As New York Focus's justice bureau chief, Chris Gelardi reports and edits work on the state's criminal-legal and immigration systems. His writing on cops, jails, ICE, and the US military has appeared in more than a dozen other outlets, most frequently The Intercept and The Nation, and his award-winning investigations into prison conditions and police surveillance have spurred lawsuits and legislation. He's based in Queens.
The Legal Aid Society alleges that DOCCS declared an overbroad emergency to keep incarcerated people locked in their cells for upward of 20 hours a day.
Short-staffed since a strike this winter, the prison system is keeping people locked in their boiling cells and dorms for upwards of 21 hours a day.
The prison agency’s security ranks are 4,700 corrections officers and sergeants short of what it says it needs to run every program and housing area effectively.
The prison agency has suspended solitary confinement restrictions since a corrections officers strike in February.
The bill package will now head to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, and she could either sign, veto, or scale it back through amendments to the legislation.
Documents show that six county sheriffs’ offices and two state agencies have recently included excited delirium in their training.
Previously unpublished photos and video show how protesters set up encampments, burned police vehicles, and marched almost daily. Today, the NYPD operates much as it did before the movement.
The embattled prison chief took an optimistic tack, but family members of those killed by prison guards have little faith that reforms will be meaningful.
For 20 years, the state police have been quietly building a database of suspected gang members — and they’re feeding it to Donald Trump’s administration.
In some counties, the waitlist for state-funded mental health treatment programs can exceed two years.
The lawsuit reveals that DOCCS is considering pausing solitary confinement law on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and any other day designated by the commissioner.
They want to beef up the powerful but little-known State Commission of Correction.
Nantwi’s cellmate, the only incarcerated witness in the room as guards allegedly killed the 22-year-old, speaks out for the first time.
The candidates did not disclose Solidarity PAC’s fundraising role in campaign finance disclosures.
The legislature rejected Hochul’s central public safety policy priorities while embracing proposals to increase prison oversight.
Former prison agency staff and newly released documents describe a patronage network centered on Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III’s family.
This isn’t Daniel Martuscello’s first crisis. An investigation reveals how his family weathered one scandal after another on their road to dominating New York’s prison system.
With nearly all of New York’s state prisons on lockdown, those on the inside struggle to get by.
The Trump administration, eager to force local officials to collaborate with ICE, is coming for a Tompkins County sheriff who released a man who’d served his sentence.
The HALT Solitary Confinement Act altered the balance of power within New York’s prisons.