New York County Defender Services

But Raji Edayathumangalam, a senior policy social worker at New York County Defender Services who testified at the hearing, said providing treatment inside jail is only part of the problem. CHS can serve as a “crisis stabilization point” for people experiencing acute psychiatric or substance-use problems, she said. But stabilization is different from recovery.

My name is Brittany Brown and I am the Supervising Attorney of the Collateral Consequences Unit at New York County Defender Services (NYCDS). NYCDS is an indigent defense office that every year represents tens of thousands of New Yorkers in Manhattan’s Criminal, Family, and Supreme Courts. Our organization includes attorneys who specialize in immigration matters, and advise our clients on any immigration consequences stemming from criminal legal system-involvement, including deportation. They also assist our non-citizen clients with other immigration issues, such as submitting affirmative applications and accompanying them to ICE check-ins. Consequently, we frequently represent clients who may have collateral immigration consequences due to their interaction with the criminal legal system.

I am here to testify that it is very much possible for people with long histories of complex needs and innumerable cycles across various institutions to exit Rikers Island, and successfully integrate and thrive in the community. I want to illustrate using the examples of two clients.

Despite efforts to expand the system, more than half of the state’s counties still lack courts that serve people with serious mental illness.

NYCDS took seriously the mandate to review court operations as a lever for reducing the population at Rikers. NYCDS maintains a database called LegalServer, where we capture as much data about individual cases as possible so that our claims about systemic change are well-researched. In that vein, we conducted a month-long study of our own case processing to identify the drivers of long case-processing times and to answer a single question: would fixing case processing meaningfully reduce the jail population at Rikers?