When Jaquan Myers was sent to the Franklin Correctional Facility infirmary last summer, bleeding and hyperventilating, he knew he couldn’t do anything about the incident that landed him there.
At least three guards had pulled his hair, choked him, and smashed his face against a wall before pepper spraying him and throwing him into a van, he said. Before the assault, he’d filed grievances against one of the guards, who’d repeatedly denied him recreational time.
Myers was too terrified to file a complaint about the assault — especially because his only proof was his injuries. There were no cameras in the processing room where they beat him up or the van where they stashed him, he said, and the guards who attacked him weren’t equipped with body-worn cameras.
“Cameras make a big difference because they show both sides,” Myers told New York Focus.
Franklin Correctional Facility is one of the more than 30 New York state prisons that lack full camera coverage, according to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, even though the agency launched a statewide prison camera program a decade ago. Around then, DOCCS also launched one of the nation’s first prison body-worn camera initiatives, but as of October, only seven of 42 facilities had body cameras for every guard on duty.
The role of cameras in prisons entered the national spotlight in late December, when New York Attorney General Letitia James released body camera video footage of corrections officers violently assaulting another incarcerated New York man. The video shows officers beating 43-year-old Robert Brooks while he was handcuffed in a medical examination room at Marcy Correctional Facility. Brooks did not survive the assault.
New York’s state prison population has long complained about a lack of camera coverage. Areas without coverage can be deadly for incarcerated people, as prison monitors have documented. “We’re being told that, regardless of there being cameras in certain places in the prisons, people are being taken to blind spots or rooms where there aren’t cameras and assaulted,” said Sumeet Sharma, director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit tasked with overseeing prison conditions.
While it’s difficult to measure how effective cameras are at deterring violence overall, many incarcerated people say their presence makes them feel safer. Guards act differently when cameras are rolling, they assert, and video coverage documents violence when it does occur, creating the possibility of accountability after the fact.
In Brooks’s case, officers likely didn’t intend to record the violence: They never activated their body cameras, but they remained running on a standby mode, capturing silent video.
The footage of Brooks’s killing prompted national outcry. Governor Kathy Hochul announced a suite of accountability initiatives, including updated plans for expanded camera coverage. Her announcement didn’t mention that DOCCS has been working on those updates for years.
Why has it taken so long? After a decade of planning and implementation — and over a billion dollars either spent or budgeted — DOCCS has finished its security and body-worn camera programs in a fraction of its facilities. All the while, incarcerated people have remained vulnerable.
“I was almost a Robert Brooks myself,” Myers said.
Despite their reputation as high-security fortresses, New York’s state prisons have always lacked comprehensive security camera coverage. In 2015, DOCCS launched an initiative to remedy that, with the goal of full camera coverage in every facility.
Progress was slow. Newer facilities were easy to equip: Upstate and Five Points prisons, opened in 1998 and 2000, respectively, were constructed with full-scale security camera systems already in place. But most of New York’s prisons are old. Some, like Clinton Correctional Facility, were built in the mid-19th century. Running wiring through and across large, aging buildings takes significant time.
It also takes money. Expanding the security camera system within the nearly 100-year-old Attica Correctional Facility, one of the first older prisons to get the upgrade, cost $12 million, according to testimony from DOCCS’s former commissioner. And that was one of the cheaper projects: The current commissioner testified last year that, over the previous decade, DOCCS had spent over $600 million in security camera projects. DOCCS’s annual budget is about $3.5 billion.
In response to Brooks’s killing, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she was “expediting” $400 million more for DOCCS’s camera initiatives. According to DOCCS, the money was already in the department’s capital plan and appropriated in prior state budgets but hasn’t yet been spent.
As of January, only 11 of DOCCS’s 42 facilities have full camera coverage, according to an agency spokesperson. “There are additional facilities undergoing or planning their fixed camera projects,” the spokesperson said.
The agency has also been slow to distribute body-worn cameras to corrections officers, a project it launched a decade ago. It was one of the first initiatives in the country to equip prison guards with body cams, the agency’s then-commissioner testified.
DOCCS framed the project as a way to protect officers. During the pilot, when it gave cameras to its SWAT-style Corrections Emergency Response Team, officers activated them selectively, like when they were transporting “high-risk” incarcerated people or during emergencies.
DOCCS started distributing body-worn cameras to everyday guards, but ran into data storage issues, according to an October audit. It later switched vendors, signing a contract with Axon, the biggest company in the police body camera market, which offers cloud-based video storage.
DOCCS has signed $36.5 million in body camera contracts with Axon since 2021, according to data published by the state comptroller. It has so far paid out $11 million.
Even since signing with Axon, the body camera rollout has been slow. As of 2022, DOCCS had fully deployed body-worn cameras at six prisons, according to documents obtained via a public records request; they had only added one to that list as of October.
Other prisons have partial coverage: There are currently 4,752 body cameras distributed across New York’s prisons, DOCCS said. (Corrections officers and sergeants work around 8,700 shifts a day, according to a DOCCS report published last year.) All but seven facilities have at least some body cameras.
There isn’t much research on how effectively body cameras reduce the use of force in correctional settings. Bryce Peterson, an expert on body-worn cameras in law enforcement settings, co-authored one of the few studies on the question. Over the course of a year, he found that use of force at a jail in Loudoun County, Virginia, dropped by roughly 40 percent after the jail introduced body-worn cameras. The number of injuries to incarcerated people during use of force incidents dropped by 60 percent.
Some incarcerated people report better treatment in the presence of cameras.
“It’s impossible to overstate how much of a difference they make in the way staff behave,” said Jeremy Zielinski, who’s incarcerated at Woodbourne Correctional Facility.
Zielinski filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging that officers had assaulted him and others in a stairwell that didn’t have any cameras installed.
“It was notorious,” Zielinski told New York Focus. “You’d walk in, out of the yard, and there’s just this blind spot, with a concrete, isolated stairway where they could kind of do whatever they want, outside the view of the cameras.”
Beyond deterrence, camera footage can help incarcerated people back up complaints or challenge discipline. Incarcerated people can request to use DOCCS security and body camera video as evidence to defend themselves during disciplinary hearings and in litigation.
Jean-Marc Desmarat, also incarcerated at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, is currently in solitary confinement for allegedly assaulting an officer. But Desmarat, who has glaucoma, said the assault never happened, and that the officers accused him of the attack in retaliation for filing grievances and lawsuits seeking better accommodations for visually impaired people in prison. Without video, it’s his word against theirs.
“If they had surveillance cameras, no officers would have accused me of physically assaulting them,” he said.
Some corrections officers also welcome the documentation that cameras provide. Andrew Dombek, a former DOCCS employee, said he would gladly have used body cameras had they been available when he worked as a corrections and parole officer. When accusations of misconduct are levied by incarcerated people, the footage could help clear their names. (The corrections officers union declined to comment for this article.)
“I was almost a Robert Brooks myself.”
—Jaquan Myers
“It would be phenomenal to have that evidence,” said Dombek. Plus, cameras could help weed out officers like those who took part in the Brooks assault, he said.
“Officers don’t want to work with these people, because these are the people that cause problems,” said Dombek. “These are the ones that cause riots and people to get hurt.”
Unlike some other New York criminal justice agencies, however, DOCCS rarely releases footage publicly. That offers little opportunity for systemic accountability, like that seen since Brooks’s killing — video of which only became public because the state Office of the Attorney General obtained and released it.
In response to questions about its video release policy, DOCCS recommended filing public records requests, which the agency takes weeks or months to fulfill.
Unlike Peterson’s jail study, research on the deterrent effect of body cameras in police departments — which have adopted them more widely than their corrections counterparts, and are therefore easier to study — has been mixed. Officers caught abusing their power often evade discipline or conviction. Still, Peterson maintains that cameras offer an invaluable window into corrections systems, which are largely hidden from public scrutiny.
“If you’re talking about making things safer, fairer, more effective, more transparent, more accountable, would you rather have that footage or not?” said Peterson. “That’s what we need to start with.”
Equipping prisons with body cameras is one battle; getting guards to use them is another.
“When we visit prisons, we’re often told that the cameras have broken down, that not all of them are working, or that half of them would be used while the other half of them would be charged,” said Sharma of the Correctional Association of New York.
Those limitations meant that, on some oversight monitoring visits, the Correctional Association found only supervisors were wearing cameras, leaving a majority of officers without them. During a 2022 visit to Albion prison, a medium-security facility where 500 incarcerated women are housed and officers staff nearly 200 shifts a day, the association reported that it had 10 cameras, but only five deployed per shift while the other five charged.
That was on top of a gap in security camera coverage. At the time of the Albion visit, the prison had 250 stationary cameras installed, with plans to install 2,000 more across the grounds and perimeter over the next two-to-five years.
Camera coverage has been further limited by the fact that, until recently, officers didn’t have to keep their body cameras running. In response to Brooks’s killing, DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello issued a new policy, obtained by New York Focus, ordering guards assigned a body-worn camera to keep it on during their whole shift and recording “whenever they are in the presence of an incarcerated individual.”
Asked for the old policy, DOCCS directed New York Focus to file a public records request. When New York Focus requested the policy from DOCCS in 2021, they declined to share it “for security reasons.”
As the agency’s initiatives have progressed at a snail’s pace, incarcerated people have pushed aggressively for more camera coverage.
In his 2023 lawsuit, Zielinski demanded that DOCCS use emergency procurement funds to install more cameras. A court dismissed his suit in October, three months before Brooks’s killing.
Desmerat said that he has filed complaints specifically asking for cameras to be installed at the prison and for DOCCS to equip all officers with body cameras.
Cameras wouldn’t just improve conditions for incarcerated people, Desmarat said: “We are safe, the officers are safe, and the staff are safe when there are cameras. It’s better for everyone.”
He’s particularly struck by the lack of cameras in prisons at a time when surveillance pervades contemporary life.
“Everything you do in society right now, you’re being monitored,” said Desmarat. “Why not in prisons? What are they afraid of?”