A technical glitch that took down a crucial city website last month has left some incarcerated New Yorkers without access to their lawyers or families, and kept at least one man stranded on Rikers Island through the holidays.
The NYC Department of Correction's Inmate Lookup Service, which allows detainees to post bail with a credit card and receive money from the outside world, has been down since December 19th, according to public defenders and advocates.
Robert Briere, a civil rights attorney, said that the outage has prevented his client from posting bail by credit card, keeping him on Rikers for weeks after he could've been free. The man's family, he said, is not able to travel to the Manhattan courthouse where they could pay bail in person.
"He would’ve been out before Christmas. He’s still there, he’s still waiting. He calls me every day and I tell him, listen...'We're waiting for the website to be up,'" said Briere, who did not want to disclose the man's name before his trial. "It’s mind-boggling."
"I wouldn’t be very patient if I was sitting there and the only thing that was separating me from being out was some due diligence on the part of the Department of Correction to get this thing fixed," he added.
The agency has yet to offer an explanation for the outage, and inquiries to DOC were not returned. A message on the website simply states they are experiencing "technical difficulties."
In addition to its role in bail payments, the database also allows attorneys to track their clients as they're moved from different facilities on Rikers Island. Its sudden disappearance has left attorneys scrambling to locate the clients at a time when exposure to COVID-19 is surging inside the notorious jail.
The outage also blocked detainees from receiving money from family members to make purchases at the commissary, where they can typically purchase snacks, books, hygiene products and other items. On Monday, the Legal Aid Society called on the website to be restored, noting its absence was "especially egregious around the holidays, and more so in the midst of a pandemic."
After Christmas, the DOC allowed payments to be made through Western Union and JPay, a third-party service used to provide money to those in jails and prisons. But activists say that the alternatives are complicated, and do little to remedy the weeks-long disappearance of the critical resource.
"The website is a means for the minimal amount of transparency from DOC about the people that it keeps in its cages," said M.J. Williams, an attorney and anti-carceral activist. "The fact that it’s been 17 days and counting with no end in sight speaks to a lack of political will, organized neglect, and cruelty."
