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As Deaths Mount in New York Jails and Prisons, Advocates Rally for Oversight: Reporters’ Notebook

They want to beef up the powerful but little-known State Commission of Correction.

Chris Gelardi   ·   March 29, 2025
A patchwork of bodies are responsible for watchdogging New York’s state prisons and local jails. The most powerful of those bodies is the State Commission of Correction. | Photo: RDNE Stock Project / Pexels
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The Reporters’ Notebook features bite-sized stories and updates from New York Focus reporters on the topics they cover.

Over the past three months, New York Focus has reported extensively on the New York state prison system’s descent into tumult. An incarcerated man’s caught-on-video killing at the hands of corrections officers in December led to nationwide outrage and calls for reform. Guards responded by launching a three-week wildcat strike, which only ended after 2,000 officers lost their jobs and half a dozen allegedly beat another incarcerated person to death.

Similar turmoil has plagued other areas of New York’s carceral system. At New York City’s Rikers Island jails, four incarcerated people have died over the span of a month. The notorious complex is supposed to close in two years, but that’s unlikely to happen: Stubbornly high jail populations, delayed construction, and a “missing” sense of urgency have likely delayed closure by years, a city-appointed commission reported last week.

People are dying. Who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on these facilities?

A worker holding up a sign that says "Just a few "Rogue" NYSCOPBA Members"

The answer is complex: A patchwork of bodies are responsible for watchdogging New York’s state prisons and local jails. The most powerful of those bodies, however — the State Commission of Correction, or SCOC — has been missing in action when it comes to Rikers and state prison oversight.

SCOC’s work can more accurately be described as oversight triage than robust watchdogging. Its mandate involves keeping tabs on conditions in all of New York’s 42 state prisons, 58 local jail systems, and countless police lockups, but with an annual budget of less than $4 million, it can only do so much. Since staffing cuts in the 1990s, it has shirked most of its state prison oversight work to focus on county jails, conducting annual inspections that often identify persistent issues, like housing people in the wrong dorms or violating solitary confinement laws.

“The State Commission of Correction looks really good on paper, but it doesn’t do most of the things that it says it does.”

—Michele Deitch

Yet SCOC rarely cracks down on those violations. As New York Focus has reported, it scolds county jails, but almost never levies fines or penalties, even though it has the power to do so. It also shields facilities from public scrutiny: SCOC doesn’t voluntarily release its inspection reports, and only the first few minutes of its monthly meetings are made public.

“The State Commission of Correction looks really good on paper, but it doesn’t do most of the things that it says it does,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told New York Focus in 2023.

Some elected officials want to do something about that. On Tuesday, legislators and advocates held a rally at the state capitol demanding the passage of SCOC reform legislation.

A bill sponsored by Emily Gallagher in the state Assembly and Julia Salazar in the Senate aims to increase SCOC’s sense of urgency by diversifying the ranks of those who run it. Governors are responsible for appointing the agency’s three commissioners, and they’ve traditionally tapped former law enforcement officials. The bill would expand the number of commissioners to nine and distribute appointments among the governor, the legislature, and a non-government state prison oversight body. And it would mandate that those commissioners come from a diversity of backgrounds, including public health, behavioral health, and criminal defense. Sixty advocacy organizations have signed onto a letter in support of the legislation.

Officials are also working to pass SCOC reform in the state budget, which is due next week. In her executive budget proposal, Governor Kathy Hochul sought to push SCOC to fulfill more of its mandate by introducing legislation that would compel commission staff to conduct yearly inspections of every county jail, state prison, and youth detention facility. She also proposed adding around $800,000 to SCOC’s budget compared to last year.

The state legislature doubled down, raising Hochul by $2.5 million on SCOC in its budget proposals. Both legislative chambers also signed onto Hochul’s yearly inspection proposal — and added clauses that would require SCOC to field complaints directly from incarcerated people.

“At a time when heightened jail and prison oversight is urgently needed, the Commission has completely fallen flat while the death tolls soar,” Yonah Zeitz, advocacy director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, said in a statement. “The New York legislature must take swift action now to save lives. No family should have to go through this. No more deaths.”

BEFORE YOU GO, consider: If not for the article you just read, would the information in it be public?

Or would it remain hidden — buried within the confines of New York’s sprawling criminal-legal apparatus?

I started working at New York Focus in 2022, not long after the outlet launched. Since that time, our reporters and editors have been vigorously scrutinizing every facet of the Empire State’s criminal justice institutions, investigating power players and the impact of policy on state prisons, county jails, and local police and courts — always with an eye toward what it means for people involved in the system.

That system works hard to make those people invisible, and it shields those at the top from scrutiny. And without rigorous, resource-intensive journalism, it would all operate with significantly more impunity.

Only a handful of journalists do this type of work in New York. In the last decades, the number of local news outlets in the state has nearly halved, making our coverage all the more critical. Our criminal justice reporting has been cited in lawsuits, spurred legislation, and led to the rescission of statewide policies. With your help, we can continue to do this work, and go even deeper: We have endless ideas for more ambitious projects and harder hitting investigations. But we need your help.

As a small, nonprofit outlet, we rely on our readers to support our journalism. If you’re able, please consider supporting us with a one-time or monthly gift. We so appreciate your help.

Here’s to a more just, more transparent New York.

Chris Gelardi
Criminal Justice Investigative Reporter
Chris Gelardi is a reporter for New York Focus investigating the state’s criminal-legal system. His work has appeared in more than a dozen other outlets, most frequently The Nation, The Intercept, and The Appeal. He is a past recipient of awards from Columbia… more
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