Authorizes the commissioner of corrections and community supervision to discipline certain employees for acts of serious misconduct

Showing the cosponsors who are on Agora, A to Z. The official record may list more.

• Democratic19

Shown in neutral colors by design; Agora is non-partisan.

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Julia Salazar says this is needed

This bill places final decision-making authority regarding discipline of DOCCS staff for acts of serious misconduct in the hands of the DOCCS Commissioner. Currently, such authority rests with outside arbitrators. Under the existing procedure, DOCCS has rarely been able to terminate a correction officer DOCCS alleges to have used excessive and unjustified physical force against an incarcerated person. That is, even when DOCCS has concluded an employee has violated the law by, for example, using excessive and unlawful force, they almost always fail to be able to terminate such an employee. This is an untenable situation. This bill was first introduced early in 2024. Since that time the neces- sity of enacting the reforms contained in this bill has become even clearer. In December 2024 a group of DOCCS staff members at Marcy Correctional Facility killed Robert Brooks in a vicious beating within an examination room in the prison infirmary, a beating caught without the knowledge of the staff members involved on video. The widely shared video shows multiple officers directly involved in physically attacking Mr. Brooks, who was handcuffed behind his back and who appears at some point in the process to be completely nonresponsive. The video also depicts other staff members, uniformed officers or supervisors as well as civilian medical personnel, standing by, observing the brutal beat- ing, and not intervening to stop the attack or to assist Mr. Brooks. In fact, it appears from the video that none of the DOCCS staff present more than a dozen individuals appeared to think anything out of the ordinary was occurring. That is, they appear to have believed they would never be held accountable for their actions. Several of the officers who appear to have been involved in beating Mr. Brooks were already facing civil legal actions based on allegations of other incidents of excessive force. This incident raised significant concerns as to how it could be that state employees could engage in the conduct shown in the Brooks videos and the incident brought to light the serious failures and inef- fectiveness of the existing employee disciplinary procedures within DOCCS. The need for change in regard to staff discipline in DOCCS is plain and obvious. This bill was drafted in response to an in-depth investigation by the Marshall Project regarding the existing disciplinary system for NY's prison staff. In a series of reports first published in the New York Times in May 2023, a stark picture emerged of a staff disciplinary system that is essentially completely broken and ineffective. The Mars- hall Project found, for example, that over a twelve-year period, DOCCS "tried to fire officers or supervisors the agency accused of physically abusing prisoners or covering up their misconduct in 290 cases. But in only 10% of those cases did the officers get fired." The existing arbi- trator system provides that the union representing an accused officer essentially has veto power over the selection of the arbitrator for the case. As shocking examples of the dysfunction of the existing system, the Marshall Project reported: An officer who broke his baton hitting a prisoner 35 times, even after the man was handcuffed, was not fired. Neither were the guards who beat a prisoner at Attica Correctional Facility so badly he needed 13 staples to close gashes in his scalp. Nor were the officers who battered a mentally ill man, injuring him from face to groin. The man hanged himself the next day. The investigation also revealed numerous instances of significant assaults by staff on incarcerated individuals where DOCCS did not even charge any officers with misconduct. This bill, by eliminating the arbitrator system only in cases of allega- tions of serious misconduct, directly addresses one of the reasons for the extraordinarily low rate of successful disciplinary cases even when DOCCS believes there was serious misconduct. This bill also addresses the so-called a "blue wal

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.