adolescents" where a "pervasive climate of fear exists."
In the filing, Bharara and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said young inmates were being "subjected to unconstitutional conditions and confinement."
"For years, staff responsible for managing [inmates] have had minimal corrections experience, failed to interact with inmates in a professional manner, and failed to adequately monitor inmate conduct," Bharara wrote in the court filings.
He added that the New York City Department of Correction has failed to ensure basic levels of staff professionalism.
"Staff have frequently insulted, humiliated, and antagonized [inmates], often using obscenities and abusive language without fear of any reprimand from supervisors. Such unprofessional conduct provokes physical altercations, and leads to unnecessary violence," according to the court filing.
Bharara said young inmates sustained "high rates of serious injuries" on a daily basis at the hand of guards and in altercations with each other. Adolescents suffer a disproportionate number of the reported inmate head injuries on Rikers, he wrote in the court filings. For example, he said, from June 2012 through early July 2013, adolescents sustained a total of 239 head injuries, and were twice as likely to sustain such injuries as was the adult population.
A Justice Department news conference on the matter is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
In the 79-page August report, Bharara said there were 1,050 cases of young prisoners injured in the last two years. In almost half of such incidents in the last year, the inmates required emergency care, according to the report. Shortly after the release of the report, Holder said his department would work closely with New York City officials to make improvements to the jail.
Allegations of abuse at Rikers Island -- New York City's main jail complex, which houses juveniles, men and women in separate wards -- go back at least two decades, when an officer, according to the August report, created an enforcement gang of teenage prisoners called "the Program" and let them beat fellow teenage inmates in order to help control the inmate population.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio toured Rikers Island this week and announced that the city would end solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds by the end of the year.
"By ending the use of punitive segregation for adolescents, we are shifting away from a jail system that punishes its youngest inmates, to one that is focused on rehabilitation with the goal of helping put these young New Yorkers on the path to better outcomes," de Blasio said in a statement Wednesday.
The mayor's office on Thursday did not respond immediately to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
Follow @kurtisalee and email kurtis.lee@latimes.com
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times8:27 a.m. This post has been updated with additional details of the court filing.
This post was published at 7:42 a.m.
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