20-05-2025
As dust begins to settle on prison chaos, reformers hold somber hearing
ALBANY — 'I hate coming here,' Robert Ricks said.
Ricks sat at the focal point of a hearing room in the New York state legislative office building. He'd traveled to Albany last Wednesday to testify for a second time about his son, Robert Brooks, whom prison guards beat to death in December at the Central New York prison where he was incarcerated. Video of the gruesome killing sparked nationwide outcry and calls to reform New York's state prison system.
Prison reform was the topic of last week's all-day hearing, which took place as the state legislature approaches its final weeks of the annual legislative session. Amid emotional testimony, Ricks outlined the Robert Brooks Agenda for Justice, a suite of legislation to expand prison oversight and make it easier to hold abusive officers to account. If lawmakers don't pass the bills before the session ends in less than a month, they'll have to wait until next year to try again.
Earlier in the hearing, the head of the state prison system had touted reforms he implemented after Brooks was killed. Ricks, seated next to two other loved ones of Black men who recently died after beatings by prison guards, expressed skepticism at the state's willingness to curb the violence.
'From the moment I step in this building, I want to cry,' he said. 'And I don't want to cry because my son is dead. I want to cry because there's an eerie feeling in the African American community that's often unspoken that nothing's going to change.'
'I come here feeling like I'm getting ready to fight the wind,' he said.
During the nearly seven-hour hearing on Wednesday, advocates, union representatives, and family members of incarcerated people testified about conditions in New York's state prisons, particularly corrections officer violence.
Despite the somber subject matter, the hearing kicked off with optimistic testimony from Daniel Martuscello, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision's earnest commissioner. For an hour and a half, he fielded questions from lawmakers and advocates about how his prison system is handling its worst year in recent memory.
Just weeks after Brooks's killing — and hours after a special prosecutor announced the impending arrest of the guards who killed him — corrections officers across DOCCS's 42 facilities launched a wildcat strike to protest what they called unsafe working conditions.
The three-week strike resulted in 2,000 guards losing their jobs and saw the deployment of thousands of National Guard personnel to staff the prisons, many of which remain on partial lockdown. During the strike, corrections officers allegedly killed another incarcerated man — 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi, whose mentor also testified Wednesday — at a prison across the street from where guards beat Brooks to death.
With the dust from the strike and killings still settling (3,000 National Guard troops remain in the prisons, Martuscello testified), the prison chief is fielding flak from all sides. He's juggling reformers' calls for accountability, demands from officers for new solitary confinement and staffing policies, and a massive hit to his prisons' already under-capacity staffing levels. At the hearing, legislators grilled him over progress on measures he's promised to curb abuse.
Martuscello was confident about 'improving prison culture.' The agency is contracting with a law firm and two nonprofit organizations to evaluate every aspect of how staff and incarcerated people interact, he explained. The law firm will issue publicly available recommendations late in the summer.
DOCCS can also change its culture through recruitment, Martuscello said. He touted a new state policy, passed earlier this month in the budget, that lowers the minimum age for corrections officers from 21 to 18, as well as an aggressive recruitment campaign DOCCS has launched to fill 4,500 guard positions. New personnel can bring a new attitude, he said: 'That's an opportunity you don't often get.'
To address demands for more direct reform, Martuscello outlined a series of initiatives he launched with Governor Kathy Hochul in recent months. None will fundamentally alter DOCCS's structure or the way it conducts oversight, and they've left others who testified at the hearing unimpressed.
DOCCS has embedded its internal accountability unit, the Office of Special Investigations, in every prison, Martuscello explained, and is getting over $7 million to expand the unit. Lawyers who represent incarcerated people are skeptical that that will improve accountability. At the hearing, they characterized the office as a black box and said that DOCCS's internal mechanisms for investigating abuse more often than not let guards off the hook.
'DOCCS's internal investigations through the Office of Special Investigations are opaque, slow, and default to weighing staff credibility over incarcerated voices, regardless of the facts,' said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society's Prisoners' Rights Project.
Martuscello also touted whistleblower policies he revamped after Brooks's killing. DOCCS now has an anonymous tipline for staff to report their colleagues' malfeasance or abuse, he said. Representatives for DOCCS staff said they thought little of the effort.
'It's toilet paper,' Wayne Spence, president of the union that represents DOCCS civilian staff, like nurses, testified at the hearing. The efforts do little to discourage retaliation against whistleblowers, he said.
There was one effort the commissioner highlighted that everyone who testified seemed to support: more body-worn cameras. DOCCS has long promised to equip all of its officers with body cameras, but the rollout has taken years. Spurred by the Brooks and Nantwi killings, the state fast-tracked the effort with $18 million in additional funding. All facilities should have body cameras by mid-summer, Martuscello said, and officers will be required to have them turned on when they're interacting with incarcerated people.
Martuscello's reforms aren't enough to fix the embattled agency, according to its critics. Reform-minded lawmakers have this session introduced legislation — part of the Robert Brooks Agenda — to expand prison oversight and officer accountability, as well as to give incarcerated people opportunities to earn time off their sentences.
One bill would expand the powers of the Correctional Association of New York, the 180-year-old nonprofit organization tasked by the legislature with overseeing prison conditions. Another would add commissioner slots to the State Commission of Correction, which has oversight power over all carceral facilities in New York state.
SCOC rarely uses its full authority to hold jails and prisons accountable, as New York Focus has reported. It also dodges scrutiny: SCOC representatives declined to attend last week's hearing, legislators said. (When asked why, a spokesperson simply said that 'SCOC submitted written testimony for the hearing.') The SCOC bill would triple the number of commissioners and require that they come from diverse backgrounds, including criminal defense and public health.
Yet another bill would allow the DOCCS commissioner to discipline officers for serious misconduct without having to go through mandatory arbitration. A 2023 Marshall Project investigation showed that, over a 12-year period, arbitrators reinstated three out of every four DOCCS corrections officers who were fired for abusing incarcerated people or covering up abuse.
Whether any of these bills make it to the Assembly or Senate floors before the end of the legislative session is an open question — subject to a complex process largely controlled by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Brooks's father, Ricks, isn't optimistic. Nor, it seems, are some of the legislators calling for reforms.
'Will they listen to us or will they continue to play politics with Black and brown men's lives?' Eddie Gibbs, the first formerly incarcerated person elected to the state Assembly, wondered at the hearing. He told the story of his own beatdown by guards at Midstate Correctional Facility, where Nantwi was allegedly murdered, in the late 1980s.
'They play politics with people's lives,' he said of legislators unwilling to support the reforms. 'Their reelection is more important than your sons' lives.'
