Nearly a year ago, corrections officers throughout New York walked off the job in a wildcat strike, sending dozens of state prisons into chaos.
The officers said they were protesting severe staffing shortages, excessive mandatory overtime and dangerous conditions, and they only returned to work after Gov. Kathy Hochul activated roughly 6,000 National Guard troops, and a State Supreme Court judge ordered the unauthorized strike to end.
State officials, negotiating with the corrections officers’ union, agreed to a key officer demand: To meet with inmates in person, all visitors at state prisons would have to pass through full-body security scanners, which are supposed to better screen for contraband.
In 2025, prison K-9 units made 218 visitor arrests related to contraband, according to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Canine units are often called in when body scans reveal possible contraband, according to visitors and nonprofit groups that work with prisoners.
But the upgraded security has come with consequences. Hundreds of visitors, a vast majority of them women, say they have been turned away — and in some cases suspended from visiting indefinitely — for carrying contraband, according to state legislators, prison reform groups, civil rights lawyers and other advocates.
For many of these women, the abnormalities identified by their scans corresponded with menstrual products they said they were wearing, or with piercings or surgeries they said had left metal inside or on their bodies.
Destiny Green, a 29-year-old Air Force engineer who was turned away when she tried to visit her fiancé last June, said she felt “degraded” and “humiliated” when she was forced to remove her sanitary products. “I had to just take the treatment because I was in their yard,” she said.
In a statement, Nicole March, a Corrections Department spokeswoman, defended the agency’s security policies. The body scanner procedures, she said, “do not discriminate on the basis of gender.” She noted that between March and December of last year, the department turned away 2,557 of 142,491 visitors because of screening problems — less than 2 percent.
State legislators and advocates, however, say the denials have had an outsize effect on the families now wading through an appeals process to restore their visitation rights.
Frequent visits help build a support system for inmates and are one of the most important factors in their rehabilitation, experts say. A 2011 study showed that inmates who were visited behind bars had a 13 percent lower risk of recidivism.
And in many cases, advocates and lawmakers say, the Corrections Department is not following its own policies.
The New York Times spoke to 14 women who said they were not carrying contraband and yet had been denied in-person visits after failing body-scanner tests. All but two of them had their visitation rights suspended due to contraband concerns.
If visitors fail a body scan and guards are unable to determine clearly whether they are carrying contraband, they are entitled to a no-contact visit, in which they can talk to inmates behind a transparent barrier. But only two women out of the 14 said they were offered such visits. The Corrections Department declined to comment on why those visitors had been denied entry.
State Senator Julia Salazar, the chair of the Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee, said her office had received over 50 calls about denied visits between May and November. Afterward, Ms. Salazar’s officer grew so inundated with prison complaints, about the scanners and other issues, that it started referring callers to their local lawmakers.
“Some D.O.C.C.S. facilities are using the body scanners and the body scanner protocol as a pretense to limit visits from family and loved ones to incarcerated individuals, often without a real justification,” Ms. Salazar said, suggesting that the agency struggled to maintain both security and inmate rights.
“It’s clearly a violation of D.O.C.C.S.’s own regulations,” she added of the denials.
Megan Porter, a staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview that the denials and suspensions were part of a broader “lack of transparency” in the state’s prison system and could be meant “to obscure what is going on inside the facilities from folks on the outside.”
The problems women have experienced with prison scanners were reported earlier by New York Focus and The New York Amsterdam News.
New York first installed scanners in a handful of state prisons in December 2023, through a $13 million contract with Tek84, a California-based manufacturer.
The scanners are similar to those in many U.S. airports, but airport scanners utilize a computerized algorithm trained to identify anomalies like contraband. The prison scanners in New York do not use an algorithm, and interpreting the scans is left to the discretion of the intake officers and their supervisors, according to prison documents. Representatives of Tek84 did not respond to questions about its training procedures.
All scans can be difficult to read, and even trained professionals in hospitals, which use similar scanning technology, often ask for second opinions, said James Donnelly, a former radiologist from Massachusetts who has reviewed body scans for a local law enforcement agency in the state.
“It’s a lose-lose situation,” he said. “The biggest loss is anyone who loses their ability to visit their loved ones in prison. But the second loss is the credibility of the person who has to make the snap decision reading the scan.”
After the contentious strike of roughly 10,000 corrections officers who disobeyed their own union, body scanners were installed in 41 prisons across New York.
The insubordination began around the time that 10 officers were criminally charged, six with murder, in the fatal beating of Robert L. Brooks, an inmate at the Marcy Correctional Facility in central New York. Mr. Brooks, 43, was handcuffed and shackled, and officers’ body-worn cameras captured his murder. Seven officers pleaded guilty, two were acquitted and one was found guilty of murder.
The state fired more than 2,000 insubordinate officers. But the state also made concessions that included installing more scanners and agreeing to re-evaluate restrictions on the use of solitary confinement.
Some families of prisoners and inmate advocates question whether the visitation denials are retaliatory or a pretense to limit visibility into a system marred by violence. The prisons continue to struggle, with National Guard officers still in place because of vacancies. The state says the cost of staffing the guardsmen will swell to over $1 billion this year.
“They have turned technology meant for safety — body scanners — into weapons of intimidation and retaliation,” said Lauren Courtney, whose visiting privileges were suspended last February. “I was innocent, I followed every rule and I was still treated like a criminal.”
Ms. March said that “the suggestion that our practices are being used to discourage visits” was “not accurate.”
Advocates for inmates are trying to assure families that they will resolve the issue. “People are really astonished that they’re doing this,” said Jose Saldana, the director of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign and a former inmate. “They tell us, ‘You’ve got to stop them.’ We just try to give hope to the families: ‘Don’t live in despair. We can fix this.’”
‘Like a Mental Breakdown’
The 14 women interviewed by The Times described going months without seeing their loved ones, placing strains on already difficult relationships.
Last Easter, Samantha Works arrived at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York to spend time with her husband, something she did every week.
She had never had issues with a prison scanner before. But that day, it flagged something potentially problematic. She was told to leave.
Ms. Works, a 41-year-old registered nurse practitioner, said she was wearing a tampon and a menstrual pad, which she believed had set off the scanner. Crying, she asked another officer if she could be frisked or have a no-contact visit with her husband. The officer refused both requests, so Ms. Works left.
A few days later, the Corrections Department suspended Ms. Works’s visitation rights indefinitely, saying she had tried to smuggle contraband into Mohawk, according to prison documents.
Ms. Works, who has no criminal record, described the suspension as “a defamation of character.”
The Corrections Department says that it has a robust appeals process for addressing mistakes by the scanners. But the agency has often taken months to resolve appeals and has dropped or prolonged cases on a seemingly arbitrary basis, according to visitors, their lawyers and a review of prison documents.
After months of navigating the appeals process — during which the Corrections Department refused to provide her with a copy of her scan — Ms. Works decided it was easier to wait for the release of her husband, who had been convicted of driving while impaired twice within 10 years.
The couple saw each other for the first time in nine months after he was released from prison on Jan. 14.
“D.O.C.C.S. pushes this ideology that it’s all about rehabilitating the individual,” Ms. Works said. “But they’re doing things like taking away their support, taking away their ability to see their family.”
A lack of regular visits can also place strains on inmates’ mental and physical health.
In October, Marie Denny and her family drove five hours from their home outside Syracuse to visit one of her sons at the Clinton Correctional Facility. Ms. Denny, a 66-year-old case worker, carried a doctor’s note describing her severe kidney stones, which she said had forced her to wear an incontinence pad.
Despite the note, she was turned away after the scanner picked up an abnormality; only Ms. Denny’s other son, who had traveled with her that day, was allowed to enter the prison.
Ms. Denny was then suspended for 90 days, and in the aftermath, her imprisoned son’s health deteriorated rapidly.
“He suffers from depression anyway, but it’s gotten worse,” said Ms. Denny, whose son was imprisoned for sexual abuse. “After I got the certified suspension letter he started having heart palpitations so bad, and his blood pressure went so high, they brought him to the hospital.”
Belinda Fisher, 39, an employee with the Administration for Children’s Services in New York City, had her visiting privileges suspended after trying to see her husband at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in September 2024.
Her husband, Shatell Spurgeon, who was released in June 2025 after a 22-year sentence for manslaughter and other crimes, said that not seeing Ms. Fisher had threatened to splinter their relationship.
“It was like a mental breakdown,” Mr. Spurgeon, 45, said. “It’s like losing everything you have when you have someone supporting you, seeing you every week, and that’s just taken from you for no reason.”
After Mr. Spurgeon was released, Ms. Fisher sued the state for a copy of her body scan. A judge ruled in her favor in October.
The scan, obtained by The Times, shows a small sliver in her sternum, an area where contraband would not be typically lodged. Ms. Fisher said a benign tumor had produced the abnormality.
Following complaints about visitors being turned away, the department updated its policies in November to require visitors who fail an initial test to be scanned again from a different angle, according to agency documents.
Yet the complaints have continued.
Two days after the policy revision, Monique Fareira arrived at the Clinton Correctional Facility to visit her brother. After scanning Ms. Fareira three times, officers told her they suspected her of carrying contraband.
Out of desperation, she showed the officers the packaging of a sanitary product she said she was using because of her uterine fibroids. They still turned her away, and Ms. Fareira later received a suspension letter, according to her lawyer, Callen Lowell.
“No one else should have to go through this,” Ms. Fareira, 42, said. “You have mothers who can’t see their sons, and daughters with brothers who are incarcerated, and you are telling me because of something that happens to women every month they are not allowed to see their families?”
The post When Prison Body Scanners Mistake Tampons and Piercings for Contraband appeared first on New York Times.
