Review: Nassau lacks jail oversight board

Since 1990, Nassau County has violated a provision of its charter requiring a volunteer civilian oversight board for the county jail in East Meadow, which has been plagued over the years by suicides and allegations of abuse of inmates and poor conditions.

Advocates for prisoners spotted the provision while reviewing the charter last summer, and some county legislators now are urging County Executive Edward Mangano to activate the Board of Visitors and fill its positions.

"It is a legitimate concern, and it's in the charter, so it deserves action," said Legis. Judy Jacobs (D-Woodbury).

The jail, which can house 1,500, has seen 14 inmate suicides over the past 21 years. There were three in 2010 -- representing a third of all suicides in county facilities statewide, records show -- and another in January.

Activists and some Democratic legislators say authorizing a group of local citizens to address jail problems would provide constant oversight and supplement the work of the Albany-based state Commission of Correction, whose few dozen paid staffers monitor more than 100 jails and prisons as well as hundreds of police lockups throughout the state.

"It's the law and the county is required to obey its own law. They've been in violation for the last 21 years," said Samantha Fredrickson, director of the Nassau chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, whose office has received more than 175 complaints from inmates in the past two years.

No apparent progress

This year, the state cited the jail for multiple violations of minimum standards, ranging from unsanitary conditions to over-reliance on solitary confinement. After improvements, the state commission approved Nassau's bid to rent surplus cells to overcrowded jails.

The charter language, adopted in 1990, empowers a seven-member County Correctional Center Board of Visitors -- appointed by the county executive and approved by the legislature -- to "investigate, review or take such other actions as shall be deemed necessary or proper with respect to inmate complaints." The panel also is supposed to advise the sheriff on "improving conditions of inmate care, treatment, safety, rehabilitation, recreation, training and education."

After advocates raised the issue in October, county officials said they were examining what to do. "The administration will "determine what actions should be taken after completion of its investigation," Mangano spokesman Brian Nevin said in an email.

Jacobs said she wants to know why the charter requirement has been ignored.

"It is something that for some reason no administration, Republican or Democrat, has done," she said.

Mangano, a Republican, is the third county executive since the Board of Visitors provision was written into the charter. He followed Democrat Thomas Suozzi (2002-09) and Republican Thomas Gulotta (1987-2001).

"Why it never became a reality is something that left many of us scratching our heads," said Legis. David Denenberg (D-Merrick).

Gulotta and Suozzi could not be reached for comment.

Privacy concerns

Nevin said it was possible the jail committee was never formed because its "duties are duplicative to those of the correction commission."

Nassau jail officials declined to comment on both the charter requirement and conditions at the lockup.

Fredrickson cited the jail's history of problems as evidence that greater oversight is needed. The Jan. 8, 1999, beating by correction officers of Thomas Pizzuto, 38, of Hicksville, who died days later of a ruptured spleen, led to prison terms for four officers and federal oversight of the jail that lasted until 2005.

Pizzuto's death briefly sparked interest in filling the civilian oversight board. In March 1999, Gulotta appointed two members, but the other seats weren't filled and the panel never met, according to county records.

Former Freeport-Roosevelt NAACP president Bob Summerville, who organized demonstrations outside the jail in 1999 to improve facility conditions, said he and others were considered for seats on the oversight board by Suozzi in 2003. But "nothing happened," he said.

The Nassau County Sheriff Officers Association has not opposed a civilian jail board, but has concerns over volunteers having access to its members' private information. It said in a recent statement that the board "must be fair, impartial and free of political influence."