In response to crises inside New York State’s prisons, Gov. Kathy Hochul said this winter that swift action in Albany would hold corrections officers accountable and keep inmates safer.
In the legislative session that ended Wednesday, the governor directed $400 million to increase camera coverage in prisons. She replaced the head of the prison where an inmate had been savagely beaten to death and ordered reviews of “safety gaps” in several lockups and assessments of their operating cultures.
But she has not committed to signing a package of bills meant to increase prison oversight that originated with reform-minded lawmakers. Criminal justice advocates and some legislators were also left disappointed that she has not championed measures that would increase the chances for inmates to gain early release and make it easier to discipline officers.
They accuse Ms. Hochul of prioritizing expedient and incremental policies to court moderate voters as she gears up for re-election next year.
“As public servants, we have to lead with a great deal of courage and moral clarity,” Emily Gallagher, a Democratic assemblywoman who represents parts of North Brooklyn, said of the governor.
“There is a tension between good policy that protects all residents of New York State,” added Ms. Gallagher, who has been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and supported the prison bills. “And the fear of this right-wing political moment that we’re in.”
Inmates have complained for years about poor treatment and conditions in New York’s prisons. In December, days before legislators returned to work in Albany, footage surfaced of corrections officers fatally beating a handcuffed prisoner, Robert Brooks, at Marcy Correctional Facility near Utica.
The graphic video infuriated Ms. Hochul. She wanted the 13 corrections officers and nurse involved fired and said she was resolved to improve the prison and to holding everyone “fully accountable.”
“I’m willing to make the investments,” Ms. Hochul said after visiting Marcy. “I just need the people to understand that this could also be a place we could turn a tragedy into something that is more positive.”
The state’s $254 billion budget, finalized last month, was the venue where Ms. Hochul accomplished her broad policy goals this year. She focused on cutting taxes for middle-class New Yorkers and sending residents rebate checks. Her other priorities were altering rules for how evidence is shared with defense lawyers before trials and making it easier to remove people in psychiatric crisis from public spaces to be evaluated for treatment.
Those measures were backed strongly by prosecutors and law enforcement leaders. They dovetailed with a concern from Ms. Hochul that New Yorkers’ sense of safety could influence her re-election chances.
The prisons were not far from Ms. Hochul’s mind as well. Over the past decade, the number of state corrections officers has dropped by 42 percent, to about 11,000. To address this staffing shortage, Ms. Hochul placed in the budget a measure allowing corrections officers to be hired from out of state and lowering the minimum age to 18 from 21.
But discussions about reducing more sentences for good behavior went nowhere. Thomas Gant, a community organizer at the Center for Community Alternatives, said that Ms. Hochul’s budget priorities showed how politics were overtaking good policy.
Even though attempts to shorten sentences for good behavior have “extensive support and would address the crisis in New York’s prisons, the governor’s eyes were on her Republican challengers,” he said.
Lawmakers and state officials note that the state prison population has dropped to about 31,000 in the past decade from about 52,000. In 2024, Ms. Hochul ordered the closure of two state prisons. During the recent budget talks, she initially asked for the power to close five more but later scaled that back to three.
In an interview, Daniel F. Martuscello III, commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, said he would be interested in finding ways to reduce the prison population further.
Nearly three-quarters of the remaining inmates have been convicted of violent felonies, and the Corrections Department’s officers are not distributed evenly among the state’s prisons.
The work force is deeply disgruntled, and an increase of assaults against officers has made them feel unsafe. Rolling wildcat strikes began in mid-February just before 10 corrections officers were charged in connection with Mr. Brooks’s death. The work stoppage led Ms. Hochul to activate 7,000 National Guard members, some of whom are still working in the prisons.
Ms. Hochul applauded the indictments of the 10 officers and took a tough line on striking guards, firing more than 2,000 for refusing to work. During the strike, which featured regular protests by guards at the State Capitol, another prisoner, Messiah Nantwi, was killed. That led to the indictments of two officers on charges of second-degree murder. So far two of the officers involved in the killing of Mr. Brooks have pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced sentences, while the eight others have declined plea offers.
Mr. Martuscello said the system was still recovering from the strike. Programming in many facilities has not returned, and Mr. Martuscello said that state officials had to make the prisons safer for guards and inmates alike.
“The strike is over. The crisis is not,” he said. “We will build back stronger and better to make sure we restore those programs that are so vital to the success of incarcerated people.”
Democrats, who hold huge majorities in both the State Senate and Assembly, were incensed by the deaths and the impunity of the corrections officers seen in the videos of Mr. Brooks’s killing. They held hours of hearings about prison conditions and heard emotional testimony from Mr. Brooks’s father.
And on June 12, they passed their package of prison reforms. But, with Ms. Hochul’s support in mind, proposals to change sentencing laws and make it easier to punish guards were excluded. The governor will now review the bills and decide whether to sign, tweak or veto them.
“We have a lot more work to do, and we cannot let our momentum slow,” said Senator Julia Salazar, one of the sponsors.
Aware of frustration, Erik M. Dilan, an assemblyman and sponsor of the package, pleaded for people to take a longer view, noting that it took nearly a decade to pass a bill giving terminally ill New Yorkers the ability to end their life.
We “put a package together that we think has the chance,” he said, adding that there was no guarantee even this package would become law and allow Democrats to “incrementally make change.”
Included in the bills are requirements that prisons have 24/7 camera coverage everywhere except inside toilet stalls, showers and prison cells. If signed, the state would have to study prison fatalities, notify families of the deceased faster and disclose footage of deaths to investigators.
The bills would also make it easier for the state attorney general to investigate such killings and they would expand and diversify the State Commission of Correction, an oversight and regulatory body.
Observing all this from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Bernard Grucza was demoralized. He is serving 25 years for killing the assistant manager of a Toys “R” Us outside Buffalo, and while incarcerated has earned a master’s degree from the Union Theological Seminary.
He now helps run the master’s program at Sing Sing, and in an email described how classes had been cut back or canceled. Guard shortages remain a problem, he wrote, and inmates spend 22 hours a day in their cells. “No solution on the horizon,” he wrote.
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
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