It also found that the contract with the company most likely violated procurement guidelines and that the department “did not perform due diligence when contracting with Microgenics for its drug testing systems, failing to understand that such tests were merely preliminary screening tests.”During the eight-month period, more than 1,600 prisoners were punished over drug tests statewide, including 140 who were subjected to solitary confinement, leading to complaints from inmates across the state, Ms. Lang said.Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, an advocacy group, brought the concerns of four incarcerated people who said they had been disciplined based on false positives to the department in June 2019. Later that summer, the department sent six positive test samples from other prisoners to another company for retesting, and five came back negative.The department then brought its findings to the office of the inspector general. It later moved to expunge more than 2,500 disciplinary records that were based on the faulty drug tests.Karen L. Murtagh, the executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, said the impact of the penalties was difficult to overstate.“The psychological and physical damage caused by solitary confinement, the loss of family visitation, the lack of proper programming, lost work-release and educational opportunities, all of which help combat recidivism, adds to the ledger for which we as a society need to take account,” she said. Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an advocacy group that seeks to dismantle the prison industry, said the report illustrated the problems inherent in allowing private companies to profit from incarceration. She called for further review of prison contracts.
N.Y. Prisons Punished 1,600 Based on Faulty Drug Tests, Report Finds
