Chair Farías asks whether families are notified about nursery eligibility
Farías asks if families are notified about the possibility of moving to the nursery. Greysock says DOC communicates directly with the person in care, and Colon says DOC generally does not contact family without consent.
And then just another follow-up from a question that Chair Books Powers asked.
For the notices regarding the nursery and potential eligibility on...
Moving from general population to the nursery, have we thought through or are their families notified of the potentiality to move their housing?
Is that something that we've done in the past or we're interested in doing?
Because maybe sometimes encouragement is needed by family members.
Typically, we communicate directly to the person in our care, and they would communicate with a family member.
Okay.
Yeah, generally, DOC is not in communication.
We don't have a means of communicating.
And what about, like, counselors or the doulas?
Are those folks talking with family members?
Yeah, I think for...
For counselors or any of our DOC staff that are even or non-DOC staff or providers, we do often get consent from the person in our care if they would like us to reach out to anyone else, including their family.
Our social service team at the Rosam Singer Center does a lot of actually facilitated phone calls with a variety of folks from community care providers that may not be able to come on to Rikers Island and families as well,
as indicated and necessary.
And so during those conversations, it could come up, the opportunity for the nursery.
But since it is a consented conversation, we're not necessarily privileged to what that information or the case note would look like.
Okay.
I would recommend just talking that through with doulas.
Sometimes you need your mom, your sister, your partner to tell you this might be best for the time being.
And sometimes folks don't want to feel isolated.
They might think the nursery will be isolating, so they want to stay around other humans, which makes sense during a very traumatic experience being incarcerated and pregnant.
But sometimes family support is helpful.
I will turn over to my colleagues for questions before I use the rest of my time.
So I'd like to first acknowledge Councilmember Morano, followed by Hudson for questions.