NEW YORK: Mentally ill inmates suffer overwhelmingly from pervasive brutality at America’s second biggest jail, where guards beat up prisoners routinely, The New York Times reported on Monday.
After a four-month investigation, the paper said 129 prisoners suffered “serious injuries” with over an 11-month period at New York's Rikers Island last year.
The injuries required medical treatment outside the jail and included fractures, wounds requiring stitches and head injuries.
Furthermore, officers used force on inmates 1,927 times in the first six months of 2014, a surge of more than a third compared with the same period last year, the newspaper said.
In 77 percent of the 129 cases, inmates had been diagnosed with mentally illness, and in 80 percent of the 129 cases, inmates reported being beaten after they were handcuffed.
“The growing numbers of mentally unstable inmates, with issues like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are a major factor in the violence,” said the newspaper.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in January, promised to take immediate action when questioned about the report, and saying his team had a “very aggressive plan for change.”
“We are going to be taking very serious and quick actions to change it,” he told reporters.
The Times said Rikers Island has about as many people with mental illnesses, roughly 4,000 out of 11,000 inmates, as all the psychiatric hospitals in New York State.
“They make up nearly 40 percent of the jail population, up from about 20 percent eight years ago,” the newspaper said.
It detailed a prisoner who was severely beaten by four guards after attempting to hang himself, and another who was beaten for holding his fiancé’s hand after being told not to.
The paper also said two prisoners died; a mentally ill homeless veteran whose cell reached more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a schizophrenic who swallowed toxic detergent and begged for medical attention for hours.
Federal authorities indicted a correction officer on charges of violating the schizophrenic man’s civil rights.
None of the officers involved in the 129 cases has been prosecuted so far, The New York Times reported.
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