With multiple delays and policy maneuvering, Gov. Hochul bullied the Legislature into the budget of her liking. With a state budget savaged by federal program cuts, Trump tax policy and a related disinterest by Hochul to tax New York’s wealthiest to back-fill the gaps, she allocated $4.15 billion to the state’s prison agency (DOCCs), plus an added payout of nearly $1 billion for the National Guard currently staffing some upstate facilities.
While the governor poses as a strong fiscal and personnel manager at a time when New Yorkers are seeking their own pocketbook relief, that image is hard to justify when looking at DOCCS. Since 2011 the state prison population has dropped nearly in half, but spending on the prison system has doubled. Nevertheless the money keeps flowing.
The results of this lavish spending are not good. Three women recently died in a four week span at Bedford Hills following repeated efforts to sound the alarm about abusive conditions. The prison has the highest rate of sexual assault by staff in the country.
The New York Times recently documented 120 cases where officers brutalized and maimed people after they were already restrained, and frequently then locked the people in solitary confinement on false charges as cover-up for the abuse. The Times separately documented three people brutally killed by officers that had previously gone unreported.
Nearly six years ago, the news outlet the City published a report, “Many Deaths at New York State prisons are preventable,” and cited examples of “grossly substandard medical treatment” that led to preventable deaths of incarcerated people.
Extreme sentences and repeated parole denials, as well as a failure by the governor to expansively use her clemency authority, have resulted in a crisis of aging, sickness, and death in her extravagantly funded prison system. A person dies in a NYS prison almost every other day, with an average age of death of just 53-years-old — a life expectancy that, if our prisons were a country, would place us among the worst in the world. More than 200 people have died in state prisons since the on-camera killing of Robert Brooks.
Hochul has shown no interest in improving either the fiscal or personnel management of her prisons, and is the only governor in the past quarter century to oversee a rise in the prison population. She has shown her intent to keep incarcerated even those people who would bear no risk to public safety: the elderly, the pregnant, the sick — and even the innocent, having vetoed in 2023 a bill that would have allowed wrongfully convicted New Yorkers to get back into court. This all comes at a great financial and social cost.
Despite the governor’s intransigence, other elected officials are joining advocates in sounding the alarm. Among them are state Sen. Julia Salazar and state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, whose recent report said “Policy makers should continue to look for ways to further reduce the state’s prison population, particularly older individuals who pose a reduced risk to society at large.”
The Legislature still has time to act this week. Creating just pathways to release from prison must be part of the solution. A package of bills that would do this is being pushed by reform advocates as the legislative session comes to a close. Collectively these bills are supported by hundreds of organizations, including survivors of violent crime, significant majorities in the Legislature, civil rights groups, law enforcement and voters.
The bills could save New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars every year and would provide hope and incentive for personal growth to those inside prison.
Encalada-Malinowski is the civil rights campaign director at VOCAL-NY.