Despite repeated promises by the Correction Department to tighten security at Rikers Island, a city investigator posing as a guard last month was able to smuggle in heroin, pills, marijuana, vodka and a razor blade, an inquiry by the Department of Investigation found.
The city investigator carried the contraband — valued at over $22,000 — through six different security checkpoints used by jail employees, hiding the drugs in his cargo pants and holding a water bottle filled with vodka, the Department of Investigation said in a report released on Thursday.
The revelations once again raised questions about the city’s ability to address the widespread corruption and brutality at Rikers detailed in several critical reports by federal and local authorities as well as the news media. The Department of Investigation has been urging the Correction Department for years to improve screening of jail employees but to no avail.
“Weapons and narcotics remain easily available to any inmate with funds to pay for them,” the report said.
Document: Report on Security Failures at Rikers Island
The report called on the Correction Department to take steps to bolster screening, including starting to routinely use drug-sniffing dogs at employee entrances. Though the powerful correction officers union has long opposed such searches, the correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, told investigators that he would comply.
Investigators say that while visitors to city jails bring in some contraband, a large proportion of the illegal trafficking is carried out by uniformed guards and civilian employees. The report described the arrests of six correction officers and a nurse for contraband over the last year and a half.
“Given the extent of smuggling that we know goes on and given what we know about what’s coming in from visitors, a lot of stuff has to be coming in from guards and employees because this stuff doesn’t magically appear,” said Mark Peters, the Department of Investigation commissioner.
On Sept. 1, the Correction Department imposed what it described at the time as heightened security measures — including searching guards’ lunch containers — intended to target smuggling by employees.
“It turns out these steps were not sufficient,” Mr. Peters said.
Last month, the undercover investigator, an employee with the Department of Investigation, was able to sneak contraband into all six of the Rikers jails that he tried to enter. The pockets of his cargo pants, according to the report, were bulging with 250 packets of heroin; 24 strips of Suboxone, a pain killer; and a half pound of marijuana.
“Any kind of serious search by trained professionals should have caught this every time,” Mr. Peters said.
At one facility, the undercover guard set off the metal detector twice. When a security officer asked the undercover guard to empty his pockets, “the undercover responded that he already had emptied them,” the report said. The security officer “accepted his answer without further inspection of his pockets.”
Mr. Peters said that correction officers and civilian staff members often do not sell the drugs directly to inmates. Rather they serve as couriers, shuttling contraband between people on the outside and the inmates for a fee that can range from $500 to $1,000.
Mr. Ponte, in a statement, said that he agreed with the Department of Investigation’s assessment that screening needed to be improved.
“I have zero tolerance for anyone, including staff, bringing contraband into D.O.C. facilities,” he said. “As part of D.O.C.'s ongoing systemwide reforms, we are working on significant new steps to improve our methods for searching for contraband.”
In addition to the dogs, Mr. Ponte said that special operations officers would be posted at each entrance to inspect employees, replacing the rank-and-file guards who have typically carried out the searches. There is also a plan to upgrade screening techniques to conform to federal airport security standards.
The Department of Investigation said that the drug-sniffing dogs and new security teams should be put in place within six months. Mr. Peters said he expected that the dogs would be used for random searches at each of the 10 jails at Rikers several times a week, though he said Mr. Ponte would have the final say about the deployment of the canine units.
The success of the new security measures could depend in large part on the response from the correction officers’ union and its president, Norman Seabrook. In an interview last week, Mr. Seabrook said even agreeing to the modest changes in September, including checking the lunches, caused friction with the rank-and-file.
“I took some heat for it,” he said.
For the report, the Department of Investigation observed 15 shift changes and reviewed 50 hours of surveillance video from June through October, monitoring the entry of more than 2,500 employees.
Even after the heightened security measures were imposed in September, the report said that some officers still refused to have their food X-rayed or were allowed to place their lunch containers on top of the X-ray machines without having it scanned.
Security officers also permitted some people to enter even though they had set off the metal detectors, the report said.
“Having observed screening procedures for six weeks,” the report said, “it is clear to D.O.I. that such compliance will not be achieved absent additional drastic interventions.”