By Chris Gelardi at New York Focus
March 29, 2025
Over the past three months, New York Focus has reported extensively on the New York state
prison system’s descent into tumult. An incarcerated man’s caught-on-video killing at the hands
of corrections officers in December led to nationwide outrage and calls for reform. Guards
responded by launching a three-week wildcat strike, which only ended after 2,000 officers lost
their jobs and half a dozen allegedly beat another incarcerated person to death.
Similar turmoil has plagued other areas of New York’s carceral system. At New York City’s
Rikers Island jails, four incarcerated people have died over the span of a month. The notorious
complex is supposed to close in two years, but that’s unlikely to happen: Stubbornly high jail
populations, delayed construction, and a “missing” sense of urgency have likely delayed closure
by years, a city-appointed commission reported last week.
People are dying. Who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on these facilities?
The answer is complex: A patchwork of bodies are responsible for watchdogging New York’s
state prisons and local jails. The most powerful of those bodies, however — the State
Commission of Correction, or SCOC — has been missing in action when it comes to Rikers and
state prison oversight.
SCOC’s work can more accurately be described as oversight triage than robust watchdogging. Its
mandate involves keeping tabs on conditions in all of New York’s 42 state prisons, 58 local jail
systems, and countless police lockups, but with an annual budget of less than $4 million, it can
only do so much. Since staffing cuts in the 1990s, it has shirked most of its state prison oversight
work to focus on county jails, conducting annual inspections that often identify persistent issues,
like housing people in the wrong dorms or violating solitary confinement laws.
“The State Commission of Correction looks really good on paper, but it doesn’t do most of the
—Michele Deitch
things that it says it does.”
Yet SCOC rarely cracks down on those violations. As New York Focus has reported, it scolds
county jails, but almost never levies fines or penalties, even though it has the power to do so. It
also shields facilities from public scrutiny: SCOC doesn’t voluntarily release its inspection
reports, and only the first few minutes of its monthly meetings are made public.
“The State Commission of Correction looks really good on paper, but it doesn’t do most of the
things that it says it does,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the
University of Texas at Austin, told New York Focus in 2023.
Some elected officials want to do something about that. On Tuesday, legislators and advocates
held a rally at the state capitol demanding the passage of SCOC reform legislation.
A bill sponsored by Emily Gallagher in the state Assembly and Julia Salazar in the Senate aims
to increase SCOC’s sense of urgency by diversifying the ranks of those who run it. Governors are
responsible for appointing the agency’s three commissioners, and they’ve traditionally tapped
former law enforcement officials. The bill would expand the number of commissioners to nine
and distribute appointments among the governor, the legislature, and a non-government state
prison oversight body. And it would mandate that those commissioners come from a diversity of
backgrounds, including public health, behavioral health, and criminal defense. Sixty advocacy
organizations have signed onto a letter in support of the legislation.
Officials are also working to pass SCOC reform in the state budget, which is due next week. In
her executive budget proposal, Governor Kathy Hochul sought to push SCOC to fulfill more of its
mandate by introducing legislation that would compel commission staff to conduct yearly
inspections of every county jail, state prison, and youth detention facility. She also proposed
adding around $800,000 to SCOC’s budget compared to last year.
The state legislature doubled down, raising Hochul by $2.5 million on SCOC in its budget
proposals. Both legislative chambers also signed onto Hochul’s yearly inspection proposal — and
added clauses that would require SCOC to field complaints directly from incarcerated people.
“At a time when heightened jail and prison oversight is urgently needed, the Commission has
completely fallen flat while the death tolls soar,” Yonah Zeitz, advocacy director of the Katal
Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, said in a statement. “The New York legislature must take
swift action now to save lives. No family should have to go through this. No more deaths.”