In 2022, New York City’s jails commissioner, Louis Molina, issued a dire warning to local lawmakers: fentanyl was pouring into Rikers Island through the mail, causing an overdose crisis among the jail’s detainees and putting guards at risk. As evidence, Molina passed around a child’s drawing of a reindeer, one of hundreds of seized items he said had been “literally soaked in the drug and mailed to people in custody.” That claim was based on faulty drug-testing kits with a stunning 85% false positive rate, says a new from the city’s Department of Investigation. The report found the city vastly overstated the prevalence of fentanyl sent by mail to detainees, reports the Associated Press.
When investigators retested 71 pieces of mail initially flagged by field tests as containing fentanyl, only 10 actually showed traces of the drug. The reindeer drawing highlighted by Molina was fentanyl-free. City officials proposed redirecting mail to an offsite vendor, who would upload it digitally for the incarcerated person to read on a tablet — a practice used in other correctional systems, including New York’s state prisons. The proposal has been blocked by a jail oversight board. Jocelyn Strauber, commissioner of the Department of Investigation, said the city should reassess its ongoing effort to bar detainees from receiving mail. “The field tests don’t support a concern that a high rate of fentanyl-laced objects are coming in from the mail,” she said. “To the extent policy determinations are based on flawed data, they ought to be reconsidered.” Detainee advocates have long contended that drugs primarily enter the jail system via employees, who can easily smuggle them inside and sell them to gang leaders. In recent years, dozens of correction officers have been charged in multiple investigations of smuggling rings on Rikers Island.
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