More Subway Cops, No Prison Reforms: State of the State 2026

“We’ll never be satisfied,” Hochul said Tuesday of dropping reported crime rates.

Her plan speaks to both perception and enforcement, said Joseph Popcun, executive deputy commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services, the state’s law enforcement administrative agency.

“After 9/11, having the National Guard being deployed in mass transit provided New Yorkers with that sense of safety,” he said. “You compare New York’s mass transit safety with almost any other, it’s on the numbers much safer, so I think the governor wants to sustain the strategy and never say ‘mission accomplished.’”

Hochul is channeling the post-9/11 era with another policy as well: For the fourth year in a row, the governor is proposing to beef up the state’s regional Crime Analysis Center Network, which analyzes data and intelligence for retail theft investigations, illegal gun tracing, and aggressive “hot spot” policing, among other initiatives. Crime analysis centers are New York’s state-level version of fusion centers, the regional hubs created during the post-9/11 domestic surveillance boom to facilitate intelligence-sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement. While fusion centers have come under fire for monitoring protesters, surveilling journalists, and propagating false intelligence, the state’s Crime Analysis Center Network has garnered less scrutiny.

This year, Hochul is proposing creating a crime analysis center in Westchester County, the only area not currently included in the state’s network.

“We’re building on what works,” she said.

Her policy book also includes a proposal to improve police training by launching an optional accreditation program for the state’s 30 police academies.

Hochul did not use her State of the State address to call for rolling back criminal justice reforms, as she did in 2022, 2023, and 2025.

Her speech and accompanying policy book also didn’t include any proposals to reform state prisons. Last year was arguably the toughest for the prison system in decades. Prison guards’ caught-on-video murder of Robert Brooks, an incarcerated man, in December 2024 led to nationwide outcry. Two months later, corrections officers launched a three-week wildcat strike, aftershocks of which incarcerated people continue to feel in the form of lockdowns and neglect.

In response to the crisis, state legislators proposed an ambitious suite of prison reform initiatives. Legislative leadership pared down the package and passed an omnibus reform bill, which Hochul watered down a second time last month through an amendment process. Legislators who pushed for the bill describe it as a limited, insufficient win.

“We left a lot undone,” said Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who led the push to expand a powerful yet underutilized oversight agency. She said her reform-minded colleagues, as well as New York’s extensive network of criminal justice reform advocacy organizations, will resume their campaign to pass more ambitious reforms this year.

A key part of that campaign launched Monday, a day ahead of Hochul’s State of the State speech. State Senator Julia Salazar, head of the Senate’s corrections committee and the legislature’s lead prison reformer, published an extensive report lambasting a prison system “built on brutality.” The report describes inaccessible health care in the prisons, the system’s “refusal” to implement reform laws, and “endemic” violence and racism. It calls on the state to take a kitchen sink approach to improving conditions and reducing the incarcerated population. Among the reform movement’s priorities are a bill to make elderly people with long sentences eligible for parole, one to make it easier for the state Board of Parole to release people from prison, and one to allow incarcerated people to more easily earn time off their sentences.

On the anniversary of Brooks’s killing last month, Hochul “committed to further action to ensure our [prisons] are safer.” She included none of the priority reform bills in her State of the State proposals, nor any other prison legislation.

“I’m not surprised,” said Gallagher. “One of the core issues with the way that Albany does business is that we’ll say we’re done with a whole topic of reform when really we’ve only skimmed the surface.”