After two deaths at the hands of employees of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and a three week illegal correction officer strike, Wednesday presented a long awaited moment at the state Capitol: An opportunity for lawmakers to take a serious look at the state’s prison system, and what can be done legislatively to fix it.
Robert Ricks, the father of Robert Brooks, who was killed at Marcy Correctional Facility in December, arrived at the Legislative Office Building in Albany at 7 a.m. to participate in the hearing running on “coffee and fumes" after working until midnight with youth in a reform program he leads.
“If you’ve never buried a child, you won’t understand the depth of my pain,” he told reporters. “If you’ve never buried a child and watched him beat to death on video, you definitely won’t understand my pain.”
Ricks said he was making that undoubtedly difficult trip to the state capitol to ensure his son “didn’t die in vain.”
“Every time I come in this building I want to cry,” he said. “Not just because my son passed away and this is a constant reminder, but because this is where the power is. I know that if the desire to make a difference is there, the people in this building can make a difference.”
Ricks is imploring the state legislature to advance and pass a package of legislation assembled in his son’s name, and later associated too with the name of Messiah Nantwi, an incarcerated individual who was killed at the Mid-State Correctional Facility during the strike.
State Senator Julia Salazar, who chairs the Senate’s Crime, Crime Victims and Corrections Committee, told Spectrum News 1 that the legislative package was a crucial step in addressing the dire conditions in state prisons.
“If we care about public safety, if we care about safety in prisons and jails then we have to change that both through policy change and culture change,” she said.
The formal package dedicated to Brooks includes the following policy initiatives:
- Allowing the DOCCS commissioner to initiate disciplinary action against certain employees for “acts of serious misconduct”
- Expanding the state Commission on Correction from three members to nine
- Expanding the oversight role of the Correctional Association of New York including authorizing unannounced visits
- Addressing blind spots in body camera coverage
- Ensuring the release of incarcerated individuals who are eligible for release on parole, unless the individual poses a significant and immediate risk
- Providing the ability for some individuals to apply for a sentence reduction
- Addressing the health and safety of pregnant individuals, incarcerated parents of children, and their children
Many of the bills focus on oversight, while others deal with “pathways to release” and safety matters.
“These are some important steps we can take to increase accountability and transparency in our state prions system but additionally, we also know there are many people in our state prison system for whom it is not in the interest of public safety nor in the interest of justice that they continue to be incarcerated,” Salazar said.
Other bills, including the Earned Time Act and Elder Parole, were not included in the formal Brooks package Wednesday but are still being pushed by state lawmakers.
Assemblymember Erik Dilan, chair of the Assembly Corrections Committee, explained that some bills have advanced further in the Senate and others in the Assembly, but movement of the Earned Time Act has been delayed after a failed attempt to include it in some form in the state budget.
“The earned time act is one of those that hasn’t cleared my committee, it was subject to budget negotiations, and I think to myself and a lot of members, the language that was done in the budget was not satisfactory,” he said. “This is our attempt before the end of session to at least match what the Senate did.”
Given the nature of the deaths of Brooks and Nantwi, expanded oversight appeared to be top priority for Democratic lawmakers and many who testified.
Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, said the ability to make unannounced visits was especially important in assessing the conditions of facilities.
“We’re not trying to say gotcha, we’re not trying to catch anyone in the act,” she said. “We can then see the facility as it is on a normal day without preparation.”
Republican state Sen. Rob Rolison said the hearing gave the legislature much to consider in the final weeks of the legislative session.
“There’s a lot that came out today, I look forward to speaking further within the corrections committee but also with our staff to make sure I have a really good understanding of these bills, but also things that aren’t even in bill form,” he said.
He stressed that regardless of the legislative outcome, the message was that the problems facing the system made clear by the two deaths are serious.
“How we respond as a legislature, as a state, is really important and we need to take what we heard today, the recommendations on various topics, and really think about them,” he said.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie attended a portion of the hearing, sitting near the front row to listen in.
A portion of the hearing also inevitably focused on the aftermath of the three-week illegal correction officer strike, and its overall impact on the staffing crisis in state prisons.
DOCCS Commissioner Dan Martuscello condemned the killings of Brooks and Nantwi, testifying that efforts to expand the use of body-worn cameras and other oversight steps are ongoing as part of the state budget.
Also part of the state budget: decreasing the age to become a corrections officer from 21 to 18. Martuscello said he wasn’t concerned by the change, given that there are ‘guardrails’ on the roles they can perform.
“In New York State County Corrections, they’ve been able to hire 18-year-olds for years,” he said. “From that lens and other states doing it successfully I think it’s a step to booster recruitment.”
He also reported that the committee to study the HALT Act, which limits the use of solitary confinement and was central to the strike, commissioned as part of the agreement to end the illegal work stoppage, has now met three times.
“We are working recommendations that revolve around safety, safety of incarcerated people, safety of staff,” he said.
He also addressed questions surrounding the state’s response to the strike, clarifying that fired officers who are brought back as part of the grievance process will be subject to some form of probation — and those central to the strike will not be included.
“Anybody that was involved in a high number of investigations or discipline or was found to be a strike leader, those aren’t individuals I would be interested in bringing back,” he said.
He revealed that the ban on strike leaders being eligible was in part because they threatened other officers.
“Unfortunately the strike leaders influenced others to come back, sometimes under the threat of force, and sometimes people didn’t come back to work, so on an individualized basis we’ll bring them back on strict terms of the settlement agreement whereby they’ll have to serve a probationary period and if they ever go on strike again it’s an automatic unilateral termination,” he said.
He also said that out of an original approximately 600 nonviolent individuals the state deemed eligible for an expedited release last month, about 250 had been released as part of the effort to address staffing issues by fast-tracking release for those already on the path to parole.
Other testimony included unions representing civilian staff and advocates for the HALT Act, who slammed the pause in programming in the wake of the strike and blamed the state for never implementing the law properly in the first place. Martuscello said programming has resumed at a limited number of facilities.
Salazar cited holes in the implementation of HALT that have been documented by the state Inspector General as an example of how increased oversight could force DOCCS to properly implement existing state law in areas where there are deficiencies.
“When we pass reforms such as HALT and they aren’t implemented, I think it has this idea that even state government isn’t complying with our own state laws,” he said. “I think the implications of that are lawlessness in the general population.”