Blind Spots: Sexual Assault Allegation Exposes Self-Policing Prison System

Adams attempted to intervene. But the two officers were angry with him, he said, for his recent refusal to give up the names of people who’d been smoking cigarettes indoors — another rule violation. It was May 19, 2021.

May threw the first punch, Adams testified in a later hearing. Three other men incarcerated at the upstate New York facility confirmed his account. Cruz and another officer then joined in, in full view of the unit, delivering what Adams described as “a flurry of punches to my face and body.”

“They were stomping him, kicking him, slapping him,” Nathaniel Bentley, one of the witnesses, told New York Focus and The Intercept. Men in nearby cells screamed at the officers to stop, recalled another, named Reginald Wilson. “Get off of him! Let him loose! … What are you jumping on him for?”

It made no difference. The guards dragged Adams into a sally port, pinned him to the ground, and beat him, he and a witness recounted. When they hauled him to his feet, Adams testified, Cruz pulled Adams’s pants partway down and repeatedly sodomized him with his state-issued baton. New York Focus and The Intercept obtained a transcript and audio recording of the hearing through Adams’s attorney.

In the hearing, Adams repeated Cruz’s words as he remembered them: “This is what happens to faggots like you.”

The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision declined to comment on Adams’s allegations but said that it has a zero-tolerance policy for physical and sexual abuse. May and Cruz did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Last December, the department’s Office of Special Investigations informed Adams that the case was closed and that the allegations of sexual assault were found unsubstantiated. But after New York Focus and The Intercept contacted DOCCS in October 2022, investigators interviewed multiple witnesses about the incident. Asked if the case had been reopened, a department spokesperson wrote that “the Office of Special Investigation is reviewing all the allegations made and DOCCS has no further comment on them at this time.”

Adams first contacted New York Focus and The Intercept in June 2021, the month after the incident. In the nearly year and a half since, he spoke to reporters by phone over a dozen times. What follows is drawn from those conversations, as well as from interviews with three witnesses, Adams’s written grievances, staff disciplinary records produced by DOCCS, a recording of his disciplinary hearing, and other prison records.

The investigation paints a portrait of a prison system in which complaints of sexual assault are suppressed, testimony by incarcerated people is discounted, and accountability remains elusive. Adams’s witnesses were scattered to prisons across the state, many to solitary confinement cells, in what they say amounts to a cover-up. One said he was beaten in retaliation for reporting what he saw. Another said he was denied food until he agreed not to testify. Adams said doctors refused to give him a proper rape examination.

The records show that Cruz has repeatedly been accused of physical assault, and that the year before he allegedly assaulted Adams, he nearly lost his job over inappropriate sexual behavior and lying to investigators.

He and May continue to work in New York prisons.

After discharging him from the clinic, staff placed Adams in solitary confinement and charged him with six rules violations: assault on staff, creating a disturbance, threats, violent conduct, refusal to obey a direct order, and movement violation.

Within days, Adams and six of the seven witnesses were transferred to prisons across the state. (Bentley says he was the only person left at Shawangunk who witnessed the incident.) At the new facility, removed from May and Cruz, Adams reported the sexual assault and requested medical care.

Under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, Adams should have received a thorough sexual assault examination and been provided with counseling. He said he was offered neither.

Instead, he was handcuffed and chained at the waist before being escorted to the medical unit. The nurse asked him to pull down his pants and bend over. She shone a flashlight at his anus and told him nothing was wrong. Adams said he asked to be sent to an outside hospital for a thorough rape exam, as required by New York prison system policy implementing PREA. Medical staff told him that they would report his complaints to the prison’s physician and sent him back to his cell.

The following day, Adams saw the physician, who he said did not physically examine him. By his account, when Adams complained that it hurt to go to the bathroom, the doctor replied: “What do you want me to do about it? You’re gay, aren’t you?”

The office of New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, responsible for ensuring that the prison system complies with PREA, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Governors who fail to maintain PREA compliance risk losing 5 percent of federal grant funding for their state prison systems, but the incentive is weak, and enforcement is lax. In New York, that penalty would be just $2 million out of the prison agency’s $3.4 billion budget.

PREA audit failures are extremely rare. In early May 2021, an auditor with the American Correctional Association, the prison trade group contracted to monitor PREA compliance, visited Shawangunk. Over the course of two days, she reviewed protocols and records and interviewed prison officials, staff, and incarcerated people. Her audit stated that Shawangunk met or exceeded all required standards.

“After they beaten the hell out of him, I witnessed Sergeant Cruz standing behind him, pull his pants down and shove his stick up his rectum,” Davis told the hearing officer. He testified that he used his tablet like a mirror, angling it to witness what was happening in the reflection.

Davis, Wilson, and one other incarcerated witness testified that Adams had not assaulted anyone. Bentley refused to testify.

In her decision, the hearing officer stated that she found May’s testimony to be substantial evidence, while the testimonies of Adams and the incarcerated witnesses were not. She found Adams guilty of all six charges and sentenced him to six months in solitary confinement.

Adams seemed unsurprised with the officer’s finding. “I understand that you probably are going to find me guilty of something,” he said before the verdict. One question nagged at him though: Why hadn’t Bentley testified? He asked repeatedly, but the officer said only that the potential witness had refused.

Adams said that an OSI investigator interviewed him in August 2021 and that he provided the names and prison identification numbers of at least five men who were witnesses. More than one year later, Wilson, Davis, and Bentley independently told New York Focus and The Intercept that no investigator had interviewed them. It was only this October, in the days after we contacted the agency, that investigators interviewed Davis and Bentley.

Adams spent the intervening year serving out his disciplinary sentence and being shuttled between solitary units, where he spent 23 to 24 hours each day locked alone in a cell. He was transferred three more times between prisons.

And witnesses are rare. Sexual abuse is frequently perpetuated in the prison’s blind spots, areas where there are no cameras or other people. When there are witnesses, Lewis pointed out, “It takes extraordinary courage [for them] to come forward because they, too, will be at risk for retaliation.” Beyond further abuse and transfers to far-flung prisons, this can come in the form of disciplinary charges, which affect people’s chances of getting parole or sentence reductions.

Reginald Wilson, Nathaniel Bentley, and Anthony Davis said that’s what happened to them. In separate interviews, they claimed that they and at least three other men who saw the incident were charged on false allegations and placed in isolation that day. Davis said that he was beaten by guards over a year later, with one asking him: “You like lying on a sergeant?”

Bentley said that the reason he did not testify at Adams’s hearing was rooted in reprisal. Locked in segregation at Shawangunk on charges of inciting a riot and disobeying a direct order to get off the phone with OSI, he alleged that officers withheld food from him. When an officer brought him the notice about the disciplinary hearing, Bentley said, he mentioned that if Bentley refused to testify, he would get his food.

DOCCS told The Intercept and New York Focus that the agency was investigating all allegations and declined to comment on Bentley’s and Davis’s claims.

Bentley acquiesced, signing a statement refusing to testify. “After that, they started giving me food and all the things a human is supposed to get,” he said.