After 15 years on the job, a New York City social service worker found himself lugging his laptop to choir practice at night, forced to work overtime for the first time in his career.

The staffer was eventually kicked out of the group last year, because he kept having to work during rehearsal. “I didn’t want to do overtime but they told us we had no choice,” he said.

Another eligibility specialist at a Brooklyn unit processing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applications said many of her colleagues have retired or quit during the pandemic, and the agency has made few hires to replace them. As a result, she often works overtime.

“The city needs to have enough staff to handle all these new cases,” said the 13-year agency veteran. Both civil servants requested anonymity to discuss work conditions.

Their stories capture the strain at the city’s Department of Social Services (DSS), where overtime has surged as a shrunken staff scrambles to process a rising tide of benefit applications.

It’s been 54 years since the infamous Attica prison uprising, when incarcerated men took over the maximum-security facility in western New York for nearly five days and drew nationwide attention to the abuse, neglect, and racism they’d endured.

The uprising prompted New York state to implement a number of prison reforms, including improved access to hygiene items, visits, education, religious services, and avenues to report mistreatment. Yet the policy changes weren’t a cure-all: Though the state enacted more reforms and saw its prison population decline in the decades that followed, abuse and neglect remained a fact of prison life and rarely made headlines.

Then came the murder. On December 9, 2024, guards at Central New York’s Marcy Correctional Facility beat a 43-year-old incarcerated man named Robert Brooks, injuring him so severely that he died the next day.

New York state will replace the company providing health insurance to hundreds of thousands of home care workers next year.

The move comes after a series of New York Focus stories found that the company, called Leading Edge Administrators, routinely underpays doctors, bills patients for care it has promised to cover, attempts to cancel patients’ insurance without notice, pockets money that is meant for low-wage workers, and directs profits to a shady charity.

Leading Edge, which also goes by the name Omni Advantage, was hired earlier this year by Public Partnerships LLC(PPL), a care management company, to oversee health insurance for employees of the $11 billion CDPAP program.