Matter of Marcus Reid et al v. New York City Department of Correction

Recent Case Filings

Surveillance and Civil Rights

April 15, 2024

In April 2024, on behalf of incarcerated New Yorkers, as well as the community members they speak with on the telephone, The Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, New York County Defender Services, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP filed a class action lawsuit against the New York City Department of Correction (“DOC”) seeking to end its unlawful mass surveillance.

DOC’s telephone system is, in practice, a mass surveillance project primarily targeting Black, brown and low-income New Yorkers. Universal recording subjects incarcerated people and their loved ones to an unprecedented level of government monitoring and data collection.  The system monitors and records nearly every call, and has recorded thousands of confidential calls between attorneys and their incarcerated clients. DOC collects not only the substance of these conversations, but also the biometric, financial, and other personal information of everyone who participates in a call on its network.

DOC’s surveillance system is operated by Securus Technologies, a private contractor with a history of unlawful surveillance practices and data breaches in other jurisdictions around the country. 

DOC’s mass surveillance system violates incarcerated New Yorkers’ rights to privacy and association, chills their willingness to speak to their attorneys, isolates them from their family and friends, and damages their mental health in an already traumatic jail environment.  

This lawsuit comes after DOC unlawfully recorded thousands of privileged telephone conversations between people in DOC custody and their defense attorneys—and then disseminated those illicit recordings to prosecutors and law enforcement.

Public defender offices began notifying DOC of privilege breaches in 2018, yet only in 2021 did DOC conduct a partial review. This review excluded calls to private and 18B attorneys without explanation, only considered recordings of privileged calls that were sent to law enforcement and truncated the review period to a single year. Still, the findings revealed that within this small sample, there were thousands of privileged calls that were recorded and sent to law enforcement.

Undeterred by these issues, DOC has continued to renew and expand its now $5.4 million dollar contract with Securus –without conducting performance reviews or public hearings, as required under the New York City Procurement Policy Board rules.