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We Spent Two Years Investigating Abuse by Prison Guards in New York. Here Are Five Takeaways.
New York’s prison system has failed to fire nearly all corrections officers it accused of attacking people in their custody. And guards often work in groups to cover-up assaults by lying to investigators and in official reports, a Marshall Project investigation has found. Reporters examinedhow New York disciplines guards for misconduct. Using public records laws, we got a database of disciplinary records that state law had kept secret for decades. Here are five takeaways from our investigation — based on our analysis of that database, thousands of pages of documents, several videos and scores of interviews with prisoners, officials and experts.
How a ‘Blue Wall’ Inside New York State Prisons Protects Abusive Guards
BEACON, N.Y. — The way the prison guards described it in their paperwork, there was a minor disturbance the day they took Chad Stanbro to a dental clinic at a regional hospital. Stanbro, a prisoner, had been sedated but became agitated during surgery, took a swing at a dentist...
An All-Night, Pizza-Fueled Interrogation. A Dubious Confession. A DNA Surprise.
Subscribe to “Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry.”. By the end of January 2015, Larry Driskill was in jail, maintaining he’d been manipulated into a false murder confession by Texas Ranger James Holland. Driskill’s claims raised a simple question for me: Was he alone?. To answer...
In 2022, exonerations hit a record high in the U.S.
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. English legal scholar Sir William Blackstone famously wrote in 1765 that it’s “better that ten guilty persons escape than that...
What Do People Not Understand About Working in Prisons and Jails?
The Marshall Project and The New York Times are publishing a series of articles about prisons in New York state, and how often the corrections department disciplines officers it accuses of abusing prisoners or covering up misconduct. Our review of hundreds of cases found that the agency rarely succeeds in firing these officers. We also identified more than 160 cases in which prisoners or their families won lawsuits or received settlements after alleging abuse at the hands of guards. The department seldom disciplined those officers.
How We Investigated Abuse by Prison Guards in New York
To report on how New York state prison officials discipline officers they accuse of abuse, The Marshall Project examined two primary data sets. We received one through public records requests to the state corrections agency. The other we compiled based on thousands of pages of court records released by the state attorney general’s office.
My Brother Was Wrongfully Convicted for Murder. 20 Years Later, So Was My Son.
The year my son Cedric Dent was sent to prison for a murder he didn’t commit, it changed everything for me and my family. Except for one thing: the trips I took to Louisiana State Penitentiary to see him. Those, I was used to — because I had already been making them for the last 20 years to visit my brother, another Black man locked up for a murder he didn’t commit.
‘No Safe Place’: On Memory, Trauma and Truth
Part seven of the “Violation” podcast reveals new information about Jake Wideman’s past and explains what happens next in his legal case. Two months after Jacob Wideman was arrested at work and brought back to prison — for failing to make an appointment with a psychologist on a particular day, as directed by his parole officer — he faced the Arizona parole board again.
When “Shoot-First Culture” Meets “Fear and Paranoia”
At least seven people were shot — one fatally — for showing up at the wrong place, in separate incidents over the course of just six days earlier this month. Kaylin Gillis, 20, was shot and killed in Hebron, New York, as a car she was traveling in turned around in a stranger’s driveway. Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot in Kansas City, Missouri, after ringing the wrong doorbell. Payton Washington, 18, and Heather Roth, 21, were shot in Elgin, Texas after Washington accidentally got into, and then quickly exited, a stranger's car in a parking lot. In Gaston County, North Carolina, when children went to retrieve a basketball from a stranger’s backyard, he allegedly came out of his house with a gun and fired, striking 6-year-old Kinsley White and her father.
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The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.
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