An advocacy group that found New Jersey prisons routinely flour restrictions on solitary confinement recommended a reform — more oversight, with every facility getting its own independent board of trustees to address its unique needs. The state’s prisons already have civilian boards of trustees tasked with oversight. Yet the boards — one for the women’s prison and one for eight men’s prisons — have longstanding vacancies that critics say have undercut their watchdog role. The men’s board has had its duties pared down so much and become so inactive that one of its own members questioned his place on it, reports the New Jersey Monitor. “We’ve never been really reappointed,” said William Curry, who was added to the board in 2015. “Some of us get a little bit nervous that, you know, your term is expired and you’re making decisions on stuff like, ‘Am I really a board member anymore? Do I really have jurisdiction over this?’”
Reformers and former prisoners are demanding action, saying the vacancies and diminished role of the men’s prisons’ board indicate a systemic indifference and contribute to problems behind bars. Dameon Marquese Stackhouse of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said he had no idea how anemic prison oversight was when he was incarcerated. “Given all of the unacceptable problems in New Jersey’s prisons, which I know well from first-hand experience, this is extremely disturbing and should be addressed immediately,” said Stackhouse, who was freed in 2016 after a decade in prison. The Rev. J. Amos Caley of New Jersey Prison Justice Watch and pastor at the Reformed Church of Highland Park said that tasking a single, short-handed board with overseeing eight prisons scattered across the state “smells like window-dressing to me,.”.
“It’s a joke,” he said. “It isn’t enough to have one oversight board over all of the men’s prisons.” A spokesman for the state Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The department has not complied with the New Jersey Monitor’s public records requests for the boards’ meeting agendas, minutes, and decisions. The last appointments to the men’s prisons’ board were made in 2017, when former Gov. Chris Christie appointed one new trustee and reappointed four more.
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