It additionally discovered that the contract with the corporate probably violated procurement tips and that the division “didn’t carry out due diligence when contracting with Microgenics for its drug testing methods, failing to know that such checks have been merely preliminary screening checks.”
Throughout the eight-month interval, greater than 1,600 prisoners have been punished over drug checks statewide, together with 140 who have been subjected to solitary confinement, resulting in complaints from inmates throughout the state, Ms. Lang stated.
Prisoners’ Authorized Providers of New York, an advocacy group, introduced the considerations of 4 incarcerated individuals who stated they’d been disciplined primarily based on false positives to the division in June 2019. Later that summer time, the division despatched six optimistic check samples from different prisoners to a different firm for retesting, and 5 got here again unfavourable.
The division then introduced its findings to the workplace of the inspector basic. It later moved to expunge greater than 2,500 disciplinary information that have been primarily based on the defective drug checks.
Karen L. Murtagh, the manager director of Prisoners’ Authorized Providers of New York, stated the influence of the penalties was troublesome to overstate.
“The psychological and bodily harm attributable to solitary confinement, the lack of household visitation, the shortage of correct programming, misplaced work-release and academic alternatives, all of which assist fight recidivism, provides to the ledger for which we as a society must take account,” she stated.
Bianca Tylek, govt director of Value Rises, an advocacy group that seeks to dismantle the jail trade, stated the report illustrated the issues inherent in permitting non-public corporations to revenue from incarceration. She referred to as for additional evaluate of jail contracts.