State Legislative Leaders Pass Last-Minute Prison Oversight Package

Amid one of the most chaotic years for New York’s prison system in recent memory, the state legislature passed a limited omnibus prison reform bill Thursday night, hours before one of its chambers closed out its lawmaking for the year.

The bill is the legislature’s response to the state prison agency’s mounting scandals. In December, body-worn cameras captured corrections officers taking turns beating a handcuffed incarcerated man named Robert Brooks, who died hours later. The killing sparked nationwide outcry and served as a backdrop for months of tumultuous events that followed, including a three-week corrections officers strike, another alleged killing at the hands of prison guards, and two contentious legislative hearings.

The prison omnibus’s path to passage is a case study in New York’s top-down legislative system.

In May, Governor Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders reached an agreement on New York’s budget after hashing out the state’s most consequential legislation in a cordoned-off room. The final budget was over a month late, leaving lawmakers roughly a month before the end of session to push for other bills.

At hearings last month, progressive legislators teased a sweeping reform package, but it wasn’t until last week that the legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus unveiled the 23-bill Robert Brooks Blueprint for Justice and Reform.

The blueprint included oversight and accountability measures, legislation that would enshrine new incarcerated people’s rights, and parole and sentencing reform, among other bills. Almost all of them had already been introduced, but most hadn’t made it out of key Senate or Assembly committees — the first major hurdle in the traditional legislative process.

During crunch time, however, the traditional process flies out the window. As New York Focus has reported, the final weeks of session see the committee system rendered mostly meaningless, with Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and a group of leadership-picked senators choosing which bills go up for a vote and which die.

The final legislation has the potential to ramp up scrutiny and oversight of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

At the same time, it includes some of the least ambitious of the Robert Brooks Blueprint proposals. Half of included measures would address prison abuse only when it results in the worst case scenario of death. Six of the bills would boost outside agencies that investigate systemic issues, but they’d leave DOCCS mostly responsible for investigating individual complaints against its officers — a dynamic that advocates, incarcerated people, and some former staff have described as key to enabling a culture of violence.

“Oversight and transparency are important and necessary, but they are not enough,” Thomas Gant, a formerly incarcerated organizer at the Center for Community Alternatives, said in a statement. “If lawmakers are serious about honoring Robert Brooks and preventing future deaths, they must offer real pathways home for incarcerated people who have transformed while inside.”

The oversight bills will empower two bodies outside of DOCCS. One would give the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit tasked with monitoring the prison system, automatic access to certain prison agency records. It would also give the organization the authority to conduct spontaneous oversight visits; currently, it needs to give the prison system 72 hours’ notice.

Another portion of the prison omnibus will expand the State Commission of Correction, or SCOC, an oversight body led mostly by former law enforcement that concentrates its limited resources on county jails and rarely uses its full power to enforce corrections standards. The legislature boosted the commission’s budget this year and required it to inspect every jail and prison once a year. If Hochul signs the omnibus bill, it will add to those efforts by expanding SCOC’s commissioner ranks to include health experts, a formerly incarcerated person, a criminal defense lawyer, and other non-law enforcement members.