$9M STATE STUDY FINDS OBVIOUS: NEW YORK'S PRISONS ARE DEADLY AND NOBODY CARES
GOV. KATHY HOCHUL DROPS WAY-LATE REPORT ON VIOLENCE & DYSFUNCTION IN STATE PRISON SYSTEM FROM VACATION IN VIRGINIA, OFFICE EXPRESSES LUKEWARM SUPPORT FOR KEY REFORM
New York State prison guards fist-bumping after killing inmate Messiah Nantwi at the Mid-State Correctional Facility Mar. 1, 2025. Photo credit: body-worn camera video courtesy of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision via Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick.
MALONE, NEW YORK July 7, 2026
New York's prison system is facing multiple crises in every measurable metric and more people will die unless the state legislature immediately takes drastic action to overhaul the system from top-to-bottom.
That's the conclusion of a long-overdue, $9.3 million report commissioned by Gov. Kathy Hochul after the murder of inmate Robert Brooks by guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility outside Utica on Dec. 9, 2024.
Lacking from the massive, 277-page report: any accountability whatsoever for the high-ranking state officials responsible for the mess, for Brooks' murder or the subsequent killing of a second inmate by guards at another New York State prison. Messiah Nantwi was killed at Mid-State, less than three months after Brooks was killed at Marcy. The prisons are across the road from each other in central New York.
The officials let off the hook by the taxpayer-funded report include Gov. Hochul herself and her hand-picked prison chief Daniel F. Martuscello, who manages the state agency that runs New York's 42 prisons, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS.
In February, federal judge Anne M. Nardacci found Commissioner Martuscello could be civilly liable for Brooks' killing because he allegedly ignored years of warnings guards were regularly beating prisoners for sport and failed to stop them. The Free Lance News reported officials ignored 114 documented misconduct complaints filed against the 13 guards who murdered Brooks or attempted to cover it up in the years before Brooks' killing.
Attorney General Letitia James also gets a pass—her office helped cover up the prior abuse.
The state legislature gets a pass too.
The report doesn't even examine a claim made by both guards and prisoners that a new law meant to humanize New York's prisons by eliminating solitary confinement for longer than 15 days, the 2021 HALT Act, is at least partly responsible for a rise in violence by reducing the administrative disciplinary system for prisoners to a joke.
Still, the report is a stark and damning indictment of Gov. Hochul and Commissioner Martuscello's management and supervision of New York's sprawling prison system.
"A staffing crisis has led to ... less programming," the report says on page 2. That, in turn, causes "worse conditions for incarcerated individuals, which leads to misbehavior, which leads to unsafe and stressful working conditions, which causes attrition, which in turn leads to fewer staff.”
Translation: gangs and drugs control New York’s prisons, guards not so much.
Not only that, the report continues, "Training for staff is outdated”—it is based on a bootcamp model—”and insufficient for the conditions staff face today."
Another giant problem: DOCCS supervisors lack the power to hold staff accountable, allowing guards to go unpunished for even major misconduct—a mirror of the administrative disciplinary system for prisoners allegedly made toothless by the HALT Act.
More "significant deficiencies" in almost every aspect of prison life thwart rehabilitation, according to the report. For example, white prisoners are treated better than black ones. Also, record-keeping is antiquated and remains paper-based.
More troubling, medical and mental health care is also lacking or practically non-existent.
The Free Lance News reported in June that a New York prisoner named Jose Rodriguez had to have one of his eyes removed because prison doctors let an abnormal mass grow on his eyelid for years until it turned to cancer and ate into his eyeball. A total of 77 people have died in New York's prisons since Jan. 1, according to DOCCS. 53 are listed with an "unknown" cause of death.
"2026 has seen the most in-custody deaths of any year since at least 2020, including during the COVID-19 pandemic," the 182-year-old and legislatively-empowered prison watch-dog group Correctional Association of New York reported in May.
Not one or two or even three dozen changes are needed to fix everything that's wrong with DOCCS.
The report says a total of "57 priority, short-, and long-term recommendations designed to foster rehabilitation and improve systemwide safety and efficiency" are needed. At least some of the necessary changes "will likely require legislative change or changes to labor agreements with staff unions."
The report was produced by the law firm WilmerHale. It was originally supposed to be released last year. Instead, it was released last Friday, July 3, the legal July 4 holiday—a day meant to bury, not broadcast, news.
Gov. Hochul was on vacation at her country home in Virginia the day the report was released, according to her public schedule.
WilmerHale says its report was the result of multiple visits to prisons and "hundreds of confidential interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated individuals, current and former DOCCS staff, facility leadership, and executive leadership."
The law firm's investigators also "reviewed records gathered from the facilities and across the system, including records related to use of force, grievances, oversight and accountability, training, discipline, staffing, medical and mental health care, and demographic information, as well as documents from OMH”—the state "Office of Mental Health."
Based on its review, the report confirms what prisoners, their loved ones and criminal justice reform advocates have said for decades: that in the Liberal bastion of New York prison guards systematically beat and abuse prisoners and regularly falsify reports justifying the abuse while supervisors and even medical staff responsible for treating prisoners turn a blind eye.
“The tragic killings of Mr. Brooks and Mr. Nantwi demonstrated systemic shortcomings in oversight, accountability, and culture within DOCCS facilities,” the report concludes. “Both incidents involved misuse of force and efforts to conceal misconduct, revealing deep cultural and procedural deficiencies at Marcy and Mid-State."
While most of the guards responsible for killing Brooks and Nantwi were convicted of crimes and sent to prison with long sentences the report finds "more must be done.”
(Read The Free Lance News' Blueprint for Justice Inside New York Prisons.)
One of Robert Brooks' sons, Robert Brooks' Jr., questioned why New York needed to spend $9.3 million to find out “what everyone already knows,” in a public statement through his attorneys on Monday.
“New York prisons are dangerously unsafe and the system is broken,” Brooks Jr.'s statement adds. “Advocacy organizations, journalists, and incarcerated people have been telling DOCCS about these problems and proposing reforms for years. The need for change was obvious before my father was killed.”
Patterson Nantwi, Messiah Nantwi's father, likewise released a statement through his lawyers on Monday.
“This report lays bare the horrific violence my son endured and the efforts to cover up what happened to him,” the statement says. “Nothing can bring my son back, but I will continue fighting to make sure that everyone responsible for his death is held accountable and that no other family has to suffer the pain our family lives with every day.”
Chris Summers, president of the union that represents New York's prison guards, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, also released a statement on Monday.
“Our members have been sounding the alarm for years,” the NYSCOPBA statement says. “New Yorkers deserve more than carefully timed press releases issued over a holiday weekend.”
"Instead of listening to the correction officers who work inside these facilities every day, DOCCS and New York state policymakers dismissed their concerns," the union’s statement adds. "Now, they are releasing reports and independent assessments that confirm many of the same warnings our members have been raising all along.”
On Tuesday, Jess D'Amelia, Gov. Hochul's Deputy Communications Director for Public Safety, told The Free Lance News that after the killings of Brooks and Nantwi "Governor Hochul invested more than $500 million to strengthen New York’s correctional system and signed landmark legislation to enhance safety, accountability, and oversight across the State’s correctional facilities."
"The safety of correctional staff and incarcerated individuals remains a top priority for the Governor which is why many of these recommendations have been implanted or are currently underway," D'Amelia added. "The Administration is committed to building on these ongoing reforms, advancing meaningful systemic change and making DOCCS facilities safer and more secure for all.”
But Gov. Hochul's office expressed only lukewarm support for the biggest, most-important change recommended by WilmerHale in the report: adding teeth to the toothless administrative employee disciplinary system.
Thanks to a sweetheart union deal that places the legal power to discipline guards in the hands of private arbitrators instead of public officials, guards enjoy almost carte blanche to abuse prisoners.
(The Free Lance News sued to open up DOCCS' employee disciplinary hearings to public scrutiny in 2025, but in January a state appeals court ruled DOCCS can continue to hold them in secret. The State's highest court, the Court of Appeals, is considering whether to grant The Free Lance News permission to appeal to it.)
State Senator and Chair of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections Julia Salazar proposed strengthening the power of the DOCCS' commissioner to discipline guards with Senate Bill No. S1671. WilmerHale's report specifically recommends making the bill law.
When asked by The Free Lance News on Tuesday whether Gov. Hochul supports the bill, D'Amelia, Gov. Hochul's spokesperson, said only that: "Governor Hochul will review all legislation that passes both houses of the state legislature."
A seperate bill making it a crime for all law enforcement officers, including prison guards, to fail to intervene to stop other officers from abusing prisoners in their presence is also in limbo. The state legislature is in recess until January.
The prison report concludes with a warning: “There is no quick fix here.”
“Many of our recommendations will take years of dedicated effort, operational innovation and financial commitment, along with potential legislative action and updates to collective bargaining agreements,” the report explained. “These recommendations provide the foundation for the years of work required to effectuate meaningful and sustained reform.”
For tips or corrections, The Free Lance can be reached at jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me.