An independent watchdog group called on New York state officials to investigate racist discrimination and “rampant abuse” by staff at the Marcy Correctional Facility back in 2023. On December 9, a group of guards at the state prison viciously beat prisoner Robert Brooks, a 43-year-old Black man who died in hospital the next day.
Body camera footage of the fatal assault was released to the public last week, sparking nationwide outcry and comparisons to the 2020 police murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. The footage shows officers repeatedly striking and apparently choking Brooks, who is lifted by his throat and dropped back on a table while handcuffed and in shackles.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the beating a “senseless killing” and on Monday ordered officials to begin the process of firing the 13 guards and one nurse allegedly involved in the abuse. They had already been suspended without pay as the state investigates potential criminal charges, although Attorney General Letitia James recused herself on Tuesday and appointed a special prosecutor because her office is defending four of the guards in other cases.
The Correctional Association of New York (CANY), an independent nonprofit tasked by law with inspecting conditions in state prisons, visited Marcy Correctional Facility in October of 2022. A survey found that 80 percent of prisoners reported facing or witnessing “verbal, physical, or sexual abuse” by staff. Another 67 percent reported seeing or experiencing racialized abuse, including Black men who said they were turned away from eating meals in the mess hall for wearing cornrows or braids in their hair.
CANY released a report on the findings in 2023. Jennifer Scaife, the group’s executive director, called on state corrections officials and New York’s Inspector General to investigate “serious allegations of racial discrimination and human rights violations” at Marcy Correctional Facility.
In an interview with CNYCentral this week, Scaife said CANY also recommended the attorney general investigate claims of abuse at Marcy Correctional Facility at the time, but it remains unclear if any state officials looked into the claims before the death of Brooks last month.
“I think certainly officials have been aware of allegations for quite some time,” Scaife said.
The CANY report was not the only warning sign. In 2020, two prisoners filed separate lawsuits alleging they suffered unprovoked assaults at the hands of guards as part of a larger pattern of abuse at Marcy Correctional Facility. At least three of the guards named in the lawsuits are reportedly implicated in the death of Brooks.
A spokesman for the New York Office of Inspector General said in an email that “active investigations require confidentiality” but allegations made by CANY, individual prisoners and prison staff are reviewed by leadership in a timely manner. The office has published reports on the “unconscionable persistence” of racial disparities in punishing prisoners for infractions, abusive misapplication of drug testing and sluggish implementation of a state law meant to reduce solitary confinement in state prisons.
The New York Attorney General’s Office initially released the body camera footage of the beating to the public and the prison staff who allegedly killed Brooks could potentially face criminal charges. However, Scaife said Attorney General James’s decision to recuse herself and appoint a special prosecutor raises questions about her power to hold prison guards accountable, given that her office will likely be defending them for years to come.
In an interview with CNN, a 30-year-old prisoner at Marcy Correctional Facility named Frederick Williams described surviving multiple violent assaults by staff and filing complaints with the Office of Special Investigations at the New York Corrections Department in vain.
“This Marcy Correctional Facility is run by a mob,” Williams said.
Governor Hochul, a Democrat, appointed a new superintendent to run the prison and offered a list of reforms this week, including $400 million to update surveillance cameras in all New York prisons. However, experts say prisons remain inherently dangerous places to live or work despite attempts at reform in New York and many other states, and ultimately only decarceration can prevent violence.
“We put people in prison largely because we have a hunger for retribution, and to that extent, there have been no reforms that have solved pervasive issues of physical violence and sexual violence in the same way they haven’t solved the conditions that contributed to the viral spread of COVID during the pandemic,” said Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, in an interview.
Bertram pointed to data released by the New York Corrections Department showing that violent assaults on people incarcerated in state prisons spiked by 42 percent from 2022 to 2023.
The data does not clarify whether the violent assaults were perpetrated by staff or other prisoners, and Bertram said data on assaults by prison staff is underreported or nonexistent in states across the country. A 2010 study found that 21 percent of male prisoners in the United States reported being physically assaulted over a six-month period.
Violence in prisons is not just a problem in New York, where politicians tend to be more open to reforms compared to more conservative states. An explosion in mass incarceration in the 1990s led to dangerous overcrowding, and between 2001 and 2018, the number of suicides, drug overdoses and homicides in state prisons skyrocketed nationwide, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
The Equal Justice Initiative, a racial justice group focused on ending mass incarceration, reports that U.S. prisoners are “beaten, stabbed, raped, and killed in facilities run by corrupt officials who abuse their power with impunity.” People in need of mental and physical health care are often denied and placed in solitary confinement instead.
“Whether you consider hunger, or restrictions on movement, or exposure to disease, or medical neglect to be forms of violence, all of these things are pervasive in prisons … this is part of the design,” Bertram said.
For those who do not have incarcerated friends or family members, the violence inside prison walls is usually out of sight. When incidents such as the death of Brooks make headlines, Bertram said, prison wardens and unions representing correctional officers often blame understaffing and low pay. While prisons do face a staffing crisis, a 2024 report by the Prison Policy Initiative found that wardens can’t recruit their way out of the problem.
Despite a 35 percent increase in median salary for prison workers, staffing levels in state prisons still decreased by 12 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to the report. Prison officials in various states also tried offering signing bonuses, increasing perks and benefits, building new facilities, and lowering employment requirements, but none of these efforts worked.
“Nobody is arguing that staffing levels don’t make a different when it comes to violence, but it’s far from the only driver, you can’t write off what happened to Robert Brooks because of understaffing,” Bertram said. “If you are going to pin that down as a problem, you have to have a plan in place and an explanation for why more hiring is going to be more effective than reducing the prison population.”
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