The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

"The very first blow was to my face," Mr. Paige said, recalling his scuffle with Rikers Island officers while, he said, his hands were cuffed behind his back.

Head strikes should be rare in jails: they subdue by causing painful and sometimes permanent injury to inmates, and can leave guards hurt as well. But in New York City, hundreds of inmates have suffered head injuries in recent years after clashes with correction officers, according to a lawsuit in United States District Court in Manhattan based on information culled from official reports.

The reports reveal that inmates' heads were punched, hit with batons and kicked in a roster of pain that is costly in human and medical terms and adds friction to an already tense environment. Officers, too, suffered, with broken fingers, fractured wrists and sprained arms.

The suit, by the Legal Aid Society and two law firms, opens a window on the corridors of the city's jails and the hierarchy of violence that guards are instructed to use to control them - a scale that begins with verbal cajoling, ascends to pepper spray and body blows and blocks, and reaches head strikes only when a guard is fighting to save himself. That scale sounds grim but is increasingly accepted practice in prisons across the country and has proven effective in New York jails where it was observed.

The suit recognizes that prison guards must sometimes resort to force. But it charges that the city's officers routinely use head blows instead of starting with less harmful methods. City guards have not been adequately trained, the suit claims, to follow the sequence of escalating force tactics, even though it is clearly spelled out in city correction policy.

"Force is not a foreign concept in a prison, it's part of everyday life," said Jonathan Chasan, a Legal Aid lawyer. But he said, "They should be able to restrain without this level of injuries."

After four years of legal jousting, the two sides are now in intensive settlement talks. Judge Denny Chin has set a trial date for Nov. 28 but apparently hopes to work out an agreement before then.

City officials declined repeated requests for comment on the allegations, saying they do not discuss continuing litigation. In motion after motion, however, the city has battled the suit in court. The city points out that recorded incidents in which guards used force in its jails have decreased significantly, dropping by 33 percent from 2000 to 2004, and are infrequent considering the size of the system, which in all admits about 100,000 new inmates a year.

"Excessive force is not a systemic problem and is antithetical" to its correction practices, the city contends.

The lawsuit looks closely at incidents in which guards used force against inmates in six jails on Rikers Island from Jan. 1, 2000, to Aug. 1, 2003. Of a total of 2,596 incidents, 703 incidents produced head injuries to 738 inmates.

Steve J. Martin, a lawyer and corrections consultant who is a witness for the plaintiffs, sifted through 745 reports of the most serious incidents, which included versions from guards and inmates as well as medical reports. He found 70 cases of inmates with facial fractures or broken teeth, and 113 cases of inmates with facial cuts requiring stitches - results he called "an astounding and frightening litany of injurious force."

Mr. Martin said his research revealed a "routine use of hard impact strikes to the head" in city jails. In one month, April 2003, in three Rikers Island jails he scrutinized, there were 42 serious incidents in which guards used force, with head strikes recorded in 13.

In a more recent sample cited in the suit from six jails, which includes reports from four months in the year before November 2004, guards used head strikes in at least 46 of 218 recorded incidents where they applied force.

Mr. Martin also provided head strike information from other prison systems he has studied, appointed by either a court or a correction agency. Examining reports of guards' use of force in five jails in and around Fort Lauderdale, Fla., during 18 weeks in 2004, for example, among 200 incidents, Mr. Martin found fewer than 8 head strikes. In the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, in 54 incidents during eight months in 2004, only 2 head strikes were reported. In a sample from Clyde N. Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., a rural prison, of 105 force incidents there were none in which an officer reported a head strike, although 10 inmate head injuries were recorded.

A number of the inmates bringing the Rikers Island lawsuit are repeat offenders with volatile temperaments or chilling criminal records - the sort of inmate whom correction officers find hardest to keep in line.

Shawn Davis, 38, is a schizophrenic. He explained, in an interview in state prison in Beacon, N.Y., where he is serving five years for sexual assault, that he visits the clinic once a month for an injection, since he can have fits and seizures if he misses it. After he returned to Rikers Island from a court date on May 28, 2002, an officer barred him from going to the clinic.

"She cursed at me using smart language," Mr. Davis said. "It got me so hyper. I very anxious to have my medications."

He decided to do "something that said I wanted attention," he said: "I picked up a plastic chair and threw it" over the heads of officers in the cellblock control booth.

He was restrained and his hands were cuffed behind his back, Mr. Davis said. But, he said, while riot squad officers dragged him down a hallway, one guard punched him in the face. One guard gave him a parting kick in the temple, Mr. Davis said.

"Both eyes just shut down," he said. "Ruptured globe" was the finding of two surgeons at Bellevue Hospital Center, who operated the next day to try to save his left eye. Doctors later concluded it would never see again.

According to a summary of the correction officers' accounts of the episode, one officer said he had defended himself from a punch by Mr. Davis by punching the inmate back three times in the face. The officer had "a superficial scratch to the left eyebrow and right side of the face." The summary was written by Vincent M. Nathan, a lecturer in criminal justice at the University of Toledo, Ohio, who is also a witness for the inmates in the suit. The city did not provide any material from correction officers.

Another inmate, Eric Richards, 28, could not even remember, in a deposition he gave last year, all his criminal convictions, starting with the one for his first car theft when he was 16. Mr. Richards was in a Queens courthouse holding cell on Jan. 29, 2002, when he objected to a strip search. Mr. Richards claimed that one angry guard had knocked him over with a punch in the face while another had jumped on him and pushed a finger under Mr. Richards's eyelid.

"I'm screaming, 'Get your hands out of my eyes!' " Mr. Richards said. Another officer slammed his head into cell bars, he said.

According to Mr. Nathan's summary of the correction officers' accounts, they said Mr. Richards had started the fight by pushing past one officer and punching another. Two officers acknowledged having punched Mr. Richards in the face. Three officers reported injuries, including one with a sprained ankle.

Medical reports showed that the perforated eardrum had left Mr. Richards deaf in his right ear, and he is also partly blind in one eye.

Martin F. Horn, the correction commissioner, at first agreed to an interview, then declined on the advice of lawyers for the city. But a copy of the city's correction policy, revised by Mr. Horn last year, shows that New York has embraced the idea of a scale of force with many incremental steps before head strikes.

Officers are instructed to try to dominate a balking inmate with "control holds" and "take-down technique." They should not go for head blows "unless unavoidable," and must especially avoid hitting inmates in the head with batons. Guards are required to record any head strikes, which are also called head shots, in a special log book.

Although the policy might sound like bureaucratic rigmarole for a guard facing a raging inmate, corrections experts said prisons around the nation have adopted similar procedures after finding them effective in lowering violence.

"If properly presented and reinforced with training, they do work," said William C. Collins, a lawyer who is an editor of The Correctional Law Reporter, a newsletter. "They allow an agency to give their staff a sense of what is appropriate under some circumstances, and what isn't." Blows to the head, he added, "pretty much aren't on the list."

Several corrections experts said they were troubled by the head strike and injury rates in New York City. "If use-of-force policies are appropriate and followed, you're not going to see a lot of injuries," said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas professor of corrections policy and a leader of a task force for the American Bar Association that is revising national standards for the use of force in prisons.

The suit, in which Legal Aid is working with lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, seeks better training for guards in self-defense and take-down methods, and calls for working video cameras in the jails.

Measures similar to those demanded in the suit were put into effect, after hard-fought earlier litigation, in the Central Punitive Segregation Unit on Rikers Island, the isolation cells for inmates who make trouble in jail. They resulted in a "significant diminishing" of inmate injuries in confrontations with guards, according to the final court order in the case, in 2002.

City officials seem more focused on the fact that overall violence is diminishing than on continuing head injuries. In a deposition last year, Commissioner Horn was asked if he was familiar with the department's system for "reporting head shots."

"Is that a drink?" the commissioner replied.

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