Fighting for greater oversight of New York prisons following two fatal beatings

The fatal beatings in recent months of inmates Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi by prison staff, as well as the March wildcat strike by thousands of corrections officers statewide, have shone a harsh light on systemic problems in the New York state prison system, known as the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Prison advocates say that the system, made up of 42 facilities housing more than 33,000 inmates, is unhealthy and dangerous for inmates and COs alike. (Here is footage of the beating of Brooks; please be advised that it is graphic.)

One of those advocates is Jennifer Scaife, executive director since 2018 of the nonprofit Correctional Association of New York, which, since 1844, has been charged by the state with providing oversight of the prison system. On May 20, Scaife talked with City & State about what CANY feels are the root causes of the upheavals in the system, the bills the group would like to see passed in Albany to improve it and what CANY will be doing with $3 million it recently got from the state. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jennifer, thank you so much for talking to us today. So I know there are a lot of bills before the legislature in Albany about the state prison system. Could you boil down the bills you are backing to, say, three things you'd like to see happen in the system?

I think I'd need more than three, but I'll try. First, our system is currently too large, even though it's about half the size it was in 1999. There are still more people in prison than is necessary for public safety and certainly more than is appropriate for the interest of justice. A smaller system is easier to manage, both in terms of provision of services and resources as well as in terms of public tax dollars. 

I would love for prisons to be places for both prisoners and staff that are rich in opportunities for personal development and growth. By and large, people incarcerated in NYS prisons experience them as punishing, negative places as opposed to places with a sense of possibility, potential and positivity.

Certainly, staffing issues have dominated the headlines since the murders and have been worsened by the wildcat strike. But I think that staffing problems are directly connected to what I just said about the way that people experience prison. They're not places where anyone wants to be, including the people who work there. People don't want to enter the field of corrections, which is a national crisis. And I think it's because the old model of warehousing people and making prison as spartan and painful as possible is not good for anyone. So fundamentally changing the look, feel and operation of the facilities would change things, but that's only possible through a smaller system.

Prisons are out of sight and out of mind for most people. And there's this societal attitude that people get what they deserve in prison. So fundamentally shifting public perceptions of what prisons are supposed to be for would be on my wish list too. Because I think that public perception, lack of concern and even contempt for people who are incarcerated allows them to be what they've become, which are neglected institutions sealed off from public scrutiny and subject to extraordinary risk in terms of people's human and civil rights.

Do you think people understand that the two recent beating deaths and the wildcat strike are coming out of the kind of systemic, structural problems you're talking about?

I think a lot of people recognize in what they're seeing that this is not the way that those staff (who did the beatings) were when they walked in the door and took the job. The environment within DOCCS, even if it didn't directly lead to that point, did nothing to keep it from getting to the point where (those beating murders) were possible. And that's clear from the number of people who were in the room watching it all happen, including the guy who mopped up the blood and hence tampered with evidence.

The video is horrifying. What leads to that kind of group behavior?

I'm not a psychologist and I don't know these people, so I'm going to speak in broad terms of what I've heard people tell me. As I said before, these are punishing environments for both incarcerated people and staff. Nationally, COs have higher rates than the general population of alcoholism, obesity, domestic violence, suicide and early mortality. Health outcomes are bad for people who work in corrections. Their sleep is interrupted because of stress from the job, being exposed to trauma and violence. And there's a culture of “Suck it up and don't talk about it.” There are disincentives to seeking mental health support due to fear of being found unfit for duty. And then of course there's that impunity of knowing that people can't see and don't care what happens inside. The great mistake of the Marcy COs who beat Brooks to death was that they thought nobody could see what was going on. (Apparently they were unaware that their bodycams were recording the beating.)

But doing the kind of things they did not only hurts others, it hurts you. It takes a toll on your psyche to cause that kind of harm to other people. I've heard the Critical Incident Response Training that COs get described as gladiator school, where people are doing daredevil stunts and get hurt. Workers’ comp claims have come out of those trainings, which are not open to public scrutiny.

Add to that having to work double and triple shifts. And we have to acknowledge the important role that racism plays in this kind of brutality. The men who beat Robert Brooks to death were apparently white and he was Black. (In recent years, nearly half of all DOCCS prisoners are Black and nearly 80% of staff are white.) 

I've long heard that the further away the prison is from NYC and downstate, the harsher it is. True?

It's harsh if your family from NYC or downstate has to travel six hours to see you. But I've also been to some prisons that are very far from NYC that struck me as more humane than others.

Is there any facility that's a model of a good or decent one?

I couldn't point to a facility as a whole because every one of them has problems. But certain housing units or special programs for some subset of a population are absolutely models that prove it can be done. I've been to a unit at Wende Correctional Facility near Buffalo with a special needs unit (SNU) where people who have developmental disabilities are housed. And there are a few such SNUs around the state. They have brightly decorated classrooms where people have their own stations and they come in every day knowing where to go, with their activities a big part of their daily routine. They were planting a garden out in their rec yard in boxes they'd made in the woodshop. The staff knew everyone by name and recognized that these were people who had special needs and required a different kind of approach. It makes you ask, “Why can't other units be approached in a similar way?”

I've also been to a senior living dorm at Ulster Correctional. They'd taken one of those cookie-cutter dorms built to house 50 people on each side and converted one side into a gym, a computer lab, classrooms and offices for all, and they had all these indoor plants growing. And the other side was housing. You had to be 55 or older and have no disciplinary record to live there. They had a horticulture program, weekly groups and a special curriculum.

So these special programs exist. I've heard the DOCCS commissioner express frustration that some of these excellent examples aren't better known and don't receive more attention. 

Do those programs exist because the people in them are easier to manage because of their age and/or disability?

It's more challenging to set up an effective program for people who are prone to violence. But there's also some good mental health programming happening for people with serious mental illness who can have a hard time adjusting to and coping with rules. So, yeah, what do you do with a person who is extremely violent and gets out of a disciplinary housing unit and then (commits violence) again? There are no great answers, although there have been initiatives in other states that show there are better ways of managing some of that behavior.

Like what?

Well, people tend to age out of violence. So I've read about programs that pair younger adults with older, more seasoned incarcerated people who can provide mentorship and even act as a father figure. And they work together on creating norms for self-management, and the staff in those units are hand-picked to work there. The challenge is that that kind of approach takes strong consistent daily leadership, troubleshooting, skills development and reminders. And unfortunately, COs are so oriented to responding to crises or maintaining basic operations that it's hard to do new resource-intensive things at the same time.

After Brooks' murder, DOCCS committed to bringing in organizations to work with staff on culture change and increasing safety in prison. But it's not a one-and-done, or just strapping cameras on COs. You have to commit to doing that work forever.

You are backing a bill that would allow CANY staff to make surprise visits to facilities – not just scheduled, expected ones.

That's a key legislative priority for us. Unannounced visits are extremely important, and not just because of the element of surprise. It's considered a component of effective oversight – golden-key, unfettered access any time of day or night. 

Is that the standard in most states?

Actually, New York is only one of three states where nonprofits like CANY have some level of oversight. It's government oversight everywhere else. But the other thing this bill would do is give CANY authority to obtain records from DOCCS about what's happening in prison. Right now, we have to FOIA everything. We filed 173 FOIAs in an 18-month period just to get basic information about chronic health conditions and capital needs.

There are a few other bills I'll highlight. One is giving the DOCCS commissioner the authority to fire a CO. Currently, they can't fire a CO without it going to the arbitration board. The commissioner needs the ability to fire people who are not following the rules. 

Another bill would empower the New York State Department of Health to oversee health services provided by DOCCS. Unlike many other states, New York has only one facility where health care is provided by a private contractor and state-provided care is probably better overall. But the No. 1 grievance from incarcerated people in NYS is medical complaints, with serious concerns about long delays in accessing care, especially specialty care. Some facilities don't even have pharmacies or a dentist, or their only doctor just retired. 

And yet another bill would require DOCCS to issue a notice on their website when somebody dies in custody. Currently, they're only required to report it to the state Commission of Correction. Yes, the attorney general's office investigates the deaths. But if you hear about a death in custody in real time, usually it's because the media got wind of it and reported it.

How likely do you think it is that these bills will pass?

I don't have a great barometer for the political will within the legislature, but I think many are very interested in the bills. Speaker Heastie came to a hearing last week that I testified at where these issues had his attention for at least an hour-and-a-half. I think that the two beating deaths and the wildcat strike have exposed the much broader crisis in the system in a way that can't be ignored and that is crying out for legislative intervention.

How did you get to your current position?

I was in school getting my masters in creative writing, and I had a professor who knew a chaplain at a prison in southwest Virginia that's since closed. The professor organized an internship for me to teach a class in the prison. And I sat down to a table of people who, week after week, were so grateful to me for coming in, for the opportunity and the human interaction, and so eager to get their lives back on track. It was exhilarating for me.

By the end of my final year in grad school, I realized that I didn't want to try to survive by writing poetry for a living, so I started teaching at San Quentin state prison in California, first as a volunteer. Then I was offered a job at this small nonprofit, the Prison University Project. And I ran a college program in prison for five years before I realized that I was interested in the policies that led people to be in prison in the first place. And for my own well-being, frankly, I needed to move away from direct service into work that allowed me to leverage my experience on the ground for policy change. So I did reentry policy work for five years for San Francisco, then moved to New York in 2015 to take a job in the mayor's office doing similar policy work, trying to reimagine the system.

When CANY posted that they were looking for a new executive director, I was intrigued. I'd never worked at the state level or in an oversight capacity. I was looking for something extremely challenging that would teach me new skills. I think I got a little more than I bargained for in that department! 

What are you proudest of so far?

I'm proud of our team. We have a hardworking, committed staff who do extremely challenging work that requires a lot of travel, long days, grueling conversations. We don't have a huge number of wins. People usually don't call us to report good news. But my team is really supportive of one another and does such incredible work.

And I'm proud that, for the first time ever in CANY's history – and unfortunately, (only) after the beating death tragedies – the state has committed $3 million in new funding for us to continue carrying out our independent oversight work. In the course of one year, we're going from being 95% privately funded to being majority state-funded.

What will you use the money for?

We're going to hire new staff and deepen our bench. We want to expand our monitoring by hiring three new people who are based outside of the NYC area, where the vast majority of NYS prisons are. Currently, we only have two staff who live outside of NYC.

What are your strongest skills?

I guess writing, but that's a double-edged sword because I edit everything that goes out of CANY and I have a heavy-handed red pen. 

But written reports of your observations are the very core of what CANY does, right?

Yes, and I want to get it as right as we can, for it to be fair, nuanced, clear-eyed and comprehensive. 

What about your skills at leading a team?

It's hard to give someone direct feedback without putting them on the spot or hurting their feelings, but consistent, direct feedback, when it's coming from a place of wanting to help someone grow, (is very important). I think I've gotten better at it. I'm working with my colleagues at trying to build a culture of giving direct feedback in the interest of helping people develop greater awareness. If you can't say something directly, it's hard to get what you want. That's another lesson I've learned.

Where do you feel you're not as strong?

Knowing when it's the right moment to say something publicly about what we're seeing in the prisons and having the confidence and clarity to say it when it needs to be said. I'm still working on that. This year, there were a couple instances where it was very clear to me something needed to be said. It's not always as clear as someone having been murdered by staff, fortunately. So you have to think about it and gather more information. You don't want to piss people off by getting it wrong. We see a lot of things in the prisons that the public doesn't, and sometimes it's hard to articulate that because it takes context. But sometimes it's just not that complicated.

Can you give an example of what you're talking about?

Sometimes, we host interns who work with us for a semester. They come in full of ideas that they're learning in school, and they're eager to apply those ideas to changing the world. But in the work we do, change often takes years. So there can be tension between our people who just want to say the thing, like, “This strike needs to end now because people in prison are suffering without medical care, food, access to programs.” These people say, “Why don't we just come out and condemn it?” And then I and my colleagues who've been doing this work a long time will have to say, “Well, if the state could just say to the strikers ‘Get back to work,’ they would've by now.”

So when is our voice going to help move the needle versus just making us feel better? I don't want to say something just because it will satisfy our outrage, but because it will contribute meaningfully to move the policy conversation forward so that something shifts. I have to ask myself, “When are we making nobody happy for the right reason?”

You work on really stressful, gritty issues. What do you do for self-care and joy?

I have a little garden in my postage-stamp backyard in Queens, where we have great neighbors whom we barbecue with. I spend a lot of time outdoors in the summer with my two dogs. I love to go to the Rockaways. I'm an avid thrift shopper and sourdough bread baker. But I also really like to work.