Cuomo Downplays Prisoner Abuse, Beating Death Of Fishkill Inmate

The news media has been largely ignoring the allegations of prisoner abuse in the state prison system that the NY Times reported this summer.

There have been 60+ allegations of prisoners being beaten, choked, and threatened with waterboarding by guards at Clinton Correction after the June escape of two convicted murderers, both of whom were later caught (with one killed in the process.)

There is also the allegation that a prisoner at Fishkill was beaten to death by guards known as the "Beat Up Squad," then the homicide covered up with the story that the prisoner died as a result of synthetic marijuana use.

Matthews Chayes of Newsday got Cuomo on the record about these allegations and predictably, "criminal justice reform leader Cuomo" downplayed the allegations.

Here is the Newsday story, in full (it's behind a paywall so I want to put the whole story up for readers):

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, addressing allegations of medieval beatings in the state prison system, said Friday that correction officers, who work a tough job, "have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt."

Investigators are probing claims by inmates in at least two state prisons that officers exacted unnecessary beatings, including one by a "Beat Up Squad" that left a prisoner dead and is being scrutinized by federal prosecutors.  

Asked whether the state prison system has a brutality problem, Cuomo said, at an unrelated event at Ground Zero, "Well, state prisons have brutal people in them. So, unless you call that a brutality problem, no. State prisons are very difficult to manage, state prisons are filled with very dangerous people.

"They are policed by a relatively small number of correction officials -- who are unarmed, I might add. It is a very, very difficult job. They have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt. So, I think they're doing a good job.

"To the extent there is an incident that has to be looked into, then we look into that incident. But you're managing dozens of facilities with tens of thousands of people, don't take one or two alleged incidents -- and they're only alleged -- ...and then take a broad brush and make a general statement."

Inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility charge that after two murderers staged a daring escape earlier this year, guards exacted days of retribution by brutalizing other prisoners and violently interrogating them about what they knew, or didn't know.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, is involved in a separate probe at the Fishkill Correctional Facility of the death of a bipolar prisoner, allegedly at the hands of as many as 20 guards who were said to have punched, kicked, and threw or dragged a black inmate down the stairs while shouting racial slurs. 

The labor union representing the officers has urged against a rush to judgement, "rather than simply relying on allegations made by a handful of violent convicted felons," according to The New York Times.

One or two alleged incidents?

Try 60+ beating/choking/threatened with waterboarding incidents and one homicide.

That's not one or two incidents.

And according to the NY Times, one of the prisoners who was beaten, choked and threatened with waterboarding had it happen to him just hours after Cuomo himself "stared" him down:

Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.

As the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: “Where are they going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?” One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.

Hours earlier, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat had made their daring escape from the unit — called the “honor block” — where they were housed. Now it appeared that Mr. Alexander, a fellow convicted murderer who lived in an adjoining cell, was being made to suffer the consequences.

...

Mr. Alexander got the news at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, where he had been transferred. He said he had earned his place on the Clinton honor block because he had not been written up for any serious infractions since entering the prison system in 2004. He occupied the cell next to Mr. Matt, who was in prison for murdering his boss and then cutting up the body. (Long before he cut his way out of prison, Mr. Matt was known around Clinton by the nickname Hacksaw.)

For Mr. Alexander, his cell’s location apparently made him a target for investigators.

The night of the escape, Mr. Alexander said, he worked late at the tailor shop, and when he returned to his cell around 9:45 p.m., Mr. Matt gave him bowls of salad and fried chicken that had been bought at the commissary. “He told me: ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the bowls from you in the morning,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

He said he was awakened around 5:15 a.m. for the morning count. “The officer comes banging on the bars,” he said. “He goes to Matt’s cell and bangs on the bars, and then he leaves and he bangs on Dave’s bars.” When there was no response, he said, a sergeant and several guards rushed up and down the cellblock shouting to one another that two inmates were gone.

“The sergeant comes over to me: ‘You hear something? You had to hear something,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

It would be several hours before the first details of the escape were made public. Around 11 a.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured the honor block and inspected the holes the inmates had cut in the backs of their cells with hacksaw blades.

Governor’s Stare

The governor then stopped to question Mr. Alexander.

“Must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Mr. Cuomo asked, according to video of the exchange. Then, Mr. Alexander said, the governor “gave me his best tough-guy stare and walked off.”

Later, the governor said he would be “shocked” if any corrections officers had been involved.

Twice during the day of the escape, Mr. Alexander said he was questioned by investigators from the State Police and the corrections department inspector general’s office.

Then, around 8 p.m., he was handcuffed and taken to a broom closet where, he said, three corrections officers whom he had never seen before interrogated him. An officer wearing a jacket with the initials C.I.U. — Crisis Intervention Unit — sat down and asked him, “Do you know the difference between this interview and those other interviews?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

This time, the officer warned, there were only uniformed guards in the room, Mr. Alexander said.

“The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall,” he said. “Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach.”

With each punch, Mr. Alexander said, the officers shouted another question.

“The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat,” he added.

When Mr. Alexander repeatedly insisted that he had no information, one officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

The officer then put the bag over his head and started beating him again, Mr. Alexander said.

He said the interrogation lasted about 20 minutes, and he was then taken, bleeding, back to his cell.

Later, Mr. Alexander said, the same officer “began quietly taunting and threatening me, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Fat Boy, we’ll be seeing you really soon.’ ”

That's one of the allegations, one with a direct connection to Cuomo himself.

There are at least 59 others at Clinton Correctional.

So, "one or two alleged incidents" that need to be looked into?

Try 60+.

As for the Fishkill incident, here's how the Times reported that:

On the evening of April 21 in Building 21 at the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Samuel Harrell, an inmate with a history of erratic behavior linked to bipolar disorder, packed his bags and announced he was going home, though he still had several years left to serve on his drug sentence.

Not long after, he got into a confrontation with corrections officers, was thrown to the floor and was handcuffed. As many as 20 officers — including members of a group known around the prison as the Beat Up Squad — repeatedly kicked and punched Mr. Harrell, who is black, with some of them shouting racial slurs, according to more than a dozen inmate witnesses. “Like he was a trampoline, they were jumping on him,” said Edwin Pearson, an inmate who watched from a nearby bathroom.

Mr. Harrell was then thrown or dragged down a staircase, according to the inmates’ accounts. One inmate reported seeing him lying on the landing, “bent in an impossible position.”

“His eyes were open,” the inmate wrote, “but they weren’t looking at anything.”

Corrections officers called for an ambulance, but according to medical records, the officers mentioned nothing about a physical encounter. Rather, the records showed, they told the ambulance crew that Mr. Harrell probably had an overdose of K2, a synthetic marijuana.

He was taken to St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital and at 10:19 p.m. was pronounced dead.

In the four months since, state corrections officials have provided only the barest details about what happened at Fishkill, a medium-security prison in Beacon, N.Y., about 60 miles north of New York City. Citing a continuing investigation by the State Police, officials for weeks had declined to comment on the inmates’ accounts of a beating.

An autopsy report by the Orange County medical examiner, obtained by The New York Times, concluded that Mr. Harrell, 30, had cuts and bruises to the head and extremities and had no illicit drugs in his system, only an antidepressant and tobacco. He died of cardiac arrhythmia, the autopsy report said, “following physical altercation with corrections officers.”

The manner of death: Homicide.

Does that sound like an incident that can be downplayed as just an "allegation" by "violent prisoners"?

That's what Cuomo's doing in his comments.

Fortunately Preet Bharara and the local D.A. are looking into the matter:

ALBANY — U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is investigating the death of an inmate at the state's Fishkill prison.

The Manhattan-based federal prosecutor said in a statement that a joint probe with Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady is investigating the death of Samuel Harrell, who died after several prison guards beat him, according to affidavits from more than a dozen other prisoners first reported by The New York Times.

State officials announced Tuesday that Fishkill was getting a new superintendent whose mandate would include reviewing “all safety concerns” in the building where Harrell died. The Correctional Association, an advocacy group with a legislative mandate to inspect state prisons, had called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a probe of conditions in the state's prison system, citing a “pervasive culture of violence and abuse.”

A pervasive culture of violence and abuse in the state prison system, but Cuomo says it's just a couple of allegations, no big deal.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, a criminal justice reform advocate when it comes to the city jails, gave Cuomo an Urban League award for being a "leader" in "criminal justice reform" just days before these allegations of beatings, choking, threats of waterboarding and the Fishkill homicide were reported by the Times.

Jeffries hasn't said a word since about the “pervasive culture of violence and abuse" in the state prison system or the reports of beatings, chokings and at least one homicide that were reported by the NY Times.

The Urban League hasn't taken back its award from Cuomo yet either.

They continue to carry water for Governor Cuomo and his "leadership" in criminal justice reforms even as he runs a state prison system that is described as "medieval" in the beatings handed out by the guards.

But at least one member of the news media got Cuomo on the record about the allegations.

Now we know that Cuomo, the criminal justice reform leader, doesn't think much about any of this since he downplays 60+ allegations of prisoner abuse and one homicide to "one or two alleged incidents."

Daily News Carries Water For Cuomo, Continues To Ignore Systemic Prison Abuse In State System

Enough is enough.

The New York Daily News continues to hammer the Rikers prison scandal, putting stories on the front page day after day, calling for resignations and investigations and kinds of change at the prison.

Good for them.

But they inexplicably continue to ignore the systemic abuse, torture and murder of prisoners in the state prison system by corrections officers even as they hammer the Rikers story.

There have been 60+ allegations of prisoners being beaten, choked, abused, and threatened with waterboarding at Clinton Correction Facility in Dannemora and an allegation of a prisoner being beaten to death by corrections officers known as the "Beat Up Squad" at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon.

The NY Times reported on both of these stories the past few weeks, but other New York papers, including the crusading Daily News that never met a Rikers story it didn't want to put on the front page and editorialize about, has ignored them.

Today the Albany Times Union published an editorial, asking when the Department of Justice will investigate these allegations of torture, abuse and murder in the state prison system under Cuomo:

Cruel and All Too Usual

“There is no protection from the freezing temperature … the prisoners are still standing in the courtyard, shivering with cold, tortured by hunger and fainting from exhaustion. In such conditions, the prisoner has only one hope left, to die.”

So goes a description of a roll call by photographer-author Brian Gaylor in “Ghosts of Auschwitz,” about the most infamous Nazi death camp.

“Once the frisking was done, they continued to make us stand with our hands on the fence. Those of us that didn’t have gloves were suffering, and the staff didn’t care.”

That second account is not from World War II. It’s from an modern-day inmate of a Feb. 7, 2013, incident at Bare Hill Correctional Facility in northern New York. The incident, related by reporter Alysia Santo of The Marshall Project, a journalism nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice, involved a prison yard search for weapons after an inmate’s face was slashed. The search that went on, inmates claim, for 30 minutes or more in the 5- to 10-degree cold. Inmates say they were ordered to remove their hats and gloves and hold a chain-link fence, even after the search was over, as guards waited for someone to come clean about the assault. Ten prisoners suffered frostbite.

Which brings us, once again, to the question: What is going on in New York’s prisons, and when will the U.S. Department of Justice take notice?

The question springs from Clinton Correctional Facility where, after the escape by two prisoners this summer, inmates told The New York Times that guards beat handcuffed prisoners, slammed them against walls and cell bars, and choked them or suffocated them with plastic bags over their heads.

The question lingers at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, a prison with a history of complaints of official brutality, where the Times recently reported on allegations that an inmate was beaten to death in April by what’s known at the prison as the “Beat Up Squad,” and witnesses put in solitary confinement and threatened.

The response from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration on the allegations at Clinton Correctional? They’re being looked into. At Fishkill? Looking into it; State Police will turn over their findings to the Dutchess County District Attorney in the “near future.” At Bare Hill? No comment, since it’s a matter of litigation.

When is enough enough? When does one report of abuse after another add up to a possible pattern of systematic, dehumanizing brutality?

When will the Cuomo administration concede that this demands an outside investigation, not one by the same state government that operates these prisons and stands to be on the hook for possible civil rights violations and potential damages?

And when will the Justice Department take notice? When these prisoners’ terms are done, and they return to society, to put into practice all the lessons they have learned about how civilized people behave?

When will the DOJ take notice of these allegations?

Hell, when will the New York Daily News?

It seems that if prison abuse doesn't occur at Rikers Island, they're not interested in the allegations in the least.

The cynic in me wonders if they continue to do Rikers stories day after day because they get to hammer de Blasio but they ignore the state prison abuse allegations because that would reflect badly on Governor Cuomo and they wouldn't want to hurt his feelings (or his political standing.)

The same goes for the politicians in this state, all of whom continue to ignore the state abuse stories even as some talk about criminal justice issues.

Some of these politicians have been hailing Cuomo as a criminal justice reformer - take Hakeem Jeffries, for example, who gave Cuomo an award from the Urban League for being swellest politician on criminal justice reform issues even as allegations of systemic abuse, torture and murder of prisoners by New York correctional officers surface in the NY Times.

The newspapers and many in the political establishment have it out for de Blasio these days, the Rikers story being just the latest example of where they take the rhetorical bludgeon out and bash him over the head with it.

I think the Daily News is justified to do so with the Rikers mess.

Yet I cannot fathom why the Daily News and other newspapers (outside of the Times and Times Union) or politicians like Hakeem Jeffries stay silent on the state prison abuse allegations even as they speak out on the Rikers mess other than they have a political agenda to protect Andrew Cuomo and destroy Bill de Blasio.

Guard Violence At Rikers Grew Under Mayor Bloomberg

Does this get added to Mayor Bloomberg's "legacy"?

The portrait that emerged from the report on Rikers Island by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan last week was of a place with almost medieval levels of violence, meted out with startling ferocity by guards and their superiors. 

The two-and-a-half-year investigation, which focused on the abuse of teenage inmates by correction staff, was exhaustive in cataloging the brutality. But a critical question that went unaddressed is how conditions were allowed to get to this point.

Rikers has been a place of violent excess for decades. And the growing ranks of inmates with mental illnesses, reaching nearly 40 percent of the jail population today, have added to the challenges for correction officials. 

But conditions worsened substantially under the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, which reduced jail staff and failed to curb escalating violence by guards, according to former correction officials, inmates’ advocates and others intimately familiar with the jail.

“There was very little interest in expending political capital and financial capital on the jails,” said Martin F. Horn, who was correction commissioner during Mr. Bloomberg’s first two terms.

As mayor, Mr. Bloomberg earned a reputation for being a consummate manager who leveraged his private sector experience to tackle municipal problems. But he never made Rikers a high priority, at a time when conditions were drastically deteriorating, according to people familiar with its problems.

During Mr. Bloomberg’s last term, use of force by officers on inmates jumped by 90 percent, according to Correction Department data. Inmates’ advocates and public officials charged with overseeing the jails said they pleaded for the administration to address the issue.

“We met with the Department of Correction and the Bloomberg administration about the prevalence of violence directed by correctional staff towards prisoners, and they didn’t respond,” said Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the New York City Board of Correction, a watchdog agency.

In short, they didn't give a shit about the violence at Rikers, the worsening conditions, what is termed in the Times story "almost medieval levels of violence."

I ask again, does the "almost medieval levels of violence meted out with startling ferocity by guards and their superiors" at Rikers to teenage prisoners get added to his "legacy"?

Charter School Goons

Some in the charter school industry like to brag about how "tough" their schools are.

Some like to run their schools like Rikers Island - any little infraction, even rolling one's eyes, gets a student jail time in detention.

That particular school in question - Achievement First in Crown Heights - apparently has decided to offer discipline not just to students but to parents as well:

A parent protesting disciplinary rules at a Brooklyn charter school Monday night said she was pushed around by the school's dean two weeks ago.

The dean says the mom pushed him, and he's considering pressing charges.

Allana Frasier, a 31-year-old medical administrator, went public with her charge at a raucous meeting to discuss discipline practices at Achievement First Crown Heights Middle School.

Parents at the school have previously met to vent their anger at the school's strict rules on behavior.

Frasier said she went to the school on Nov. 10 to pick up her sixth-grader, who was booted from class for disrespecting his teacher.

She said dean Sean Solomon confronted her in a second-floor hallway and blocked her way to her son's class.

"He started pushing me into the wall with his shoulder as I was trying to pass him," she said. "He kept blocking me, then he pushed me and I pushed him back and started yelling."

While I do not condone the way the staff treats either students or parents at this charter school, I do have to say that if you don't want your kid treated like a prisoner, don't put them into a school that brags about the tough discipline it offers and gets compared to Rikers Island jail in the press.