Jails' teen violence law is met with skepticism

updated 4:05 p.m. ET May 17, 2009

NEW YORK - It took the vicious jailhouse beating death of Charnel Robinson's teenage son to spur passage of a law that might help to expose violence in city facilities that house adolescent inmates.

But the mother of 18-year-old Christopher Robinson, who was killed at a Rikers Island jail, said it was at least some kind of victory.

"It makes me extremely hopeful that lives could be saved," she said in an interview this past week.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on May 11 signed a law that requires the Department of Correction, which runs the city's jails, to publicly disclose statistics on violence against incarcerated teens, whether committed by staff or by other inmates.

Accountability after death
Elected officials and inmate advocates had pushed for the legislation as a small measure of accountability in the wake of a four-month investigation into Christopher Robinson's death on Oct. 18, 2008, at the Robert N. Davoren Complex. That is one of 10 jails that make up the sprawling correctional system on the 400-acre Rikers Island, which sits in the East River between Queens and the Bronx.

Bronx prosecutors have accused three correction officers at the Davoren complex of allowing a "Lord of the Flies"-style crew of inmates to run amok in one of the housing units and enforce rules through bullying, intimidation and violence. Prosecutors allege that one of their victims was Robinson, who had been remanded to the jail after a parole violation and dared to defy their authority.

District Attorney Robert Johnson said the inmate crew, known as the Program, had turned the jail into "an incubator for violent criminal activity." The three guards and 12 inmates arrested in the probe have pleaded not guilty to charges ranging from enterprise corruption and conspiracy to manslaughter.

The city's average daily inmate population last year was about 14,000, more than the prison populations of many states. About 800 of those inmates were adolescents, most of them held at the Davoren complex.

Before and since the allegations that surfaced in the Robinson case, the Department of Correction said it had instituted changes aimed at curtailing violence among teens, including adding more guards and separating inmates according to age. Teenagers charged as adults and between the ages of 16 and 18 are housed at Rikers.

'Tragic and shocking'
A spokesman for the department, Stephen Morello, said in an e-mail that the city's jails are "the safest they have ever been" and called them "the safest large city jails in the nation." Department Commissioner Martin Horn called the Robinson case, the first homicide in the city's jails in four years, "tragic and shocking."

The Department of Correction has traditionally published some data on violence in its jails, but it has not typically pulled out statistics related to violence against or among adolescent inmates.

Inmate advocates have long chafed at what they say is a lack of transparency of life behind the walls of the city's jails, especially when it comes to incarcerated teens.

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