Emma's Blog

For decades, the workings of the prison discipline system had been hidden from public view under a secrecy law adopted at the urging of the state’s powerful law enforcement unions. But after the Legislature repealed that law in 2020, The Marshall Project obtained more than 5,600 records of disciplinary cases against prison employees, for issues ranging from physical abuse of prisoners to sleeping on the job.

The records probably reflect only a fraction of the violence guards have inflicted in New York’s corrections system, experts said. Many prisoners do not file complaints because they fear retaliation or not being believed. And in most of the state’s 44 prisons, officers do not wear body cameras, which sometimes help prove abuse. These records do not detail prisoner attacks on officers, which the department and the guards’ union said have increased in recent years.

Six correctional facilities in upstate New York were closing Thursday as the number of inmates drops across the state prison system. The closings announced in November were expected to save $142 million. The facilities scheduled to close at the end of the business day were..

Six facilities that are part of New York's prison system will close next March amid a decade-long decline in the number of people the state incarcerates. 

The closures, announced Monday by state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision officials, scheduled for March 10, 2022 are: 

• Ogdensburg Correctional Facility
• Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility
• Willard Drug Treatment Campus
• Southport Correctional Facility
• Downstate Correctional Facility
• Rochester Correctional Facility