The city’s Department of Correction will no longer tell the public if someone dies behind bars – a move critics charge is meant to cloak what happens inside the Big Apple’s troubled jails.

The abrupt policy shift was revealed just days after the DOC’s federal monitor accused the jail system of failing to tell its oversight team about five in-custody incidents — including deaths and injuries — as it is required to do by a court order.

Frank Dwyer, the DOC’s new chief spokesperson, framed the department’s decision to stop informing the public as a simple change in routine.

“It was a practice for the last year or so,” Dwyer told The Post on Thursday. “It is no longer a practice.”

Critics weren’t buying it.

“DOC leadership apparently doesn’t care about the humanity of the people in its custody enough to even report honestly when they die,” NYC Comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement Thursday that also called for a federal receiver to take over Rikers Island.

“The lives of people awaiting trial are not disposable and their deaths cannot be swept under the rug,” Lander added.

The Legal Aid Society also skewered the decision, saying in a statement that it was “another lowlight in the Department of Correction’s campaign to keep outside eyes away from the catastrophe that is the City’s jail system and the harm it inflicts daily on New Yorkers trapped inside its deadly walls.”

“The city cannot be permitted to isolate the jails from outside oversight, especially at a moment when so many of our incarcerated clients are vulnerable to suffering severe harm or even death,” the statement said.

The DOC’s decision, first reported Wednesday night by The City, is a significant departure from procedures the department established during the last two years.

Previously, the DOC issued press releases when inmates died that listed information such as the deceased’s name, where they were held and when they passed.

Last year, the DOC reported 19 in-custody deaths. This year, there have been at least three.

But the change led to at least two of the deaths initially going unreported: Rubu Zhao, a 52-year-old accused murderer who allegedly leapt from the upper tier of a mental health unit on May 14, and Joshua Valles, who died on May 27.

Both of the incidents, which took place at Rikers Island jails, were mentioned in a scorching report issued last Friday by the federal monitor. The report detailed five recent disturbing cases — including Zhao and Valles’ deaths — and said the department didn’t notify his team promptly of the injuries and deaths as it’s required to by a court order.

The monitor first learned of the incidents through outside parties, and – in at least one case – from media reports.

In the Valles case, the 31-year-old man with a history of drug addiction died from a fractured skull, according to his autopsy. But DOC Commissioner Louis Molina had written in a May 26 letter to the monitor that the inmate simply took a “turn for the worse” after complaining to the medical staff about headaches.

The department’s general counsel first told the deputy monitor that Valles “appeared to have a heart attack and no foul play is currently suspected,” Molina wrote.

Molina went on to say there was “no departmental wrongdoing” in either the death of Valles or Zhao’s.

In a letter to Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain, monitor Steve Martin said an autopsy revealed that the skull fracture killed Valles — and the DOC is “unsure how the individual obtained the fatal injury.”

Martin also said it’s not clear how Molina concluded that his department did nothing wrong.

“This serious and disturbing update only reinforces the Monitoring Team’s concerns about the management of this individual, any potential underlying incident(s) he may have been involved in, and any potential reporting irregularities or failures that may or may not have occurred,” Martin wrote.

On Wednesday, Swain ordered the DOC to provide to the monitoring team all meaningful details – such as reports, records and other material — from the five “disturbing incidents” by June 5.

This will include information on both Zhao’s and Valles’ deaths.

The monitor has until June 8 to file a status report, the judge wrote. A conference will follow five days later.

“These incidents have highlighted dangerous conditions and unsafe practices, as well as grave concerns related to transparency and the reporting of information to the Monitoring Team,” Swain wrote.

On Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams defended the embattled commissioner, who he said has been “amazing.” And he implied that there is “something else going on with this relationship” between Molina and the monitor.

“[Molina] did not violate any of the rules on what he was supposed to report on — not one item,” Adams said. “But if you would have read the report, you would have thought just the opposite. So I think there’s something else going on with this relationship that we’re having. And I have been extremely restrained, but that level of patience is running out.”

The monitor’s displeasure with the DOC was clear in the report it issued last week. It lambasted Molina for trying to get Martin to stop the report’s release because, he claimed, it would cause “great harm [to the department] at a time when we are making great strides.”

The monitor team declined to comment when reached by The Post on Thursday.

“I am not at liberty to make public statements, including statements to the press, outside of our reports,” a spokesperson said.

The monitor was installed in 2015 as a way to help rectify claims that guards regularly used unnecessary force against inmates.

The settlement — the culmination of a lawsuit brought by a dozen men who claimed they were beaten by Rikers Island corrections officers — also instituted a number of other reforms, such as strict rules against guards striking inmates on the head, a body camera mandate and the installation of 8,000 security cameras throughout the complex.