The murder of Robert Brooks in December of 2024 shook the state’s prison system – and it was, perhaps, confirmation of a belief many had whispered to me in the past: New York State’s prisons were chaotic, violent and deserving of a closer look.
As NY1’s investigative reporter, I have always followed closely what happens on Rikers Island, our city’s jail system, but we as a station based in New York City had not delved deeply into the state’s prison system. It’s a fact of proximity – the majority of state prisons are not in our coverage area here in the five boroughs.
But the inmate population may be – so many of the detainees on Rikers Island end up serving their sentences “upstate” (the common colloquialism for heading to state prison).
Greene Correctional Facility is one of a majority of state prisons located north of New York City. (Spectrum News NY1)
So, following the death of Brooks, I submitted multiple freedom of information law requests asking for data and statistics on violence – how often force was being used against the inmates themselves? And how often were those officers disciplined for that violence? The state took about nine months to respond.
What we found was stark – violence had been increasing rapidly and rarely were officers terminated for it.
We got digging, looking for stakeholders who could explain to us the numbers, the inmates themselves who could describe their experiences and the officers who say they were stretched too thin. We got rare access into one of the state’s largest, most secure facilities an hour and a half north of Manhattan. We spoke extensively to the commissioner of the system – asking what exactly was happening on his watch.
And while it may not be a focus of this series, in the background we were thinking about the department’s leadership. Thousands of officers walked off the job in an illegal strike last year, in what was, at the time, one of the biggest crises Governor Kathy Hochul had to navigate. As she seeks reelection, have Hochul and her team at the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision been able to fix the problem? And is it something that New York State voters will remember and care about?
With all of this in mind, here is our latest investigation – Behind the Walls: Investigating New York’s Prison System.