The Crisis in New York State Prisons

"Prisons are a closed world, and it was their word against the officers'. Who would believe them? And then, last December, a group of guards killed a man named Robert Brooks in a state prison near Utica—punching him, shoving a rag into his mouth, hitting him with his own shoe, and stomping on his groin. Unbeknownst to the officers, they had inadvertently videotaped their actions on their own body-worn cameras."

"In February, the state's prison guards walked off the job at nearly all of New York's correctional facilities. They claimed the prisons had become more dangerous and that they were being forced to work extreme amounts of overtime. It was the first strike by the officers in almost fifty years, and even now, seven months later, state prison operations have not returned to the way they were before the strike."

New York State prisons are experiencing systemic dysfunction marked by violent misconduct by correction officers, including the December killing of Robert Brooks, which officers inadvertently recorded on body-worn cameras. Decades of incarcerated people reporting brutality rarely produced change because prisons operated as closed systems where allegations lacked corroboration. In February, correction officers staged a near-universal walkout citing rising danger and extreme overtime—the first strike in almost fifty years. Seven months after the strike, prison operations have not returned to previous norms. The combination of recorded violence and the strike has exposed deep operational failures and elevated the risk of further unrest.

Read at The New Yorker