In 2022, New York Metropolis’s jails commissioner, Louis Molina, issued a dire warning to native lawmakers: fentanyl was pouring into Rikers Island by way of the mail, he mentioned, spurring an overdose disaster among the many jail’s detainees and placing guards in danger.
As proof of the insidious menace, Molina handed round a toddler’s drawing of a reindeer, considered one of lots of of seized gadgets he mentioned had been “literally soaked in the drug and mailed to people in custody.”
However that declare was based mostly on defective drug-testing kits with a shocking 85% false constructive charge, in accordance with a report launched Wednesday by the town’s Division of Investigation. The report discovered the town vastly overstated the prevalence of fentanyl despatched by mail to detainees.
When investigators retested 71 items of mail initially flagged by area exams as containing fentanyl, solely 10 really confirmed traces of the drug. The drawing of a reindeer highlighted by Molina was fentanyl-free.
Subject exams indicating an inflow of fentanyl-laced mail to Rikers Island fueled a yearslong marketing campaign by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to bar folks in metropolis custody from receiving bodily mail.
As a substitute, metropolis officers proposed redirecting mail to an offsite vendor, who would then add it digitally for the incarcerated individual to learn on a pill — a follow utilized in different correctional methods, together with New York’s state prisons. Thus far, the proposal has been blocked by a jail oversight board.
Jocelyn Strauber, the commissioner of the Division of Investigation, mentioned the town ought to reassess its ongoing effort to bar detainees from receiving mail, given the report’s findings.
“The field tests don’t support a concern that a high rate of fentanyl-laced objects are coming in from the mail,” she instructed The Related Press. “To the extent policy determinations are based on flawed data, they ought to be reconsidered.”
Detainee advocates have lengthy contended that medicine primarily enter the jail system through workers, who can simply smuggle them inside and promote them to gang leaders. In recent times, dozens of correction officers have been charged in a number of investigations of smuggling rings on Rikers Island.
In its report, the Division of Investigation mentioned corrections officers had did not implement most of the division’s earlier suggestions aimed toward screening employees for contraband.
Such area exams have gained reputation lately alongside a spike in opioid overdose deaths nationwide, permitting regulation enforcement officers to bypass the prolonged lab course of to find out if a substance comprises narcotics.
However consultants have lengthy raised questions concerning the strips’ effectiveness. Beneath federal laws, producers are required to incorporate language on their packaging indicating that outcomes are preliminary till confirmed by a lab — one thing that hardly ever occurs in correctional settings.
Final November, New York’s state jail system was discovered to have wrongly punished greater than 2,000 detainees attributable to false positives from drug exams manufactured by Sirchie Finger Print Laboratories.
For years, the take a look at strips used on Rikers Island, the city-run jail system, have been additionally offered by Sirchie. However after complaints concerning the reliability of the exams, the Division of Correction switched to kits made by DetectaChem final April.
Mayor Eric Adams suspended components of a brand new solitary confinement regulation in jails like Rikers Island. This is what we all know.
The evaluation by the Division of Investigation discovered DetectaChem’s take a look at strips had a false constructive charge of 79%, whereas Sirchie’s have been flawed 91% of the time.
Inquiries to Sirchie weren’t returned.
Travis Kisner, the chief working officer of DetectaChem, mentioned the corporate was nonetheless reviewing the report, however added: “We stand behind our product.”
