Beacon is a prison town. Just up the road from the high school sits the Fishkill Correctional Facility; each morning, 1,500 people wake up there.
Ten years ago this month, The New York Times ran a front-page story about one of those prisoners, Sam Harrell. He was a 30-year-old Black man from Kingston who suffered from bipolar disorder. He had been incarcerated on drug charges. According to 19 witnesses, as many as 20 correction officers beat him while he was handcuffed. He was thrown or dragged down a flight of stairs and died at a hospital.
In the five years before the assault, the state had settled 175 lawsuits brought against New York correction officers for abuse, many of them with similarities to his case: handcuffed inmates who suffered broken bones, hearing loss, smashed teeth.
The New York Times story sparked horror, grief and outrage in the community. We organized protests, vigils and discussions. We wrote hundreds of letters to state officials. We met with the prison superintendent and legislators. But no charges were brought against the officers. Our primary demands for change — body cameras for officers and restraint in the use of solitary confinement — were ignored.
It should be acknowledged that this violence and dehumanization in prisons impacts the people who work there, as well. A third of correction officers nationwide have post-traumatic stress disorder, and officers commit suicide at a rate twice that of the public. Guards who treat prisoners with respect or raise concerns about abuse are ostracized as “inmate lovers.” Staffing shortages have forced Fishkill Correctional employees to work extremely long shifts, including mandatory overtime. Hundreds of area residents work at the prison.
There have been important changes since Harrell’s death on April 21, 2015, that residents helped bring about. In December another Black man, Robert Brooks, was killed at a state prison. According to testimony, he was beaten while handcuffed and submissive. This time 13 officers were charged with murder, manslaughter and tampering with evidence. A key difference was that some of the guards were wearing body cameras that they didn’t realize functioned in “passive” mode. Although not a single officer activated the camera, as required by law, prosecutors still had video evidence of the beating.
At this point, officers in most of New York’s 42 prisons have at least some body cameras, and seven facilities have outfitted all their officers. It’s critical that their use be enforced, and that watchdogs outside prisons have access to the video.
Another important change was the enactment in 2021 of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, based on the United Nation’s Mandela Rules, which consider more than 15 days in solitary confinement to be torture. At the time of Harrell’s death, nearly half of the inmates at Fishkill were subjected to solitary; the median sentence was more than five months. The enforcement of HALT was recently suspended in response to demands from some officers who want to return to unlimited use of solitary, but it hopefully will be reinstated soon.
The biggest change over the past decade has been a massive decline in the prison population, which has dropped nearly 50 percent in New York since the last draconian Rockefeller-era drug law was repealed in 2009. Twenty-two prisons have been closed, including Downstate in Fishkill, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed shuttering five more.
On Saturday (April 19), at 1 p.m., residents and activists will host a memorial for Sam Harrell — along with a call for continued reforms — at the intersection of Verplanck Avenue and Matteawan Road in Beacon.
