Criminal Justice New York State Budget

Hochul and Legislators, Urging Action on Prisons, Are Poised for a Fight on Other Public Safety Policies

The legislature rejected Hochul’s central public safety policy priorities while embracing proposals to increase prison oversight.

Chris Gelardi · March 13, 2025

The governor and the legislature agree on some proposals to increase prison oversight. | Illustration: New York Focus

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New York’s legislature set Albany on a criminal justice collision course when it released its annual budget counter-proposals Tuesday. Both the Senate and the Assembly omitted Governor Kathy Hochul’s central policing and prosecution policy priorities, even as the chambers embraced her proposals to increase oversight of the state’s embattled prison system.

One of Hochul’s priorities this year is to once again alter New York’s 2019 criminal justice reforms. After twice pushing through changes that made it easier for judges to jail criminal defendants before trial, the governor is now targeting reforms that require prosecutors to share evidence with those defendants in a comprehensive and timely manner.

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Hochul’s proposed changes to pretrial evidence sharing — a process known as discovery — are sweeping. The 11 pages of legislation would give prosecutors power to decide what information they initially need to share with defendants and make it harder for judges to dismiss cases when prosecutors blow past deadlines or don’t turn the right material over. District attorneys have hailed the proposal as a much-needed corrective to a law that has coincided with an increase in case dismissals, while defense and criminal justice reform advocates have argued that it would take New York back to a time when criminal defendants were kept in the dark about the evidence against them until right before trial.

The defense and reform advocates seem to have won over the legislature: Neither the Senate nor the Assembly included discovery changes in their budget counters.

The legislature also rebuffed another of Hochul’s public safety policy priorities: expanding officials’ power to involuntarily hospitalize people with serious mental illnesses.

Under New York law, authorities can commit someone against their will if the person poses a risk of self-harm or suicide or is demonstrating outwardly violent behavior. The governor suggested expanding those parameters to include an “inability or refusal, as a result of their mental illness, to provide for their own essential needs,” including shelter.

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Some mental health and homeless rights advocates worry that the expansion would allow authorities to detain and forcefully hospitalize people for living on the street. The governor claims that the changes would help mentally ill people get care they need faster. Neither legislative chamber adopted the proposal.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins indicated that, while her chamber thinks Hochul’s proposals go too far, she’s open to compromise on discovery and involuntary commitment.

“These are things that are going to be discussed at length,” she said. “We just want to make sure that we get it right.”

The governor and the legislature agree on some criminal justice policies — namely those that would increase prison oversight.

The state prison system has descended into turmoil in recent months. In December, the attorney general released video of corrections officers beating an incarcerated man to death, sparking national outrage. As prosecutors handed down murder charges for those involved, guards launched a 22-day wildcat strike that saw thousands of National Guard troops deployed and 2,000 officers lose their jobs. In the middle of the strike, another group of officers allegedly beat another incarcerated man to death. Officers returned to work this week, but tensions inside the state’s 42 prisons remain high.

Legislators and advocates have tried to use the urgency of the moment to pass prison oversight and reform legislation. Hochul has put forth her own agenda: During the strike, she released amendments to her original executive budget, many of them focused on the prison system. For one, she proposed adding to the responsibilities of the State Commission of Correction, or SCOC, which has significant legal authority to regulate jails and prisons, but rarely uses it.

Both the Senate and the Assembly adopted the meat of Hochul’s SCOC proposal, including a provision that would compel commission staff to conduct yearly inspections of every county jail and state prison. Unlike the governor, the chambers also proposed adding $2.5 million to SCOC’s undersized annual budget.

The legislative chambers also signed onto an amendment that would require prison corrections officers to wear body cameras and turn them on when interacting with incarcerated people. Officers who killed 43-year-old Robert Brooks in December seemingly thought their body cameras were off during the beating, while incarcerated people report that guards who allegedly killed 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi last month weren’t wearing body cameras.

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Hochul’s amendments also include a provision that would allow the state to close up to five prisons on an expedited timeline over the next year — part of the state’s attempts to remedy a staffing crisis by consolidating a diffuse prison population. The state passed the same provision last year but only closed two facilities. The legislature accepted the closure proposal.

There are also a few other prison-related budget proposals on which the governor and legislators haven’t aligned.

Hochul proposed making it easier to award incarcerated people time off of their sentences — a central theme of an ongoing advocate-led reform campaign. The Senate signed on but the Assembly didn’t.

The Assembly, meanwhile, proposed requiring the prison system’s internal investigations office — which legislators and advocates describe as a black box adept at keeping corrections officer abuse out of the public eye — to issue quarterly reports to the governor and legislature.

And the Senate proposed policies that would create a program to give people state IDs when they’re released from prison or jail; establish a uniform medical record-keeping system for correctional facilities across the state; authorize the state Office of the Inspector General to investigate complaints of sexual assault in jails and prisons; and require the state prison agency to offer limited transportation for visitation.