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 and Northwestern universities to cover immigration enforcement, US militarism, contemporary colonialism, and county jails. His investigations into the use of a police gang database in Washington, DC, have spurred lawsuits and legislation. He’s based in Queens.
New York prisons may have effectively banned journalism behind bars.
Budget legislation released Monday night includes eight pages of bail law markups — significantly more than the governor announced last week. A vote is imminent.
Police will receive photos of defendants with curfews and report alleged violations to District Attorney Melinda Katz.
A new legal challenge takes aim at the New York prison department for locking hundreds of people up in solitary over offenses that should be exempt.
With budget talks at a stalemate, Hochul offered the legislature new draft language on bail. It would accomplish largely the same result as her previous plan: a dramatic expansion in judges’ ability to set bail.
So-called “de-escalation units” were supposed to help people cool off after violent encounters. But months after their implementation, Rikers staff still use the old brutal methods.
Nearly a year and a half after they were supposed to fix their system, jail officials still don’t know how long they’re keeping people in notorious intake pens.
After months of ignoring reforms, the corrections department published new rules. They look a lot like the old rules.
The governor proposed an outsized boost worth tens of millions for prosecutors — drawing comparisons to New York’s history of public defense neglect.
A recent hearing was legislators’ chance to have acting prison commissioner Anthony Annucci explain himself. They didn’t make him.
Long before 2019, New York law mandated that judges setting bail consider only a person’s likelihood of returning to court. Hochul’s proposal would strip that limit.
The controversial units have been responsible for high-profile killings and civil rights abuses in cities nationwide. Hochul doubled their state grant funding in New York — and wants to double it again.
Legislators are taking aim at a host of police surveillance tools, from undercover social media accounts to facial recognition to aerial drones.
The New York State Police bought social media monitoring programs that have violated platforms’ policies and been used to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters.
This time last year, Hochul promised to fully staff the parole board. But vacancies have only grown — and went unmentioned in this year’s agenda.
Legislators wanted to make judges warn defendants about deportation risks. They say Kathy Hochul’s veto left them blindsided.
New documents obtained by New York Focus offer a glimpse into the last hours of Kevin Bryan’s life. His was one of several recent deaths at Rikers in dorms with unstaffed posts.
Legislators told the prison department it was violating a solitary confinement reform law. So it ignored them.
The Israeli firm Cellebrite offers tools that unlock data, trawl search histories, and perform facial recognition. The New York State Police are in the market.
Eric Adams pledged to cut police overtime in half. Instead, his initiatives helped it soar to the second-highest level on record.