The Board of Correction establishes and ensures compliance with minimum standards regulating conditions of confinement and correctional health and mental health care in all City correctional facilities. These standards are compiled in the Rules of the City of New York, Title 40.

In 1978 the Board adopted a set of sixteen Minimum Standards to provide what it considered to be the basic elements necessary to promote safe, secure and humane jail environments. The original Standards provisions sought ensure non-discriminatory treatment of prisoners, and regulated classification, personal hygiene, overcrowding, lock-in, access to recreation, practice of religion, access to courts, visiting, telephone calls, correspondence, packages, publications, and access to media. The original Standards remained substantially unchanged until 1985, when the Board promulgated three important amendments to Standards provisions regulating overcrowding, law libraries, and the variance process.
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Promoting the delivery of appropriate correctional health and mental health services has been a critical part of the Board’s mission. Spurred by its longstanding concern about inmate suicides, the Board held public hearings in the early 1980s to explore the quality and availability of mental health services provided to prisoners. Thereafter, the Board worked collaboratively with the Departments of Correction, Health, and Mental Health, and the Mayor’s Office of Operations, the Office of Management and Budget and contract service providers to develop Mental Health Minimum Standards for the City’s jails.
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With the same inter-agency collaboration and cooperation, the Board established Health Care Minimum Standards in 1991, which all participants viewed as a consensus document. The Health Care Standards require that the quality of services provided to prisoners be consistent with “accepted professional standards and sound professional judgment and practice”.
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The Department of Correction or the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene may apply for a variance from a specific subdivision or section of the minimum standards, mental health care minimum standards or health care minimum standards when compliance cannot be achieved or continued. A "limited variance" is an exemption granted by the Board from full compliance with a particular subdivision or section for a specified period of time. A "continuing variance" is an exemption granted by the Board from full compliance with a particular subdivision or section for an indefinite period of time. An “emergency variance” is an exemption granted by the Board from full compliance with a particular subdivision or section for no more than 30 days.
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