New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, announced a number of policy changes to the state’s department of corrections and community supervision (DOCCS) on Monday, following the release of brutal footage showing correctional guards apparently beating a detained man to death.
Hochul visited the Marcy correctional facility following the death of Robert Brooks, an imprisoned Black man who was beaten by facility correctional staff in a medical examining room. During her visit, Hochul met with prisoners to discuss the facility’s conditions and announced the appointment of a new permanent superintendent for the Marcy prison.
“Today, as I stood in the room where Robert Brooks was killed, I was once again heartbroken by this unnecessary loss of life and further sickened to think of the actions of depraved individuals with no regard for human life,” Hochul said in a statement.
“The system failed Mr Brooks and I will not be satisfied until there has been significant culture change.”
Hochul also announced the state will be expediting $400m to purchase more body and fixed cameras for facilities across the state, the expansion of a DOCCS special investigations team, an expansion of a whistleblower hotline and new partnerships with organizations to monitor facilities.
Guards at the Marcy facility beat Brooks, who was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, on 9 December. Brooks died the next day at a hospital in Utica.
Earlier this month, the state’s attorney general released body-camera footage of the beating, showing a team of correctional guards carrying a handcuffed and face-down Brooks into an examining room, and then repeatedly punching and kicking him for about 10 minutes.
In the footage, he does not appear to threaten or resist the guards. Brooks is seen motionless on an examining table. A medical examiner determined Brooks may have died of “asphyxia due to compression of the neck”.
Brooks’s death and the footage of his beating has led to rage and condemnation. Members of Brooks’s family reviewed the footage of the beating.
“We will not rest until we have secured justice for Robert’s memory, and safety for the prisoners at Marcy correctional facility,” said Elizabeth Mazur, the attorney for Brooks’ family.
The New York attorney general’s office of special investigations and the FBI are conducting investigations into Brooks’s death. In the days after Brooks’s death, Hochul ordered the DOCCS to fire 14 Marcy facility staff members, including 13 guards and one nurse.
The Marcy prison in upstate New York has been criticized in the past for its conditions and treatment of detained people. A 2022 report from the Correctional Association of New York, an independent body that conducts audits of New York prisons, found a number of problems, including racial discrimination and mistreatment by facility staff.
“We are calling upon the State Inspector General and DOCCS’ Office of Special Investigations to investigate these serious allegations of racial discrimination and violations of human rights,” said Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York.
Some of the correctional guards implicated in Brooks’s beating were previously accused of assault at the facility, including one 2020 case in which an inmate was beaten by guards and left with “a permanent facial deformity”, according to the New York Times.
