Early in Harriet Jacobs’s memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs receives a new pair of shoes from her grandmother in time for a February snowstorm, only for the mistress of the household to make her take them off. The mistress—jealous of her husband’s lecherous attentions to the slave—then sends the barefoot teenager on a long errand in the snow. In the neatly handwritten term paper I was grading, my student compared this story to something he witnessed on a New York State prison walkway: outdoors, in the snow, a friend stopped by the guards, roughed up, told to strip, shivering, his shoes thrown over the barbed-wire fence.
In Jacobs’s narrative, her master’s sexual predations are the driving force of his relentless efforts to keep her enslaved, but are never made explicit. The essay I was grading suffered from no such Victorian restraint: in a bare sentence, it dealt with the rape of a prisoner from his dormitory by a group of guards. If his language was detached, almost clinical, it was perhaps because my student understood that both his position as an inmate in a New York State Correctional facility and the brutality of the facts might make it hard for his audience to believe him. There was no reason to doubt his account, and I didn’t, but the symmetry with the incidents in Jacobs’ narrative and the barbarity of his story made it difficult to assimilate. His essay sat, disturbing and grotesque, on top of a long semester teaching in one of New York State’s medium security correctional facilities.
A few weeks after I graded this essay, in the dead week between Christmas and the new year, New York State released body-camera footage from Marcy Correctional Facility. The video shows a group of white prison guards carrying a shackled black inmate into a medical examination room, where they attempt to shove what looks like gauze into his mouth, and then beat him. The officers are burly, American flags on the shoulders of their uniforms. Robert Brooks, the inmate, is slight and already limp, but the guards continue punching and kicking him. Some have put on blue medical gloves to administer the beating. Eventually, they lift Brooks’s bloodied frame by the collar and drag him to the corner of the room. Brooks died the following day.
A 2023 investigation by the Marshall Project and the New York Times found that New York State prison guards routinely beat—and in three cases killed—prisoners, without facing any disciplinary action. When the Department of Corrections did try to fire abusive guards, it succeeded only 10 percent of the time, due to an arbitration system that gives the prison union effective veto power in choosing the arbitrator. If you factor in how often guards cover up for each other in their reports, and the reprisals inmates face for reporting abuse, New York prison guards operate with almost complete impunity. But two elements took the Robert Brooks incident beyond prison routine: the officers were careless enough to kill the inmate, and their body cameras were running.
The story made national news, and at the end of January, New York State Senator Julia Salazar introduced three bills to introduce accountability for abusive guards. Then in mid-February, two weeks into the new semester, 14,000 guards in forty-one of the state’s forty-two prisons walked off their jobs, demanding increased staffing and a repeal of the HALT Act, a bill passed in 2021 that limits the uses and length of solitary confinement. During the strike, the prisons were closed to all outsiders, and 4,500 members of the National Guard were brought in to keep them running on an emergency footing. The striking guards contended that solitary confinement allowed them to isolate troublemakers—essential, they argued, during a crisis of short-staffing—and kept the rest of the prison safe. They pointed to a report by the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association showing a 50 percent increase in officer assaults since 2020, and to a February memo from the Department of Corrections stating that “70% of our original staffing model is the new 100%.”
Critics noted the timing of the strikes—just as accountability was coming into view as a real possibility—and how quickly the national coverage shifted from the savage beatings of prisoners to the long hours for guards.
“Things have never been so bad”—on this, at least, prisoners and guards in the prison where I teach agree. The complaints are double: this is the worst prison they’ve ever worked or been incarcerated in, and conditions within this medium-security prison have never been so bad. The guards complain of long hours—I usually encounter them in the middle of twelve-hour shifts, but occasionally also sixteen- and even twenty-four-hour emergency shifts—and of deteriorating discipline and control from short-staffing. My students complain about reduced programming, danger from both fellow prisoners and guards, a prison rendered more violent and unpredictable than ever. Both groups pinpoint an influx of drugs—and the familiar sight of inmates lying comatose from laced variants of fentanyl—as a central cause of violence. My students claim that this amount of drugs couldn’t be entering the building without the participation or knowledge of guards: “There’s only so much you can fit up your ass.”
As a regular visitor, this influx isn’t hard to imagine, for while the process of tracking our identity and movement is thorough—teachers are escorted from the waiting area to the school by a guard, and the school is monitored at all times by another guard—the screening is not. Except for cell phones, which are strictly forbidden, as we’re reminded by multiple all-caps signs, nobody seems to care what we bring into the prison. We do not pass through a metal detector and are only usually scanned with a handheld detector. Book bags must be transparent, but guards rarely check their contents; in many cases it would be easier to bring a gun or drugs inside a New York State prison than into a concert in the city. The attitude of the guards implies that this laxity is partly because the shabby academics who come in to teach are beneath suspicion, but it also suggests a widespread breakdown of security standards and discipline. Why check the teachers when any inmate in the prison can already obtain more than enough laced drugs for an overdose?
Our most frequent escort inside the prison—potbellied, closely cropped—gives off a slightly renegade, slovenly attitude even in uniform. We are fresh ears for old complaints: he hasn’t been home in four days, in part by design (he lives three hours away), and in part because he’s had to work two twenty-four-hour shifts this week. He limps slightly as he tells us about the urgent need for new corrections officers, though he still tells potential recruits to stay away from his profession of almost thirty years. His dissuasion is largely unnecessary. Not many people under 30 are willing to go sixteen hours without their phones, and that’s before you get to the job itself—the tedium, claustrophobia, moral ambiguity.
These walks—our longest one-on-one time with guards, and the only time we encounter members of the wider prison population—reveal their ambivalence toward us teachers: we’re soft-hearted academics with too much sympathy for the prisoners, but also outsiders who must be made aware of the guards’ plight and the reality of life within prison. Occasionally, we’ll get a lurid tale of prisoner misconduct; once, at the end of the semester, a guard chastised me for returning a student’s greeting with too much enthusiasm. “Yeah, let’s be nice to the rapists and murderers!” (This generalization is fairly common and certainly helpful to the prison guard’s imaginary, but it is categorically false in a medium-security prison.) But Khalil, my favorite guard, often greets passing prisoners by name, and recounts the latest degradations of the prison with mournful clarity. “When a prison gets this bad, it’s hard to bring it back.”
Khalil understands that despite the inherent antagonism, prisoners and guards have a shared stake in a well-run prison. After all, they both spend most of their waking lives together in it. But it is the prisoners who remain locked in their dormitories when there aren’t enough guards to man the walkways, the mosque, yard, gym, or school; and they are the easy, inevitable target of low morale, instability, rage. If it is true, as numerous students have told me, that whole dorms have now essentially been turned over to gang rule, it is in large part because there are often so few guards on duty, and both officers and prisoners know that it will take ten or more minutes for reinforcements to arrive should an officer need them.
But only the guards can use violence and neglect to their advantage. Every incident of ill-discipline, from guard and prisoner alike, can be held up as evidence of short-staffing and used as a bargaining chip for better pay and more power. The guards can also use prisoners against each other. According to students, some guards now routinely threaten to send inmates “up the hill,” where they drop them off at the most notorious gang-run dorm and return an hour or two later to take the beaten or raped prisoner back to his own dorm. Guards also threaten permanent transfer up the hill, and the threat of violence is pervasive. In another part of the prison, there is a staircase, dark and far from guard stations, tightly winding so you can’t see more than a few feet ahead, where the walls are stained with blood.
These conditions help explain some of my students’ ambivalence towards the HALT Act. While they recognize the cruelty of solitary, they are far more likely to suffer abuse from someone who might otherwise be in solitary than they are to end up there themselves—you don’t take college classes in prison without a record of good behavior. But the guards also use solitary to isolate anyone they see as a threat. One of the most disturbing details of the Marshall Project’s reports on the lack of accountability in New York State prisons is how often solitary is used on victims of correctional abuse: “A man at Sullivan Correctional Facility said guards beat his head against the floor and smashed his face with handcuffs. At Sing Sing Correctional Facility, officers fractured a man’s eye socket. In both cases, corrections employees charged the men with assault and sent them to solitary.” At Fishkill Correctional Facility, during a visit to a dental clinic, guards paralyzed an inmate by kneeling on his neck, excluded the perpetrator from their falsified report, and sent the victim to solitary. Isolating victims who have been beaten by guards delays knowledge of the incident spreading in the prison and serves as a warning to others. In this light, it’s understandable why overturning the HALT Act was as central to the striking guards’ demands as increased staffing and better wages: solitary is an essential tool of their arbitrary power and impunity.
Something subsides when the escort leaves us at the entrance to the school. A latent hostility. Unadorned walls and the exposed metal of bars, pipes, and desks make the classrooms resound unpleasantly. At the back of our room, whose only cushioned chair is wrapped in multiple layers of tape and reserved for the teacher, there is a crude rectangular hole in the wall to let a pipe into the next classroom. If a student in the next classroom scrapes their metal desk along the floor, they drown out whoever’s speaking in ours. Otherwise, save for the metal lattice on the windows, this could be an underfunded public school. Those small, grated windows are eye level with the courtyard outside, where inmates push hand mowers in straight lines as a guard watches on. When students call prison a plantation, this is what they mean—menial labor and a paycheck of $30 every two weeks.
I have had plenty of time to take stock of our classroom because students are always late—even when we are escorted fifteen minutes late, the students invariably arrive later still. This is because the walkways only open right when class is supposed to start, and guards often fail to hear the announcement on the walkie-talkie, or an incident in the mess-halls shuts the walkway down. At the maximum-security prison where I used to teach, we were once held half an hour after class to wait for tear gas to clear from a corridor. At this one, students have been late because an inmate attacked someone with a frying pan in the mess hall, because a prisoner overdosed on the walkway, and because students were mistakenly told the school was closed. One evening, we passed a group of guards on the walkway with their weapons drawn, shackled prisoners in tow.
But once we are all finally in the classroom, some of the privations particular to prison life are salutary: no cell phones or laptops, and nobody has anywhere better to be. Most of the students had to complete their GED behind bars before coming to this class, and they’re not only motivated but unembarrassed by the massive gaps in their educations. They will bring discussion to a standstill until they understand a phrase in Shakespeare even after the rest of the class has moved on, and often start class with unresolved disputes that have carried them through the week. It’s an almost ideal intellectual atmosphere.
During a class on Plato’s Republic, I began to explain what the Athenians understood by paideia, a word that encompassed not just formal education but the culture and the prevailing way of life, when one of my students interrupted me. “Look. We all come from the same neighborhoods. We’re all in here for the same thing. We all had that friend or uncle with the flashy car, who first got us into the business. We know what paideia means, even though we didn’t know the word.”
This student—a man in his fifties who has been imprisoned for his daughter’s whole childhood, and who is clearly a well-respected figure outside the classroom, judging by the way his classmates greet him—often takes it upon himself to explain the prison to me. Most of the class, he tells me, are in for drug charges. They started selling as teenagers and ended up like the drones in Plato’s oligarchies and democracies, with the same vices as those at the summit: an obsession with money, an inability to place their long-term goals above short-term impulse. Unlike those at the top who go into finance or politics, though, he and his classmates had no socially sanctioned outlet for their vices. They were not evil, but superfluous.
My whole class was sympathetic to Plato’s focus on the stories, role models, and sounds that are absorbed earlier and more completely than anything in our subsequent formal educations. But they were highly critical of Plato’s elitism—they seemed satisfied to learn that the most revered anti-democrat in history had supported the violent overthrow of Athenian democracy by a group of thirty oligarchs. It confirmed their suspicions, for they understood and resented that Plato’s model of education was not intended for them. Unlike students from more illustrious institutions, whose critiques are usually softened by the assumption that there is gold spun into their souls and futures, these students had no trouble recognizing Plato as a mystical reactionary.
The view from the bottom of society is often clearer than the one from its summit—and not only because so much of what passes for elite education is indoctrination and trained myopia. For the most part, my students have no illusions that they live in a democracy or that the laws of the land correspond to any ideal of justice. They understand prison not as the exception to an otherwise free society, but as the bedrock of oligarchy. Their cynicism is often crude, but it is usually aimed in the right direction: upwards.
During the six weeks of February and March that prisons were closed to visitors, the news was scarce, but definite enough to confirm our fears. Nine prisoners died across the system during the strikes—one reportedly was beaten to death, two more died when they didn’t receive timely medical treatment, and another hanged himself. Many more prisoners did not receive hot meals or access to showers, let alone any programming.
When we finally returned to the classroom, I expected to find traces of the strike everywhere, evidence of catastrophe. Instead, we found jocular, emboldened guards—or was that my imagination? The members of the National Guard, in their camouflage uniforms, moving with the purposeful briskness of their trade, added to the sense of renewed elan. And the students were enthusiastic to be back. Most had done their readings and were ready to plow right back into the conversation that had been cut short more than a month before. My students didn’t volunteer much about the intervening six weeks, except that they had been grateful for all the reading. Time in prison is always slow, counting down, and for the prisoners, the strike was primarily experienced as an excruciating further slowdown.
There has been no hurry to resume programming after the end of the strikes. Even as staffing has returned close to pre-strike levels, our school is open on fewer days, and other programs remain closed. The contradictions aren’t lost on my students: “They say they want to rehabilitate you, and then take away anything that could help you.” The student telling me this is 76, has been in prison for decades, and continues to take classes years after he graduated: “The higher-ups in Albany see the statistics and are all in favor of the programming. But it’s different with the boots on the ground, who would rather shut everything down so we spend twenty-three hours in our dormitories, and an hour a day in the yard. Would make their lives easier.” It would also come closer to some guards’ idea of fairness: why are the inmates getting a free education while those who did nothing wrong work long hours at a thankless job? This resentment is always palpable, and as understandable as it is misdirected. Few become prison guards out of vocation.
As we once again sign in without being scanned or searched, it is hard to shake the feeling that the striking guards have been victorious, in part by displacing the central crisis: the deal between New York State and the striking guards pauses the limits on solitary confinement in the HALT Act for ninety days, allows prisons to be partially closed when staffing drops below 70 percent, increases pay for overtime, promises more technology to screen prisoner mail for drugs, and rescinds the memorandum that made 70 percent staffing the new 100.
Shorter hours and a lift on the cell phone ban might attract more recruits, but in the short term, the strike—and the firing of the two thousand officers who refused the deal—has only increased the shortfall, to such an extent that New York is releasing some prisoners early. No matter how euphemistically ads on the A train describe upstate careers in the Department of Corrections, prison guard will always be an unattractive job on the margins of society and the labor movement. At best, as Hill wrote, they are “pawns of a dehumanizing institution that leaves them powerless to affect meaningful change,” and at worst, they are brutal enforcers of the status quo, who see prisoners rather than management as their primary foe.
When our semester ended in early June, the prison was running smoother. The strikes successfully refocused the crisis on understaffing, without touching the guards’ arbitrary power. The most depressing achievement of the strikes seemed to be that Salazar’s bill on punishing abuse remained stalled in the New York Assembly—a tactic with precedent, as Rebecca Hill documented in her study of New York prison-guard unions: when the Department of Corrections is under scrutiny, strikes turn the debate from accountability to understaffing.
But on June 16, the final day of the New York State legislative session before the summer recess, a modified version of Salazar’s bill finally passed. It is narrower, without parole or sentencing reform, and as such, “leaves every single one of the ~32,300 imprisoned New Yorkers behind in the very system that murdered Robert Brooks and countless others,” as the disappointed executive director of the Release Aging People from Prison campaign wrote. Or, as my 76-year-old student occasionally says with a wry shake of his ponytail, he who would have benefited not only from the Elder Parole Act but also from the Earned Time Act for all his years in school, “I’ll die in here. No way they’d let me out with everything I’ve seen.”
Still, the bill is a necessary counterpoint to the strike agreement. Contrary to the logic of the strike’s demands, increasing the number of guards will only improve conditions if their power is simultaneously weakened. The state prisons need guards working shorter, more humane shifts, under conditions of greater scrutiny and accountability. And the new bill provides some: prisons will have to install security camera coverage throughout the whole prison. (Currently, guards know where the dead spots in coverage are, and use them.) Any footage involving corrections officers and the death of an inmate now must be released to the Attorney General’s office within 72 hours. And the law requires prisons to notify the next of kin and publish a public notice of deaths, increases the autopsy requirements, and extends the statute of limitations to three years from the date of release.
It’s enough to make the most brutal forms of abuse harder to pull off with impunity, though nothing to change the basic calculus for my students: “I would do anything not to come back here. It’s become the guiding principle of life.”
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