In More than 290 Cases NY State Guards Brutally Beat Prisoners and Lied about It but None Were Fired

From [HERE] Shattered teeth. Punctured lungs. Broken bones. Over a dozen years, New York State officials have documented the results of attacks by hundreds of prison guards on the people in their custody.

But when the state corrections department has tried to use this evidence to fire guards, it has failed 90 percent of the time, an investigation by The Marshall Project has found.

The review of prison disciplinary records dating to 2010 found more than 290 cases in which the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision tried to fire officers or supervisors it said physically abused prisoners or covered up mistreatment that ranged from group beatings to withholding food. The agency considered these employees a threat to the safety and security of prisons.

Yet officers were ousted in just 28 cases. The state tried to fire one guard for using excessive force in three separate incidents within three years — and failed each time. He remains on the state prisons payroll.

An officer who broke his baton hitting a prisoner 35 times, even after the man was handcuffed, was not fired. Neither were the guards who beat a prisoner at Attica Correctional Facility so badly that he needed 13 staples to close gashes in his scalp. Nor were the officers who battered a mentally ill man, injuring him from face to groin. The man hanged himself the next day.

In dozens of documented cases involving severe injuries of prisoners, including three deaths, the agency did not even try to discipline officers, state records show.

For decades, the workings of the prison discipline system had been hidden from public view under a secrecy law adopted at the urging of the state’s powerful law enforcement unions. But after the Legislature repealed that law in 2020, The Marshall Project obtained more than 5,600 records of disciplinary cases against prison employees, for issues ranging from physical abuse of prisoners to sleeping on the job.

The records probably reflect only a fraction of the violence guards have inflicted in New York’s corrections system, experts said. Many prisoners do not file complaints because they fear retaliation or not being believed. And in most of the state’s 44 prisons, officers do not wear body cameras, which sometimes help prove abuse. These records do not detail prisoner attacks on officers, which the department and the guards’ union said have increased in recent years.

A key reason the prison system finds it so hard to get rid of guards is the contract the state signed in 1972 with the union. The agreement requires any effort to fire an officer to go through binding arbitration, using an outside arbitrator hired by the union and the state — a system the union has successfully kept in subsequent contracts. Only a court can overturn arbitration decisions. [MORE]