The restricted housing unit at Northern State Prison in Newark has three tiers of cells and individual cages for accessing the phone and kiosk for electronic communications outside of the prison. (Photo courtesy of the New Jersey Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson)
Last December, state correctional officials reopened a long-closed 650-bed housing unit at Northern State Prison to hold people who’d broken the Newark facility’s rules.
It didn’t take long for the complaints to start rolling in, according to the state Corrections Ombudsperson’s Office, which fielded 300 complaints from the 400 people incarcerated there.
Residents reported raw sewage backing up and spilling into cells and hallways; little to no access to medical care, phones, and showers; no laundry service or trash collection; a lack of basic hygiene items like toothpaste and toilet paper; rampant drug use that resulted in smoke so bad it caused the heating and air conditioning system to shut down; and staffing shortages that drove officers to operate in a semi-permanent lockdown in violation of state Department of Corrections rules.
“What was happening on this housing unit at Northern State Prison didn’t amount to discipline. It amounted to inhumane conditions,” state Corrections Ombudsperson Terry Schuster said.
Now Schuster is calling on state legislators and prison officials to act.
In a new report, he urges lawmakers to set minimum habitability standards for prison housing units and increase funding for prison repairs, renovations, and new construction to ensure humane living conditions.
He also calls for them to require corrections officials to publicly report data on “restorative housing units,” where disciplinary offenders are held in solitary confinement. State law already requires corrections officials to publicly report on a quarterly basis how many people are held in isolated confinement, as well as incidents of suicide and self-harm there, but officials exclude from that reporting the people held in restorative housing units, Schuster noted.
He also recommends that prison officials reduce how many people they hold in such units and audit health care access for those who live there. The report, which was released Wednesday, comes a year after Schuster issued another report that found the state Department of Corrections flagrantly flouts a 2019 state law limiting solitary confinement.
Corrections Ombudsperson Terry Schuster stands outside the state Department of Corrections headquarters in Trenton. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
“The problem with isolated confinement is not just that people are stuck in a small cell. It’s that all of their basic human needs rely on other people bringing things to them. If you need toilet paper or toothpaste, if you need your laundry, you need to take a shower, you need to throw your trash away, you need to see the nurse — all of that relies on somebody coming to your cell,” Schuster said.
That can work if correctional staff have just a small number of people to guard, like at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, where about 14 women are in the restricted housing unit, Schuster said.
“But when there are hundreds of people and they’re all locked down and there’s not enough staff, the conditions become really dangerous,” he said. “People act out when their basic needs aren’t met, because they’re desperate.”
That results in a vicious cycle, he added.
“That acting out disrupts the operation of the housing unit, and staff have to deescalate the situation, and then the disruption means staff can’t carry out their duties, and that results in more people not having their needs met, and more acting out,” Schuster said.
William Sullivan, who heads the union that represents correctional officers who work in state prisons, agreed that staffing shortages pose challenges. The system is short about 1,500 officers, with about 1,200 vacancies and another 300 or so officers out on leave for illnesses, on-the-job injuries, and other reasons, he said. Few want to work in restricted housing units, where residents attack them daily and often hurl bodily fluids at them, Sullivan added.
He blamed many of the problems at Northern State on the people incarcerated there.
“They rehabbed that whole unit before they opened it back up, and it was destroyed shortly after due to the behavior of the inmates in the unit,” Sullivan said. “A lot of these inmates that are in the RHUs are scared to be in general population. They want to do their time by themselves, without the fear of being in a general population. So they keep acting up to stay over there.”
After the complaints started, staff from Schuster’s office began weekly visits to talk to people incarcerated there and did two announced inspections in April and May and an unannounced inspection in July, according to Schuster’s report.
Prison officials did fix many of the issues that resulted in complaints by the summer, which helped reduce assaults on staff and security incidents that prompted daily lockdowns, Schuster wrote.
Still, problems persist, he noted.
Plumbing and drainage problems, caused by both aging infrastructure and objects flushed down the toilets, still cause leaks and flooding in occupied cells, he said. And residents still must endure extended periods of extreme hot and cold temperatures due to fire safety mechanisms that shut down the HVAC system when smoke is detected from people consuming drugs smuggled into the prison, he wrote.
Health care access and outdoor recreation time remain inconsistent and infrequent, in part because of staffing shortages that prompt officials to schedule rolling lockdowns in the restorative housing unit, Schuster wrote. As of July, residents still were reporting that nurses distributing medication did not visit every cell, that sick call requests went unanswered, and that they were never taken to see health care providers, he wrote.
“The big problem on these units is medical emergencies because people aren’t getting seen when the problems are minor,” Schuster said.
So small medical maladies can snowball into major health problems — or can prompt residents to fake a medical emergency just to get out of their cells, he added. Residents reported twice as many medical emergencies between January and March than emergencies called for fights, assaults, or other disturbances, the report says.
The unit would operate better with fewer residents, but months-long delays in disciplinary hearings and an inefficient process for graduating residents to higher levels of privileges ensure the population remains high, Schuster wrote.
He recommended that prison officials place people with special needs in alternative settings, eliminate the 500-case backlog of disciplinary hearings, process new cases within the three-day timeline state law requires, and review people with the most severe restrictions monthly, with the goal of lifting restrictions for good behavior.
A Department of Corrections spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sullivan agreed with Schuster’s call for more funding for capital improvements to the prisons and added his own recommendation — that policymakers build a prison for incarcerated people with serious mental health disorders.
“Out of the 12,500 inmates, there are about 400 of them that are beyond controllable,” Sullivan said. “The answer is to build a state-of-the-art facility that has all the best technology out there for less one-on-one contacts, to manage the 400 troublesome inmates better.”
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