Metro

Inmates reap rewards of $35M settlement

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Crime does pay.

The city has started doling out $1,000 checks to 26,131 former jailbirds who won a $35.7 million class-action settlement for illegal strip searches — and recipients who are back in jail are throwing their newfound weight and windfall around.

“I own you!” inmates are bragging to jailers on Rikers Island, according to Correction insiders.

The taxpayer gifts — an average of $1,130 per prisoner — are deposited into inmate commissary accounts, leading to logjams at snack bars, inmates and officers said.

AND YOU THINK YOUR CIGS ARE PRICEY!

The crooks are cashing out with loads of chocolate bars, Ruffles chips, Rolet beef sticks and Pop-Tarts, as well as radios, headphones and batteries, jail officers said.

“They are just gloating. They are saying that they sued and will sue again and that we’ll be paying them,” a jail supervisor fumed.

“At the same time we are looking to lay off teachers, we are rewarding people who commit crimes? How many teachers could we hire with $35 million? It’s lawsuits gone wild.”

The money has also led to a boom in black-market items like cigarettes

“It’s just crazy, man!” one inmate told The Post.

Incredibly, the city has paid out $81 million to settle three identical class-action strip-search suits over the past decade.

In 1986, a federal appeals court ordered the city to stop strip-searching inmates during their initial processing at Rikers if all they were facing were misdemeanor charges. The invasive, nude frisk, the court said, violated the prisoners’ constitutional rights.

In the first class-action suit, in 2001, the city paid $43 million to settle with thousands of inmates who said the searches continued. A year later, the city shelled out another $5 million to a fresh batch of suing inmates.

The city finally came up with a plan in 2002: Inmates would change into a paper “hospital gown,” walk through a metal detector and sit on a body-scanning chair.

But the Correction Department either didn’t buy enough gowns or didn’t use the ones it had.

Last March, the city agreed to shell out $35.7 million to the inmates arrested on misdemeanor charges between July 15, 1999, and Oct. 4, 2007. Of that sum, about $29 million went to ex-inmates, $4 million to lawyers and $2.7 million to a court-appointed monitor.

Inmate Danique Lewis, 23, told The Post he ended up with a check for about $500 for the commissary after money was subtracted for child support for his daughter.

The Bushwick, Brooklyn, native was first strip-searched after he was arrested in 2007 for jumping a turnstile.

“They made me squat down naked. It was terrible,” he recalled.

He was searched two more times after arrests on other misdemeanors. He’s back in jail on charges he assaulted his girlfriend.

The city defended the settlement as “prudent.”

“Given the inherent risks involved with any litigation, the settlement was in the city’s best interest,” said Muriel Goode-Trufant of the Law Department. “[The monitor] has since affirmed that the city has complied with all required procedures.”

Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello said, “Payments to recipients in custody have had no disruptive effect on operation of the city’s jails.”

rblau@nypost.com