It’s Dangerous to Feel This Desperate: How to Ease the Chaos in New York’s Prisons

This essay was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

It was 1994, around the time US Senator Joe Biden penned the notorious crime bill that President Bill Clinton would sign. Hillary Clinton hadn’t yet made her famous remark about “superpredators,” but Frantz now knows she was talking about him and his friends. They were Black teenagers, crooks from the crack era, robbing people at gunpoint, like the Pakistani cab driver they carjacked and killed, though Frantz was not the shooter. “It took many years to recognize all the negative spillover from my actions,” Frantz wrote in the personal statement of his recent clemency application to New York Governor Kathy Hochul. “I suppose this is why I want mercy — so I can earn redemption by mending all the harm I caused.”

I’m serving time with Jean Frantz up the river at Sing Sing. He is one of the thousands of New York prisoners who have applied for clemency in the form of a commutation from the governor. Clemency has two functions: Pardons are meant to erase the consequences of convictions and are usually granted to people who have been living crime-free for decades; commutations reduce sentences, either by making the recipient eligible for parole or freeing them outright, while the convictions remain on their records. Presidents have power over federal cases, governors over state convictions. Commutations are what matter to people in prison.

A sentence commutation is the only way someone like Frantz will see a parole board before 2042. Unlike some states that require someone to serve one-third or half of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole, we serve the full minimum term of our sentences in New York. For Frantz, that means 47-and-a-half years. Because people convicted of violent offenses in New York prisons aren’t able to earn time off our sentences for good behavior, and because our lawmakers are unwilling to pass legislation that would change that, our only hope for a second chance is for Governor Hochul to commute our sentences.

As we approached the end of 2025 — a year when President Donald Trump went commutation crazy — Hochul hadn’t issued a single one.

It’s hard not to compare Hochul’s inaction to Trump’s fearless use — or abuse — of the power. I’ve watched the news on the TV in my cell as the president granted pardons and commutations to those who’d served only weeks or months on years-long sentences — nowhere near enough time to process accountability or feel remorse. And it’s not like he’s only freed people like George Santos or that Christian reality show couple, clowns with just enough clout to make the ask. He’s let some heavy hitters go, too: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a dark web marketplace for drug trafficking, who was accused of trying to use his own platform to contract murders-for-hire (although they weren’t carried out).

That’s not to say there isn’t a difference between those cases and ours. The person I killed can never come back. The crime of murder is more tangible than financial crimes or fraud. My victim’s loved ones are affected forever. When deciding whether to grant clemency, Hochul must weigh the seriousness of the crime against the long stretches of time we’ve served, as well as our “exceptional strides in self-development,” which the application asks us to detail. This is not exactly what Trump is considering before commuting his people.

After Christmas came and went without an announcement from the governor, Frantz stopped in front of my bars and asked if there was any word. He showed me a letter he had recently received from the governor’s office, assuring him that his clemency application was still under review. When I pulled out the one that was also mailed to me, and showed him the language in both letters was the same, word-for-word, his face dropped.

I said it didn’t look like she was going to do any commutations this year, and if she did, they probably wouldn’t be for violent cases like ours.

“Damn,” Frantz said, “you make it sound like I shouldn’t even have hope.”

I felt bad that I sounded so cynical.

In 2018, CUNY Law School Professor Steve Zeidman came to Sing Sing to give a talk about clemency. He was a trim 60-something with salt-and-pepper hair. “Everyone was saying to me, ‘Oh, clemency, it doesn’t happen,’” Zeidman told the attentive crowd of prisoners, many condemned to de facto life sentences. “And my response was always, ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t happen because not enough people are banging the drum.’”

Zeidman, with all his energy and optimism, sounded like the founder of a tech start-up. Before 2015, clemency was unheard of in New York. Zeidman set out to change that. In 2016, he convinced then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to commute the 75-to-life sentence of Judith Clark, the getaway driver in the 1981 Brink’s heist that left a guard and two police officers dead. Soon after, Zeidman started the Second Look Project at CUNY, and since then, he and his colleagues have represented hundreds of people incarcerated in New York. By the time Cuomo stepped down in 2021, he had granted 41 commutations, several for homicides, 14 of which were filed with the help of Zeidman’s clinic.

Seeing the opportunity that a new administration could create for clemency, I wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times arguing that, as the governor, Kathy Hochul should appoint an advisory panel to help her select the most qualified candidates for commutations. Hochul wound up doing that.

A few months later, in a December 2021 press release, her office detailed “several steps to reform the Executive clemency program” and said Hochul committed to “dedicating additional staff resources to reviewing applications in order to be able to grant clemency on an ongoing basis throughout the year, rather than granting clemency only once.”

By the time I submitted my clemency application in the summer of 2023, Hochul had commuted seven sentences. She wasn’t making announcements on an ongoing basis, but she was doing something.

After a contentious meeting with my legal team, the family of the man I murdered created an online petition opposing my release. (His sister had previously asked that I no longer use his name in my writing, so I don’t.) It’s for this reason that I’ve come to accept that I will not receive clemency, and if no bill is passed that recognizes rehabilitation, I won’t see the parole board until 2029.

Hochul commuted another three people’s sentences in September 2023, but it wasn’t long before she started to experience the political risk of showing mercy. Some had pointed to her supposed soft-on-crime policies for her waning popularity and for Democratic losses in New York. By the summer of 2024, after she commuted two more people’s sentences, her approval rating hit a new low.

It’s been chaos. And as egregious as the behavior of some officers has been, I do not blame them entirely, just like I do not wholly blame my peers. In large part, I blame New York lawmakers, and the governor, for their ineptitude and indifference, and their failure to offer hope to people living and working in the state’s prisons. They should have passed a bill, in tandem with HALT, that would have allowed those of us doing the right thing, for example, an opportunity to earn time off our sentences. But they didn’t. Now, no one gets punished for bad behavior or rewarded for good behavior, either.

As last year wore on, Hochul’s zero commutations were being far surpassed by her peers in other states with comparable — or even higher — rates of incarceration and far more stable prisons. Across the river, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy made several clemency announcements, commuting 40 sentences, many for murder. Maybe Murphy was more generous with his mercy because he was not running for reelection, but on the other side of the country, Governor Gavin Newsom made similar announcements. Newsom will likely run in the next presidential election, and yet he granted 34 commutations, several of which were also for people convicted of homicides. This is how you inject shots of hope into a prison population.

During and after the strike, reform advocates called on Hochul to use her clemency power to decrease the prison population, consolidate us all into fewer prisons, and make better use of her guards. But it’s hard to imagine Hochul freeing a bunch of us with the stroke of a pen. Lawmakers let us down, too. Despite a statehouse full of Democrats and a prison system in crisis, none of the bills aimed at reducing the population were even put to a vote before the last session ended in June. These included legislation like the Earned Time Act, which would’ve allowed guys like Frantz and me the ability to earn time off our sentences for good behavior and participation in programs. The Second Look Act would’ve let us, after serving a significant amount of time, petition a judge for a second chance in the form of a sentence reduction. If one or both of these bills had been passed with HALT, I doubt we would have had the uptick in violence, the killings, or the strike. 

Like one of the failed bills in New York, “second look” legislation is actually modeled off a measure in the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill that Trump signed into law in 2018. It allows any federal prisoner to ask their trial judge, usually after long stretches of time, for compassionate release. So far, federal judges have released nearly 6,000 people under the measure.

U.S. District Judge Frederic Block, of the Eastern District of New York, told me it’s ridiculous that New York doesn’t give its judges the same power. The judge and I became acquainted after I reviewed his book, “A Second Chance,” and he responded with a letter to the editor, writing that if I were locked up in the feds, he’d free me.

What’s more frustrating for us is that the most dangerous organized crime figures wind up in the feds, while those of us in state prison were often their flunkies, taking their orders, low in the criminal pecking order. This gnaws at my peers and me. Many of us aren’t as culpable as our counterparts in the feds. That they can get second chances and we can’t feels arbitrary and is hard to reconcile.

Judge Block has freed some real brand-name reformed criminals under the First Step Act, like Anthony Russo, a captain in the Colombo crime family, who ordered the executions of two mafia rivals in the early ’90s, around the same time Jean Frantz went away. During one phone conversation, Block told me he was about to release another: Walter Johnson. I later realized he was talking about “Tut,” a notorious stick-up kid from Brooklyn whom I’d been hearing about for years. Block had sentenced Tut to five life terms in the ’90s. Now he’s free. Block and Tut have even gone on to do interviews together about the importance of second chances. (Last week, in a decision granting the termination of Tut’s supervised release, Block called out New York legislators for failing to pass the Second Look Act.)

Between the releases under his First Step Act and the more direct ones with his clemency power, Trump, who positioned himself as the law-and-order candidate, has shown far more mercy (warranted or not) to people in the feds than New York’s progressive leaders have shown to people in their prisons.

That’s the other thing about second chances: Hope makes the job safer for officers, too. I’ve never been the kind of writer who makes my peers into victims or prison guards into villains, because most of us are just trying to do our time, and most of them are just trying to do their jobs. Our lives are inextricably intertwined — and any discussion that pits us against them is missing the point. COs and prisoners both have lower life expectancies and higher rates of PTSD, suicide and depression than other people in society. An inhumane living environment for us is also an inhumane work environment for COs.

Prison is more painful for those of us who have turned our lives around. We are ready to go, but unable to leave. It’s like that for a lot of men I know, like Frantz and many of Zeidman’s clients, who’ve robbed and killed and now have receding hairlines, gray goatees and college degrees. We’re wiser and more contemplative, nothing like we were when we came in. These days, I can’t stand the piercing noise and the same old, boring conversations. In my lower moments, I’ve sometimes wondered, “Why did I work so hard to better myself if it only made the time harder?”

In an earlier draft of this piece, I had closed with a call to action: As Hochul prepares to ask voters for a second chance, perhaps she could give second chances to those who have asked the same of her. But why kid myself? Hochul has likely made a strategic decision to limit commuting sentences as she runs for reelection this year, to avoid attacks from her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, accusing her of coddling criminals. Why would Hochul risk her career to give us second chances when the supermajority Democratic party in Albany refuses, year after year, to pass any bills that would do that?

A few weeks ago, I helped Frantz bring some bags of his property over to the honor block. It’s a safer environment with more privileges, even a yard with a garden. The retirement home of the big house. Frantz hurt his knee playing ball a few years ago, and today he walks with a cane. He feels vulnerable. Having come in as a kid, and now having his body break down at 52, it messes with his head. He was happy to get a bit more freedom. As for our prospects for actual freedom, our conversations had shifted from clemency to the Second Look Act.

“Our number will play soon,” I told him. “The bill has a lot of momentum.”

“I’ve been hearing that for years,” Frantz said.

“Now you sound like the cynic,” I thought.