Thread by @drrjkavanagh

Jose Rivera died in NYC DOC custody last Sunday. Like Layleen Polanco, who died 2 days before, he was being held on Rikers Island, but he was transferred out the day he died.

The truth is he shouldn't have been on Rikers & it may have hastened his death.

thecity.nyc/2019/06/two-da…

Mr. Rivera struggled with homelessness and mental illness. He was also on parole for a low level drug offense from 2010. He stopped reporting to parole maybe 2 years ago. He was technically in violation of the terms of his parole, but they never came to arrest him.

That changed in April when he was admitted to hospital with a very serious, probably terminal, illness. Parole learned of his whereabouts and decided they would arrest him and they took him to Rikers Island. FROM HIS HOSPITAL BED.

Normally when someone has technically violated parole, it doesn't catch up with them unless they get arrested for a new offense - true it is often a very minor offense, which then gets resolved, leaving the person to deal with the much-harder-to-resolve parole violation.

When it happens the way it did to Mr. Rivera, and there is just the parole violation, you don't have a right to a lawyer, nor to see a judge, immediately, the way you would if you were arrested on a new matter. So Mr. Rivera sat for weeks on Rikers Island with no counsel.

When it did come time after a few weeks for his parole hearing, he had become too sick and he was taken to Bellevue Hospital prison ward for treatment. But DOC didn't even keep him there. They took him back to Rikers again. Back and forth. But mainly he was held on Rikers.

And that is where he was on the day he died, when I guess they realized that he was literally dying. So they took him back to Bellevue Hospital prison ward. And he died.

So, no Mr. Rivera did not die on Rikers Island, but he may as well have. Rikers Island killed him. Even if he had a terminal illness, it killed him, because he needed to be receiving treatment in hospital, not to be in jail.

This city, this mayor, gallivanting around the country looking perplexed when people ask him how it is that people can be dying on Rikers Island, all have blood on their hands. We need to close this jail down now.

We need to stop putting people in jail for missing appointments. We need to stop putting people in jail who are mentally ill or homeless or struggling with addiction. People are dying every day and we are all responsible.