[CW: This article discusses physical violence, suicide and death.]
On Dec. 9, 2024, white corrections officers (COs) at Marcy Correctional Facility beat to death Robert Brooks, a 43-year-old Black man.
Brooks’ killing was captured on guards’ body cams, which had been powered on but not activated; they did not know the cameras were recording. While Brooks was handcuffed, officers punched him in the face, stomped on his genitals, picked him up by his neck and dropped him and pinned him against a wall so that he could not breath. This final move appears to have been what made Brooks’ cause of death “asphyxia due to compression of the neck.” More than a dozen people participated in or watched Brooks being murdered, including multiple nurses, whom officers blocked from entering the room. No one intervened. At least one nurse was smiling.
Nurses entered after 10 minutes. Eight minutes later, Brooks was declared dead.
On Dec. 21, 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III to fire 14 individuals involved in the killing. “We have no tolerance for individuals who cross the line, break the law and engage in unnecessary violence or targeted abuse,” Hochul wrote in a statement announcing the firings.
Multiple of the officers who killed Brooks were part of a “beat-up squad,” officially a “security squad team,” that operated at Marcy for years. State officials as high up as Attorney General Letitia James knew of the squad—her office represented guards in an abuse lawsuit. In 2022, prisoners William Alvarez and Adam Bauer filed separate lawsuits alleging severe assaults by Marcy officers, at least three of whom—Sergeant Glenn Trombly and officers Anthony Farina and Nicholas Anzalone—contributed to killing Brooks. In an interview with Assistant Attorney General Matthew Gallagher, Alvarez brought up the beat-up squad and named Trombly and Farina as leaders.
In May and August 2025, five guards involved in killing Brooks—including Farina and Anzalone—pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In October, another guard was convicted of murder. Two more were acquitted.
Prisoner abuse, especially by beat-up squads, is widespread in New York. At Fishkill Correctional in Beacon—15 miles from Vassar College—21-year-old Benjamin Van Zandt committed suicide after witnessing the Fishkill beat-up squad severely assault another incarcerated person. According to his psychologist’s notes, Van Zandt, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and severe psychotic depression, feared officers might beat him to death and said he preferred to kill himself. In 2015, the Fishkill beat-up squad beat Samuel Harrell to death, a 30-year-old Black man with bipolar disorder. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to file charges, citing insufficient evidence.
Three and a half months before Brooks’ killing, prisoners’ rights advocates warned DOCCS Commissioner Martuscello that COs were regularly severely beating people. They called the violence a “ticking time-bomb.” Martuscello dismissed the concerns as impossible due to cameras in prisons.
“The death of Robert Brooks wasn’t something out of the ordinary,” said Alisha Kohn, Co-Founder and Co-Executive director of Prisoners’ Brain Trust, which works to amplify the voices of people affected by incarceration and the criminal justice system. “It’s something that happens all the time in New York state prisons. This one just happened to be caught on camera… This isn’t a new crisis. This crisis has been in existence since prisons in itself.”
Kohn continued, “During my time in incarceration, I’ve witnessed people getting beat up by the cops. I’ve witnessed the same horrors that Robert Brooks has experienced.”
“The existence of prisons in the first place is a crisis,” Mars Graham ’28, a prospective Prison Studies correlate, wrote in an email to The Miscellany News. “Prison was never intended to be a reformative practice, and we can see this in every facet of the way it functions.”
Two months after Brooks was killed, on Feb. 14, New York COs began an unauthorized strike, citing unsafe working conditions. Under New York law, public employees and employee organizations are prohibited from striking and face removal or loss of pay for doing so. The strike continued for almost a month, involving around 15,000 officers at all but two of New York’s 42 prisons.
DOCCS’ chronic staffing shortage forced guards to work compulsory overtime shifts of 16- or 24-hours. According to DOCCS, New York had 2,000 officer vacancies and used 7,441,833 overtime hours in 2024—up 21 percent from 2023. Vassar Adjunct Assistant Professor of Religion Klaus Yoder, who researches Christianity’s ties to incarceration, identified the staffing shortage as symptomatic of one of the carceral system’s fundamental issues. “Working for the carceral system is a way the state makes stable employment available for the working class. Prisons are supposed to be an economic fix for deindustrialization,” wrote Yoder in an email to this paper. “But they never really take the place of those lost jobs. Meanwhile the work is hard and dangerous.”
The officer shortage also worsened incarcerated people’s living conditions. The strike exacerbated these issues. Prisoners were locked in their cells or dorms for full days. Activities—yard, college classes, weekday visits, garbage collection, laundry, showers—were interrupted. Food was delivered to cells soggy and moldy.
As the strike dragged on, with 90 percent of COs joining, Hochul called in over 6,500 National Guardsmen, who were locked into prisons and slept on cots.
In late February 2025, Jonathan Grant, a 61-year-old diabetic man, died at Auburn Correctional. Multiple prisoners blamed the strike’s 24-hour shutdowns and food shortages for his death. A few days later, Anthony Douglas, 67, and Franklyn Dominguez, 35, died at Sing Sing Correctional. Douglas’ death appears to have been a suicide. On March 1, Mid-State Correctional’s beat-up squad killed Messiah Nantwi, a 22-year-old Black man, by kicking and stomping him in the head. Over a dozen guards were charged with murder, assault and an attempted cover-up. At least seven incarcerated people died during the strike.
One of the striking guards’ primary demands was repealing the 2021 Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act. The act prohibits placing incarcerated individuals in solitary confinement—defined as confinement of 17 hours or more per day—for over 15 consecutive days or 20 total days in a 60-day period. It also prohibits confining prisoners who are 21 or under, 55 or older, disabled, pregnant, in the first eight weeks of post-partum recovery or caring for newborns. These restrictions follow recommendations by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, who determined that solitary confinement of over 15 consecutive days is torture.
“HALT came after decades of prison organizing, hunger strikes, lawsuits, families fighting to make the state admit that solitary confinement is torture,” Kohn emphasized. “The reality of the HALT bill is, no, that it doesn’t go far enough. Because you can’t reform torture.”
Striking guards said HALT undermined prisoner discipline, fostered disorder and violence and made their jobs more difficult and dangerous. “The use of solitary is a preferred method of guards who want to maintain strict discipline and protect their own safety through a regime of fear,” wrote Yoder. “The inmates and the guards are locked into an adversarial relationship. Any advance in the human rights of the inmates becomes framed as negatively impacting the working conditions of the COs.”
“The strike was manufactured,” Kohn commented. “The strike was not simply about the overtime wages. This was not simply about the [overtime] shifts… Part of what actually led to the strike was the fact that they were charging officers for the murder of Robert Brooks. It came to the fact that [guards] could no longer use solitary confinement the way that they were using it before.”
On Feb. 20, 2025, DOCCS temporarily paused parts of HALT. A March 8 agreement between DOCCS and the CO union extended the pause for 90 days, which continued well past its deadline of June 6. On July 1, New York Judge Daniel Lynch enjoined DOCCS from suspending HALT. It is active as of publication.
After 22 days, Hochul ended the strike on March 10, firing 2,000 guards and banning them from future public employment. To counteract the now further exacerbated shortage, Hochul plans to close five prisons next year. She closed two prisons in 2024. A fired sergeant told The Free Lance, “It’s gonna be worse than ever. They’re going to lose one of those jails.”
As of late October, some prisoners are still locked in their cells for full days with most activities canceled. “The state says stuff all the time,” Kohn said. “Until those actually doors are closed—we won’t know until it’s done.”