Proposal would send New York judges to prison — for a day

When Alelur “Alex” Duran was locked in solitary on Rikers Island, he used to look through his window and up at the planes flying out of LaGuardia Airport.

“I always used to think,” he said, “Do the people in these planes, do they sometimes look down and do they imagine just the level of brutality happening here? I wish people knew.”

Duran spent three years at Rikers and another nine in different maximum-security prisons upstate for manslaughter. He described spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement as “torture.” He said he watched as prisoners were beaten by guards and as people left prison worse than they came in.

He often wished the people who handed down sentences had a better sense of where they were sending people. Now, a new rule under consideration in the state’s unified court system aims to do just that.

The proposal, now open for public comment through Nov. 21, would require every New York judge with sentencing or detaining responsibilities to visit a correctional facility once a year. The authors say it would be the first of its kind in the nation.

It’s an effort, they say, to bring some transparency to a part of the justice system that is largely out of sight — and to let people in the state’s jails and prisons know they’ve not been forgotten by the judges who put them there.

The idea began with Judge Daniel Conviser, who chairs the Office of Court Administration’s criminal law advisory committee. Many judges, he said, describe sentencing as the most difficult part of their job.

“We have a tremendous amount of discretion ... and so I think it’s important to get in touch with the reality of what it is that we’re actually doing,” he said. “Going to prisons and jails, walking into those facilities and getting just the tiniest taste of what it’s really about is really vital.”

An existing rule, written in 1978, requires judicial visits every four years, but Conviser said they’re typically short and unstructured, if they happen at all. So, three years ago, Conviser turned to Pace University law professor Michael Mushlin, one of the country’s leading experts on prisoners’ rights law, who convened a committee of judges and other experts to craft the new one.

Not just a 'dog-and-pony show'

The push comes as several New York facilities are under intense scrutiny: The city faces a legal mandate to close Rikers as the count of in-custody deaths grows; judges have refused to send prisoners to the notorious federal Metropolitan Detention Center amid reports of poor medical care and mounting suicides; and members of an upstate prison team known to prisoners as the “demon squad” are accused of beating a man to death.

However, the judicial visits aren’t meant to be formal inspections of the sort that takes training and leads directly to oversight reports. They also shouldn’t be quick stops to the superintendent’s office, under the proposed rule.

Judges would be explicitly required to see intake, housing, medical and mental health areas, solitary confinement units, food preparation and dining spaces, education and exercise quarters and visiting rooms, as well as speak directly with incarcerated people. The revised rule would also mandate that visits be spread across facilities across the state and include women’s facilities.

”They would not get a ceremonial visit or a dog-and-pony show,” Mushlin said. “They would not be shielded from or kept away from critical areas of a prison. They would be meeting with prisoners. They would be seeing the solitary confinement units. They would be going to the mess hall and really looking at what food people are being served.”

Mushlin and the other committee members did four trial runs — two each to the Bedford Hills women’s correctional facility in Westchester County and the Sing Sing maximum security facility in Ossining. The visits lasted five or six hours and, with transportation, could take the whole day.

Mushlin said he’s been on many visits to prisons in both New York and other states during the course of his career, “but I have to say, I’ve never experienced visits that are as profound as the four visits that I took with the judges.” He found the conversations between the judges and the people incarcerated there were revelatory.

“I really got the sense of how connected these two groups of people are and how much the prisoners wanted to communicate with not just people from the outside world … but with judges who are actually sentencing people to prison,” he said. “They wanted to show them their full selves, not just the part of their selves that these judges had seen when they sentenced them."

Hearing about hopes and dreams

Judge Dineen Riviezzo, a Court of Claims judge who serves as an acting state Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn, was on Mushlin’s committee and joined one of the trips to Sing Sing. Riviezzo said she’s made it a point to visit many correctional facilities throughout her time on the bench.

Those have helped get a sense of what imprisonment means, she said. But the visits with Mushlin’s group were different.

“What we did do, which I had never done previously in any of the visits, was have the opportunity to actually dialogue with incarcerated men,” she said. The men at Sing Sing, some of whom had been incarcerated for decades, told her about their college degrees, their vocational training and their peer mentoring, she said. And she said they expressed “great remorse" for the harm they did.

“It was very valuable to have that insight on what life is like and their hopes, their dreams,” Riviezzo said.

Mushlin hopes New York’s new rule could be a model for the rest of the country. But first, the rule would have to be approved by the Administrative Board of the Courts and the the New York Court of Appeals, before going into effect in January 2027.

Mushlin is expecting a mix of reactions to the proposal, but has so far collected 26 comments in support.

Conviser said he’s heard from some judges that prison visits aren’t necessary or that, at the very least, they should be voluntary. The New York City Bar Association has not taken a position on the matter. A spokesperson for the state bar did not respond to a request for comment.

“In some cases you don’t want to be too close to the experience because that distracts from your ability to deal with it in a rational way,” Conviser said. On the other hand, he said, “you do want to be able to connect with it to some extent.”

'They should know what that is like'

Martin Horn, who spent decades running prisons and jails in New York and Pennsylvania, including as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Correction, submitted a comment in support of the new rule.

“Prisons and prisoners are out of sight and out of mind,” he told Gothamist. “Everything we can do to bring prisons and the conditions in them — both the working conditions for the staff as well as living conditions for the prisoners — is welcome and necessary.”

Seeing the conditions firsthand, Horn added, may also lead some judges to impose shorter sentences, except in “the most egregious crimes.” That, he argued, would be good for both employees and people on the inside. “The best thing we can do for prisons is have fewer prisoners.”

Duran, the man who spent 12 years in New York’s correctional facilities, now works as a program director at Galaxy Gives, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform.

The new rule, he said, “is definitely moving in the right direction.”

Still, if he were crafting his own rule, he might go further. He thinks visits could be more frequent than once a year. And he’d go beyond judges.

“I wish that not only judges, but prosecutors and other stakeholders in our criminal legal system would see the conditions they’re sending folks to,” he said.  ”Any person who is a stakeholder in our criminal justice system and is sending someone to prison, they should know what that is like.”