New York City's Push To Ban Mail at Rikers Was Based on Drug Test Kits With an 85 Percent Error Rate

The problems with these test kits are well-known, and there have been hundreds of documented cases of wrongful arrests based on them.

In 2022, former New York City Department of Corrections Commissioner Louis Molina testified before the city council about the flood of fentanyl coming into Rikers Island, the city's infamous jail complex.

"How does fentanyl get into our jails?" he asked. "The short answer is that most of it enters in letters and packages laced with fentanyl, literally soaked in the drug, and mailed to people in custody."

To illustrate the problem, Molina had a powerful prop: A child's drawing of a reindeer that had been mailed to a Rikers Island inmate and tested positive for fentanyl. It was because of letters like this, Molina explained, that his department was proposing ending delivery of physical letters to jail inmates and instead sending them scanned and digitized copies.

There was only one problem: The field test used on that reindeer drawing wasn't reliable, and a drug lab would later invalidate the results. Rudolph was clean.

In fact, a report released Wednesday by the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) found that, when it sent 71 pieces of mail that tested presumptive positive for fentanyl to a drug lab for verification, 85 percent of the items came back negative, including the reindeer drawing.

The DOI concluded that "field tests are not reliable, particularly with respect to the identification of fentanyl in items such as books, clothing, greeting cards and other materials sent through the mail."

The basis for the DOC's proposed policy ending physical mail delivery to inmates was a falsehood, and not a particularly good one. The problems with these drug field tests are well known: They've resulted in hundreds of documented cases of wrongful arrests around the country, and several state prison systems, including New York's, have suspended their use.

The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. Over the years, police officers have arrested and jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned presumptive positive results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball. 

A study published earlier this year by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania estimated that these tests may result in up to 30,000 wrongful arrests a year.

The DOI says reliance on these field tests led officials to incorrectly focus on mail instead of other, more obvious, vectors for contraband.

"DOI's investigations have shown that contraband enters DOC facilities through means including DOC staff, and that DOC has failed to fully implement DOI's prior recommendations, particularly those intended to strengthen controls around staff contraband smuggling and thereby to limit vulnerabilities in this area," the report says.

The New York City Department of Corrections did not have an immediate comment on whether it will continue to use the field kits and digitized mail, but in a statement, it said: "Field tests are a tool used to quickly assess potential threats, and while not perfect, they play an important role in our safety protocols. We will review the report and continue to refine our testing processes to ensure the highest standard of safety for all involved."

But prisons and jails don't use these field tests as a first step in identifying potential drugs; they are typically the only step. As the DOI report notes, field tests "are not subject to confirmatory laboratory testing as a routine matter."

The Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to demand that drug tests be sent to outside labs for verification, and prisons are free to punish them based on the results. Reason reported on how federal inmates are subjected to solitary confinement and other discipline based on unverified field tests, despite the fact that the manufacturers warn that the results are preliminary.

In 2020, the New York state prison system suspended the use of drug test kits manufactured by the company Sirchie because of concerns over their reliability. An investigation later revealed that 2,000 state prisoners had been wrongly punished with solitary confinement, canceled parole hearings, and loss of visitation rights because of field tests that were later invalidated by drug labs.

And in 2021, a Massachusetts judge ordered the state prison system to stop using Sirchie's test kits for synthetic cannabinoids, writing that they were "highly unreliable" and "only marginally better than a coin-flip." The injunction was in response to a class action lawsuit filed after a dozen Massachusetts attorneys said they were falsely accused of sending drugs to their incarcerated clients, who were then put in solitary confinement for receiving legitimate legal mail. 

Another class action lawsuit was filed against Washington's state prison system last year for punishing inmates based on the results of unverified field tests.

New York City's Rikers Island also used test kits manufactured by Sirchie, but it switched to another brand, DetectaChem, last year.

The problem has nothing to do with the brand, though. It's that the tests do not give the user conclusive results about the presence of drugs in the first place. In 2018, a California judge noted that one color test identified chocolate as presumptive positive for heroin, and if one accepted the logic that the test could identify heroin, "it would also be true that it is a presumptive positive test for chocolate."

Sirchie notes the clear warnings on its website: "ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY! The results of this test are merely presumptive. NARK® only tests for the possible presence of certain chemical compounds. Reactions may occur with, and such compounds can be found in, both legal and illegal products."

Molina testified in 2022 that "books are for reading, not for lacing with fentanyl," and he was perhaps more correct than he realized.