Even in a system known for its brutality, what New York State prison guards did to Robert L. Brooks and Messiah Nantwi stood out.
Both men were handcuffed before guards beat them viciously, leaving them unable to defend themselves or even shield their faces as the blows rained down. Both died soon after being attacked, victims not of justified force but, essentially, of torture.
The killings caused a brief reckoning this year within the walled-off world of New York’s prisons, resulting in criminal charges against 20 of the officers involved and sending officials scrambling to try to portray the episodes as unacceptable aberrations.
But a New York Times investigation has found that state prison guards have been credibly accused of engaging in such behavior — putting inmates in restraints and then assaulting them — far more often than was previously known.
Drawing on thousands of pages of court records, disciplinary data and interviews with dozens of current and former inmates, The Times identified more than 120 instances in the past decade in which guards were described as having punched, kicked or stomped on prisoners, smashed their fingers in cell doors, held their legs apart and struck their genitals with batons, and even waterboarded them — all while the prisoners were handcuffed or otherwise restrained.
Across the prison system, the rate at which staff members have used force against inmates has been climbing steadily for the past decade.
But interviews with watchdog officials, prisoners’ advocates and prisoners themselves suggest that instances of the most egregious abuse have increased significantly in just the past three years.
The officials, advocates and prisoners have linked the increase partly to seething anger among guards over recently enacted limits on their ability to use solitary confinement. And they said the uptick had been accompanied by a general increase in rule breaking by officers, who maintain that the solitary confinement restrictions have made their jobs less safe.
Just before 10 guards were charged in the killing of Mr. Brooks in February, thousands of officers walked off the job in illegal strikes across the state, plunging the prisons into chaos and prompting Gov. Kathy Hochul to deploy the National Guard to restore order. When officers began returning to work weeks later, many were still fuming, inmates said.
“The abuse has been worse since the strike,” said Duane Brown, 44, who is serving 30 years to life for murder and said guards at Green Haven Correctional Facility had beaten him to unconsciousness in September.
A spokesman for the union that represents the guards, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, denied that officers had tortured inmates. He acknowledged that they were using force more often but said they were doing so because of working conditions that left them no choice.
“The reality is that when you are dealing with inmates who attack staff and other inmates and refuse orders to cease, force is necessary to contain the situation and minimize the amount of injuries that occur at the hands of inmates,” the spokesman, James Miller, said.
But a vast majority of cases identified by The Times did not fit that description.
One occurred in June 2024 at Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border, where guards handcuffed Ernastiaze Moore, a 25-year-old inmate who had filed lawsuits against prison staff members, punched and kicked him and then dragged him to a medical room, where they held a plastic bag over his head until he lost consciousness.
Another beating unfolded in September 2023 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility north of New York City, where Dane Stuart, 34, said guards restrained his hands before putting him in a chokehold and stomping on his arms and legs.
A third happened in April 2022 at Collins Correctional Facility near Buffalo, where Byron Santos, 28, said guards handcuffed him, put him in a headlock, threw him to the floor, kicked him and knelt on the back of his neck.
In a prison system where more than 75 percent of employees are white and 73 percent of prisoners are Black or Hispanic, many of the incidents had racist overtones, inmates said, with white guards using racial epithets and other demeaning language during attacks. One inmate said guards restrained him and then called him a slur as they punched and kicked him and tore dreadlocks from his scalp at Clinton in 2021.
Most guards who are accused of such abuse are never charged with crimes, or even disciplined. There were about 9,500 misconduct investigations brought against officers from 2000 to mid-October 2020 and closed by mid-2021, an average of more than 460 a year or about 38 a month, records show. Of those, about 10 percent involved accusations of inmate abuse. A vast majority of guards accused in such cases were never terminated.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said that the safety of prison staff members and inmates was the agency’s “top priority.”
“The department has zero tolerance for violence within our facilities,” the spokesman, Thomas Mailey, said. “Anyone engaged in misconduct will be disciplined, and, if warranted, incidents will be referred for outside prosecution.”
At a public hearing in Albany in May, Daniel F. Martuscello III, the state’s corrections commissioner, acknowledged problems and promised improvements.
“Individuals are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment, and there is an expectation of safety and opportunities for rehabilitation,” he said. “The last few months have challenged the foundation of this belief.”
Any reform efforts face a steep uphill climb, current and former inmates said.
At the Marcy Correctional Facility, where Mr. Brooks was killed, vicious beatings occurred so often that Sean Chung, a 29-year-old former inmate who worked there as a janitor, said in an interview that he had developed a routine to clean up after them.
He would follow orders to face the wall and listen as the first blows landed.
“I am hearing loud thuds,” said Mr. Chung, who was released on parole in 2024 after serving eight years for weapons possession and conspiracy. Then came shouts from the guards: “‘Stop resisting, stop fighting, put your hands behind your back!’”
“You hear the hard, gut-wrenching punches,” he said, “the screams, the ‘I’m sorrys,’ ‘I can’t breathes,’ ‘You’re going to kill me.’ You hear ‘Mom,’ and it gets quiet and you just keep hearing the thuds.”
Afterward, he said, his eyes would water and his throat would burn as he scrubbed the oily residue of pepper spray from the walls. He would use a mop to soak up blood from cracks in the floor and apply disinfectants to areas where urine and feces were sometimes left behind. He had a red bin marked “hazardous waste” for collecting broken teeth, torn-out hair and bits of clothing.
“It used to be traumatizing, but then it became normal. This is every day,” Mr. Chung said, before adding, “Everybody knows about this.”
‘The Slaughterhouse’
Few places in the prison system have a worse reputation for violence against inmates than the Clinton penitentiary.
The setting for brutal attacks on inmates in the 1980s and ’90s, the scene of a fatal beating in 2010 and the epicenter of brazen assaults after two inmates escaped in 2015, the prison, in Dannemora, has more recently become known for a unique form of punishment, The Times found.
In interviews and lawsuits, nine inmates have described being handcuffed, beaten and then nearly suffocated by guards who held plastic bags over their heads.
In the most recent such incident, in August 2024, an inmate named Deveron Raymond was walking back to his housing area when guards ordered him to face the wall. One pulled a plastic bag over his head and another punched him in the stomach, he said in an interview. A third wrapped his hands around Mr. Raymond’s neck, and he lost consciousness, he said.
When he came to, he was in the infirmary, in a room known among prisoners as “the slaughterhouse,” and a guard was hitting him in the face with a baton, he said. Others punched and kicked him as he lay handcuffed on the floor and then pushed his face against a hot radiator. Then they pulled another bag over his head, he said.
“I knew it was over,” said Mr. Raymond, 41, his voice cracking. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is it. This is how I have to go out.’”
Mr. Raymond, who had been serving 13 years to life on a burglary conviction, emerged with a dislocated thumb, a missing tooth and permanent injuries to his jaw and face, according to a lawsuit he filed, which is pending.
Two other inmates, brothers Paris and Curtis Perkins, said they had been singled out for similar treatment in February 2023.
Paris Perkins, who is 47 and serving a life sentence for murder and other charges, said he was waiting in line for the mess hall when guards slammed his head into a wall, threw him to the floor, handcuffed him and took him to the infirmary, where they punched, kicked and stomped on him, breaking five of his teeth. (The Marshall Project, a criminal justice news outlet, has previously reported on accusations of abuse being carried out in prison infirmaries, where there are no cameras.)
Mr. Perkins said a sergeant, Matthew Liberty, had pulled a bag over his head before he lost consciousness.
Sergeant Liberty is accused of similar brutality in two other pending lawsuits. A corrections department spokesman said the agency sought to fire him in 2013 but that the termination was overturned in arbitration. The sergeant did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Curtis Perkins, who tried to come to his brother’s aid, said he was also restrained and taken to another room, where guards pulled braids from his scalp, bent his fingers at odd angles, shoved fingers in and out of his anus and called him a racial slur, he said. They held a plastic bag over his head until he lost consciousness and then did it again when he came to, said Mr. Perkins, who is 37 and serving up to 27 years for attempted murder and other offenses.
Another inmate, Tevin Jackson, said he was handcuffed when guards punched him in the face and back, kneed him in the chest and lashed at his feet with batons. A sergeant then held a plastic bag over his head until he passed out on an exam room table in February 2022, said Mr. Jackson, who is 34 and serving 20 years for manslaughter and attempted robbery.
The corrections department spokesman, Mr. Mailey, said in a statement that all of the accusations involving Clinton described in this article had been investigated and were determined to be unfounded or unsubstantiated. He added that the agency had separately investigated past claims about guards placing plastic bags over inmates’ heads and had found no evidence to support them.
But Ellie Silverman, a lawyer who represented several inmates who said they had been nearly suffocated at Clinton, said the practice occurred regularly and involved not just a few officers.
“We are no longer even talking about bad apples anymore — we are talking about a bad culture,“ Ms. Silverman said. “It has become an accepted culture at Clinton, which is terrifying.”
She said the case of Tyrone McCalla exemplified that culture.
Mr. McCalla was serving up to 10 years for burglary and other charges when he was pulled out of the line for the recreation yard in March 2022 and ordered to put his hands on a wall. When Mr. McCalla, who had a history of filing grievances against guards, did not immediately comply, officers threw him to the floor and piled on top of him, according to Mr. McCalla and video of the incident.
They pulled him into the infirmary, where they continued beating him before pulling a plastic bag over his head, he said. One guard kicked him in the genitals and said he was rendering him incapable of fathering Black children, whom he described with a racial slur, Mr. McCalla said. Others punched him in the face, stripped him to his underwear and pulled another bag over his head, he said. He recalled seeing blood and feeling his nose breaking.
Afterward, Mr. McCalla, who was set to be released that July, was sent to solitary confinement and falsely accused of attacking guards, he said. He was charged with assault, convicted and sentenced to another seven years in prison.
“This is their currency,” Mr. McCalla, 38, said. “Jumping on inmates and charging them. They try to paint a picture like we are attacking them until stuff like what happened at Marcy,” he added, referring to the killing of Mr. Brooks.
“Who is going to be next?”
Using Force
No organization regularly tracks instances of brutality inside state prisons.
But after the beating deaths of Mr. Brooks and Mr. Nantwi, Times reporters set out to learn how often prisoners had received similar treatment.
Scouring corrections department records, legal filings, news articles and other sources, they identified 127 cases in which inmates said they had been handcuffed or otherwise restrained before being physically abused. All of the cases occurred in the past decade.
Some of the accounts were drawn from lawsuits that were ultimately dismissed for procedural or other reasons. Others came from claims that led to legal settlements. A few were relayed by the inmates themselves in on-the-record interviews. A small number were described in charging documents or state disciplinary records.
Taken together, they paint a damning picture of brutality inside New York’s state prisons.
Department policies bar guards from using unnecessary force, and guards who do so can potentially face criminal charges.
Yet the Times review found that guards have been regularly accused of such behavior for years.
And for years, state officials with the power to crack down on such conduct have largely tolerated it. They have treated some cases as isolated incidents, labeled others as justified and written off still others as lies told by untrustworthy prisoners.
Even when the same guards have been accused of abusive behavior repeatedly over several years, officials have not fired them.
That was the case with Troy Mitchell.
In 2002, Mr. Mitchell was an officer at Auburn Correctional Facility when he targeted one inmate with a vicious beating, breaking both of his hands, his ankle, his nose and a tooth, the inmate said in a lawsuit. That case was settled in 2008 for $55,000.
In 2008, Mr. Mitchell, who had been promoted to lieutenant, was accused of assaulting another man while he was handcuffed, leading to another settlement.
In 2016, Mr. Mitchell and other guards shackled an inmate named Matthew Raymond at his hands and feet and brought him into a room in the prison’s medical unit, according to another lawsuit.
Mr. Mitchell held Mr. Raymond down by his hair, pulled his shirt over his face and slowly poured a large bucket of water over his nose and mouth, simulating drowning, Mr. Raymond said in an interview and in a lawsuit. Then Mr. Mitchell pummeled Mr. Raymond’s face, neck and chest, twisted his genitals and beat them with a baton while another officer held Mr. Raymond’s legs apart, he said.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Raymond, who was released in 2020. “I feel helpless for the people who are in the position that I was in.”
Afterward, Mr. Raymond was locked in solitary confinement and denied medical care for months, the lawsuit said. He sustained permanent bladder damage, and, nearly a decade later, must still urinate through a catheter. Earlier this year, the state settled his lawsuit for $1.2 million.
Mr. Mitchell would be accused of at least two more beatings before he was allowed to retire in 2018, amid disciplinary charges that he had failed to turn in his pistol and had communicated in an unprofessional and profane manner. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The corrections department spokesman, Mr. Mailey, said the agency had investigated Mr. Raymond’s claims and found them to be unsubstantiated. Later, he said, a nurse came forward and said that Mr. Mitchell, who had retired by that time, had assaulted Mr. Raymond. Mr. Mailey said the department had referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office, which had declined to prosecute.
A Times analysis of disciplinary records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that even when guards have been formally accused of extreme abuse, they have rarely faced serious consequences.
On at least 377 occasions from January 2000 to mid-October 2020, officers were accused of punching inmates in the face while they were shackled to a chair, forcing them to perform oral sex, using a wooden paddle to strike them on their bare buttocks, handcuffing them and kicking them in the ribs, stomping on their heads, striking them with batons while ignoring orders to stop, and other offenses.
Just 28 lost their jobs.
Methodology
Reporters analyzed disciplinary records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union through a lawsuit and provided to The New York Times. The records cover closed cases initiated between January 2000 and mid-October 2020. Only misconduct investigations involving captains, sergeants, correctional officers and lieutenants were considered. The records associate each disciplinary case with one or more types of misconduct; The Times focused on those classified as “inmate abuse.” The records also include a field indicating the penalty imposed. The Times identified guards who lost their jobs based on cases where the penalty was termination or dismissal.
To identify the most extreme cases of inmate abuse described in disciplinary records, The Times used an artificial intelligence model to examine the records’ brief incident descriptions, looking for cases in which officers were accused of using “excessive,” “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” or “inappropriate” physical force on inmates. Journalists then reviewed and verified the results.
The Times’s analysis of use-of-force frequency is based on “unusual incident” data published by the Correctional Association of New York, a prison oversight organization. The data is based on reports submitted by New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision staff members. Reports were treated as including staff members’ use of force if they met at least one of the following criteria: They contained at least one incident classified as involving such force, had a report-level use-of-force flag or indicated a staff member’s use of a weapon. (Reports that included multiple incidents classified as use-of-force were counted only once.)
To calculate the annual use-of-force rate per 1,000 inmates, The Times divided the counts above by the average monthly number of incarcerated individuals in custody each year, based on data also obtained by the oversight organization through public records requests. A similar methodology was used to calculate the use-of-force rate per 100 uniformed staff members by facility in 2024.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Jan Ransom is an investigative reporter for The Times focusing on the criminal justice system, law enforcement and incarceration in New York.
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