Queens courthouse jail is in atrocious condition

NY Daily News  

Working conditions at the Queens Criminal Court complex’s detention center are so disgusting, correction officers have complained to state and federal workplace oversight agencies.

Rats scurry in the kitchen, roaches crawl in the locker room, and flies hover over hopelessly backed-up toilets, say filings with the state Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“The appalling conditions in the Queens courts are consistent with the decaying infrastructure at our jail facilities,” said Benny Boscio, president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.

Photos obtained by the Daily News show an overflowing toilet, ripped-up flooring stained with water from leaks, peeling paint, black mold creeping up the walls, a trashed locker room, and a disheveled food storage area.

As if working conditions weren’t bad enough, the Correction Department’s staffing crisis has cut the number of officers regularly working at the Queens Detention Center in Kew Gardens.

Roughly 40 officers out of the center’s detachment of 173 were moved to Rikers Island, and an additional 12 officers have retired since May 2021, correction sources said.

On top of that, the Correction Department has been constantly “redeploying” or temporarily moving officers to Rikers from the Queens courts on a spot basis, further reducing available staff.

The complaint alleges a security entry gate in the intake area has been broken for months, forcing officers to leave the gate unsecured.

The complaint to state officials describes food being stored improperly, broken laundry machines and cleaning equipment, and a filthy kitchen and rest rooms. Devices that filter air and drinking water for the detainees have been broken for months, the complaint said.

A factor in keeping the facility clean is that those jobs are usually done by detainees from Rikers — but there hasn’t been such a work detail in months, said Correction Department sources.

The situation has slowed down court operations by delaying the production of detainees at court hearings, said the sources.

 

City courthouses are pig stys and petri dishes

  

Queens Eagle

As Queens, Staten Island and Bronx courthouses resumed in-person day arraignments Monday, public defenders across New York City called out the city for what they say are “deplorable” conditions.

The Association of Legal Aid Attorneys condemned the Office of Court Administration and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services for unsanitary and unhealthy conditions that they say are rife throughout city courthouses.

“As ALAA members returned to ‘in-person’ arraignments, they found that OCA and the City had not only failed to remediate the dangerous and unsanitary conditions, they had failed to take a single measure to clean or upgrade these areas from their pre-pandemic levels to meet even minimum standards of health and safety,” the union said in a statement.

The calls to clean up conditions come not only because COVID-19 remains a threat but because as proceedings resume, people who work in the buildings are seeing its conditions again with fresh eyes, attorneys say.

“We've always known it was bad but I think with COVID we just had the separation from that environment,” said Julie Sender, the Manhattan Criminal Defense Practice vice president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. “We don't have to just accept that we're going to get sick and that we're going to maybe bring roaches home or bring bedbugs home because we were at work and it was not cleaned.”

Sender, who mainly works out of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse building at 100 Centre St., said that nonpublic courthouse spaces, inlucing jail cells, pens and meeting rooms for defendants and their attorneys, are often unsanitary.

Surfaces are stained, ventilation systems are covered in dust and pests like insects and rodents are sometimes spotted, Sender said.

The conditions are present throughout criminal courthouses in the city, including in Queens, attorneys said.