The Legal Aid Society has filed a letter petitioning the court in Benjamin v. Schiraldi – a landmark consolidated class action about conditions in the City jails resulting in court orders on fire risks, extreme temperatures, and sanitation and ventilation deficiencies – to sanction the City for failing in its legal obligation to provide comprehensive reporting on ventilation efforts at local jails, as reported by the New York Daily News.

As part of the supplemental remedial order in Benjamin, the Court required the City to provide timely ventilation-related data to Legal Aid and the Office of the Compliance Consultants (OCC), the monitoring office created by this lawsuit. OCC is then expected to use that data to assess the quality of ventilation inside of the city jails and publish its conclusions in periodic progress reports three times yearly.

The City has substantially stopped providing these reports, profoundly undercutting OCC’s mandate and leaving the parties with little information about compliance with the ventilation orders and the state of ventilation inside of the New York City Department of Correction’s aging, crumbling buildings. The City’s noncompliance accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when the need for effective ventilation was at its zenith. As COVID-19 continues to infect New Yorkers, it is critical that the City provide ventilation-related metrics about the City jails, congregate settings where the virus can spread quicker than in the community.

Legal Aid Society is calling on Manhattan Federal Judge Loretta Preska, who currently presides over the case, to tour the jails with sanitation experts. Preska has overseen the case for the past seven years but has never visited local jail facilities.