The restraint desks are used in Rikers’ Rose M. Singer Enhanced Supervised Housing (RESH) unit, designed as an alternative to solitary confinement, where
Eight Rikers detainees slashed while shacked to restraint desks amsterdamnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from amsterdamnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Prisoners at Rikers Island are still being shackled and handcuffed to metal restraint desks when they are in classrooms despite a New York correction commissioner promising to remove them last year.
Dozens of detainees in three Rikers housing units are sometimes shackled in restraint desks, correction sources told the Daily News. The specially-built metal desks are used to restrain “potentially disruptive inmates during therapeutic, educational, programming, and/or recreational sessions in a classroom setting,” the department says.
The federal monitoring team in a lawsuit over violence in city jails said in court papers Thursday that it’s not ready to approve the Risk Management Accountability System, known by the initials RMAS. “The department is not ready to adequately implement RMAS, which is a complicated, staff-intensive program model,” the monitoring team wrote.