Four Things to know about the New York Prison System's ruling family

Yahoo

06-03-2025

— This story first appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating New York state politics. Sign up for their stories at nysfocus.com/newsletter.
New York's state prison commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III, is catching flak from every direction.
Since December, when the state attorney general released video of prison guards beating an incarcerated man to death, Martsucello has faced calls for resignation from prisoners' rights activists and corrections officers alike. Some of the former see him as the kingpin of a brutally violent system; the latter as a gutless reformer who doesn't have their backs. He's faced protests, national outrage, aggressive inquiries from horrified legislators — and, most recently, a wildcat strike from his guards. Through mediated talks with the officers' union on one hand and promises for reform on the other, he's been working around the clock to keep both his commissionership and the state prison system itself from falling apart.
How did Martuscello find himself here? While his tenure as prison chief is less than two years old, he's no stranger to New York's Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS. He came of age in the agency, and knows its ugly side better than anyone.
This week, New York Focus published an in-depth investigation into Martuscello's ascent. The result of a year and a half of reporting, the article reveals his role as scion of a state prison dynasty. It details not only the commissioner's rise to power, but his father's, brother's, siblings', in-laws', and that of his family's friends across the system.
Thousands of pages of previously unreleased documents and testimony from incarcerated people, advocates, officials, and over a dozen current and former DOCCS staff tell the story of a man who's found himself at the center of a firestorm, torn between his professed progressivism and his background in a shadowy system.
Here's what you need to know.
Daniel Martuscello III is the eldest child of a New York prison dynasty.
Dan Martuscello is second-generation DOCCS. His father started as a guard in the late 1960s and rose through the security ranks, eventually becoming superintendent of a maximum security prison.
The elder Martuscello was an old school prison boss — simultaneously aggressive and savvy — with deep connections throughout the agency. He was such a DOCCS institution that some contemporaries simply referred to him as 'the Old Man.'
The Old Man raised six children, all but one of whom launched careers in the prison agency. Three worked under their father's watch at his prison, as did three of the Old Man's sons-in-law.
Dan, the Old Man's eldest, is the family's suave politician. 'He's very astute politically,' said Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit that the state tasks with overseeing prison conditions. He's won over key elected officials in the state government's Democratic majority, as well as some prisoners' rights advocates, who say he's as accessible and humanitarian as one can hope from the head of a sprawling 42-facility carceral system. Before his confirmation as permanent prison commissioner, sources described him as long destined to take over.
Dan's brother Chris has also spent his years seeking power; he's shot up the ranks of DOCCS's internal investigations office. In contrast to Dan, Chris inherited his father's rough edges. Former staff describe him as a hot-headed tyrant whose main mode of leadership is intimidation.
The dynasty is the center of a patronage network. Its main hub is the prison agency's internal accountability office.
The Martuscello prison family functions as the focal point of a patronage network, according to former staff and documents. It has taken advantage of DOCCS's culture of favoritism, wherein employees in sought-after posts often have benefactors who helped secure their cushy or lucrative assignments. The network is so embedded in DOCCS that staff have dubbed it the 'friends and family' program.
The friends and family network spans across the prison agency, from its nursing corps to administration to security ranks to its training and education programs — though its main hub is Chris's internal investigations office.
That office — now called the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI — is responsible for digging into wrongdoing against both incarcerated people and prison employees. Traditionally staffed by former corrections officers, OSI allows the prison agency to police itself. Incarcerated people and advocates describe it as a black box, quick to absolve officers and adept at keeping DOCCS wrongdoing out of the public eye. It closes at least hundreds of unresolved officer abuse cases a year.
A former head of the office was an old friend of the Martuscellos (until a state investigation found him covering for one his beneficiaries, an alleged serial harasser, and he retired). The Old Man used that connection to ensure that his family could get plum posts in OSI, per former staff and documents. Chris transferred to the office and quickly ascended its hierarchy, as did a buddy from Chris and Dan's corrections officer days, the Old Man's closest friend, the eldest Martuscello daughter's then-husband, and others.
The Old Man even directed one of his sons-in-law to a specific post within the office, steering him away from an unpopular 'rat' unit responsible for digging into complaints of officer abuse.
Around the time Dan became commissioner in 2023, other Martuscellos and members of their network also ascended. Chris became an assistant commissioner — and second-in-command of OSI — as did Chris and Dan's eldest sister, a longtime DOCCS nurse. One of the brothers' friends had risen to OSI's third-in-command, while their brother-in-law and family friend had become higher-ups within OSI's specialized investigative units.
'The Martuscellos — they all get hooked up,' an OSI staffer told state authorities. 'They got this juice.'
Consequences of alleged nepotism have reverberated across the prison system.
The friends and family network has made enemies on its path to power. Chris has been particularly aggressive about forcing people out of positions he wants for his favorites, former staff allege. That has not only led to internal DOCCS controversy, but contributed to some of the agency's biggest scandals of the last decade.
Case in point is the story of Al Montegari. In 2014, Montegari was named head of OSI's sex crimes unit. According to court documents, he quickly called attention to problems in OSI, particularly within the unit Chris Martuscello was leading at the time.
Roughly a year into Montegari's tenure, Chris and Dan worked to remove him from office, with Chris spearheading a seemingly bogus disciplinary investigation into him. Even though a hearing officer found him not guilty of most disciplinary charges, Dan, then a deputy commissioner, stripped Montegari of his OSI title — leaving the spot open for the brothers' friend, who was soon hired into it.
The Montegari incident resulted in double blowback for the Martuscellos. Montegari sued over the alleged retaliation, and a jury eventually awarded him $500,000. (DOCCS is appealing.)
His ouster from OSI also left a temporary vacancy atop the sex crimes unit. That forced Montegari's former deputies — whose abilities he'd said he doubted, according to court records — to sign off on investigators' work.
While Montegari was suspended, his unit was digging into a complaint regarding rumors of an inappropriate relationship between a civilian employee and an incarcerated person. The investigator closed the case as 'unfounded,' and unit deputies signed off on it, even though the investigator didn't search the incarcerated person's cell, which would have been standard, former staff said. If he did, he may have found tools — and a hole behind the man's bed.
Three weeks later, the incarcerated person and his friend escaped. The civilian employee had smuggled them the tools. and she'd been sending love notes to one and having sex with the other. The 2015 escape from Clinton Correctional Facility was a national scandal: It became the subject of a Lifetime movie, a Showtime miniseries, and an episode of Law & Order: SVU.
The future of New York's state prison system hangs in the balance
New York Focus's investigation into the Martuscello family illustrates how the state prison commissioner came up through a corrupt system. It also shows that he's a complex figure, delicately balancing his liberal persona with his status as a corrections lifer.
Dan Martuscello's standing among prison staff is in the tank. Striking officers laughed off his initial demands that they return to work, forcing DOCCS to agree to recently announced concessions. Some have called for his resignation. His unpopularity is partly a result of what online materials circulating among officers describe as his family's 'nauseating' nepotism.
That unpopularity also stems from the fact that guards associate him with forces trying to alter the dynamics undergirding the prison system's brutality. He has heeded some calls for reform after Brooks's killing. (Elected officials are calling for further scrutiny after guards at a prison across the street from where Brooks was killed reportedly beat another man to death over the weekend.)
Guards have also railed against his willingness — however reluctant — to implement a statewide solitary confinement reform law, which they've tried to overturn since before it went into effect. That law not only shielded incarcerated people from the torture of indefinite isolation, but stripped guards of some of their power to punish incarcerated people arbitrarily.
Meanwhile, incarcerated people and their family members are up in arms over continued abuse, they've told New York Focus.
How Martuscello balances the demands of the 14,000 guards who work for him and the welfare of the 33,000 people in his custody will determine the future of a system that's shown itself to be a powder keg. As his past becomes clearer, the future of the agency he leads becomes more uncertain.