Two murders and a strike by correction officers inside New York State prisons have exposed a system at its breaking point. Could a major uprising be next? Plus:

Jennifer Gonnerman 
A staff writer covering the prison system.

For decades, people who were incarcerated in New York State’s prisons have recounted tales of brutality at the hands of correction officers that they either witnessed or experienced themselves. But rarely did these stories result in any change. Prisons are a closed world, and it was their word against the officers’. Who would believe them? And then, last December, a group of guards killed a man named Robert Brooks in a state prison near Utica—punching him, shoving a rag into his mouth, hitting him with his own shoe, and stomping on his groin. Unbeknownst to the officers, they had inadvertently videotaped their actions on their own body-worn cameras.

A trial begins today for three of the officers involved. For a piece in this week’s issue, I report on the fallout from Brooks’s killing, as well as on another explosive event from the past year that has exposed the deep dysfunction in New York State’s prisons. In February, the state’s prison guards walked off the job at nearly all of New York’s correctional facilities. They claimed the prisons had become more dangerous and that they were being forced to work extreme amounts of overtime. It was the first strike by the officers in almost fifty years, and even now, seven months later, state prison operations have not returned to the way they were before the strike.

I started writing about New York’s prisons in the late nineteen-nineties, and I still remember the first time I stepped inside one: walking through Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, in 1997. In the decades that followed, I visited many of the state’s prisons for my reporting. But the events of the past year have illuminated the inner workings of this closed and enigmatic world in new and unexpected ways—allowing the public an unprecedented look into this broken system.

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“We’re being deployed because of the protests about us being deployed.”

Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson

P.S. Heavy snow has trapped hundreds of people on Mount Everest. It’s always risky to climb mountains, and extended time spent so high is a real test of human limits. 🏔️

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.