New York state prison guards have been on strike since February 17. The strike began in part as a result of attempts by the state to prosecute the death of Robert Brooks, a forty-three-year-old Black father who was serving a twelve-year prison sentence at Marcy Correctional Facility when he was fatally beaten by guards on December 9, 2024. (He passed away at a nearby hospital the following day.) Guards have also complained of out-of-control facilities, understaffing, and new regulations curtailing the use of solitary confinement. During the strike, the New York National Guard has been temporarily acting as guards at many of the unstaffed facilities.
On February 28, the administration of New York governor Kathy Hochul reached a temporary agreement with the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) to end the illegal action. The agreement stipulated that guards who returned to work by March 1 would not face penalties for violating the state’s Taylor Law, which prohibits public employees from going on strike. It also offered other concessions related to the guards’ working conditions and overtime pay. But the deadline has come and gone and many of the guards have refused to return to work. On March 2, Daniel Martuscello, acting commissioner of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), began sending out letters informing guards that they were being fired for “unauthorized absences.”
Meanwhile, incarcerated people and their families are bearing the brunt of this crisis. The guard strike has interrupted critical services—such as the provision of food and medication delivery—as well as the delivery of mail, family visitations, educational programming, and counseling services. It has also meant that most of the population has been locked in their cells twenty-four hours a day for weeks. “The guards who walked off their jobs to engage in an illegal work stoppage are leaving people to die and the tragedies are mounting,” said Jose Saldaña, executive director of advocacy nonprofit Release Aging People in Prison.
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For some, the strike has indeed been deadly. This week the New York Times reported that, as of Tuesday, the strike has been linked to the deaths of at least seven incarcerated people. On February 22, sixty-one-year-old Jonathon Grant was found dead in his cell in Auburn Correctional Facility after pleading for medical attention to no avail. On February 24, forty-year-old Jeffrey Bair died in Auburn after complaining of chest pains. On February 26 at Sing Sing, Anthony Douglas was found hanging in his cell, and hours later Franklyn Dominguez was found unresponsive in his cell and died soon after. On March 2, twenty-two-year-old Messiah Nantwi was reportedly beaten by guards in Mid-State Correctional Facility, across the street from Marcy. We do not yet know the names and details of the remaining two deaths reported by the New York Times. The guard strike has clearly accelerated the death-dealing function of prisons.
In my recent book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, I argue that prisons in the United States should be understood as institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control. Although it focuses on the 1970s, the book offers war as a framework for understanding how and why today’s prisons function as they do.
In what follows, I recount key aspects of this multifaceted crisis that has unfolded across the New York state prison system over the past three months and demonstrate that seemingly inscrutable aspects of the guards’ demands make sense when the prison is understood in its proper context as warfare.
Someone dies inside a New York state prison every three days, and in most of these cases the general public never hears about it. Given this reality, Robert Brooks’s death could have easily received no public attention. But in the days after his passing, incarcerated people and their loved ones—amplified by groups such as Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the Correctional Association of New York (CANY), among others—called for an investigation into reports that prison guards at Marcy Correctional Facility had beaten Brooks to death.
On December 27, 2024, under mounting pressure, New York attorney general Letitia James released body camera footage depicting multiple white guards savagely beating and kicking a handcuffed and shackled Brooks, while medical staff and other guards stood by. The assailants did not intend for this graphic footage to be recorded by their body cameras, which none of them had activated at the time of the incident. Rather, the video was recovered using a little known “video recall” feature, which allows administrators to access archived footage, even when recording has not been manually switched on via a button press. Impossible to dismiss, justify, or spin, the video of what advocacy groups call a “lynching” circulated widely on social media and the press, where it was held up as proof of endemic brutality. In early February, news outlets began reporting that the Onondaga County Medical Examiner had ruled Brook’s death a homicide, resulting from “compression to the neck and blunt trauma to the body,” confirming that Brooks was indeed killed by agents of the state.
On December 22, five days before the video’s release, Governor Hochul attempted to head off the mounting controversy by ordering the immediate termination of thirteen guards and a prison nurse. Then on February 14, a grand jury charged six guards with murder and other crimes; four others were charged with manslaughter and evidence tampering. “This reprehensible act of violence demands the full force of our justice system—the family of Mr. Brooks deserves no further delays,” Governor Hochul said in a statement. These swift moves are exceptional given how rarely guards are held accountable for abusive behavior.
Two days earlier, however, on February 12, another event took place in a New York prison that would come to play a defining role in prison guards’ attempt to regain control of the public narrative. On that day, a minor prison uprising erupted at Collins Correctional Facility. Initial reports indicated that the event developed after guards forcibly confiscated a contraband cell phone. What ensued was a “chaotic” scene in which guards were reportedly forced to retreat, leaving incarcerated people in control of three dormitories for several hours.
Five days after the uprising in Collins, guards in that prison and at another in distant Elmira inaugurated the strike. The illegal action quickly spread to nearly all of New York’s forty-two prisons, where guards refused to report to work and instead set up encampments outside the facilities. Amid the protests, which intensified over several days, a DOCCS bus was set on fire and another was spray-painted with the words, “Can you hear us now.” Acting Commissioner Martuscello placed most of the state’s prisons on lockdown, while Governor Hochul activated the National Guard to staff the prisons.
On February 20, eight days after the Collins uprising and with the strike underway, another uprising took place at Riverview Correctional Facility. At midnight, according to WNYTV 7 News, “prison staff decided conditions were unsafe and pulled staff back into a visitors area,” then to an “administrative area . . . where they felt safe.” Incarcerated people reportedly controlled the prison’s ten dormitories until about 7 a.m. At both Collins and Riverview, military-style correctional emergency response teams (CERTs) were called in to reestablish state control—“including several [correctional officers] who stepped off the picket line,” in the case of the Riverview uprising.
How are we to make sense of this chaotic series of events?
In Policing the Crisis (1978), cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his coauthors demonstrate how mainstream media relies on agents of the state to be the “primary definers” of any given situation. Think of the press conference after any major crime: police and other civic authorities make statements that become the official narrative about what has happened. By contrast, incarcerated people, their loved ones, and advocates constantly struggle to have their voices and perspective heard and taken seriously. This asymmetrical struggle to define the truth and narrate history is what I call narrative war, and it has important consequences for what we think we know about prisons and political struggle.
For example, there is reason to believe that prison guards attempted to leverage this narrative asymmetry to actively deceive the public. An ongoing investigation by New York State Police has, among other things, raised questions about the extent to which guards who claimed they were forced to retreat from the dorms in Collins were legitimately in danger of harm.
In fact, this is not the first time New York prison guards have been suspected of creating untenable conditions with the intent of inciting a riot, which they could then leverage in collective bargaining negotiations. Back in 1970, imprisoned Black Panther Ricardo De Leon wrote a letter to the Black Panther newspaper describing a similar scheme in the lead up to a massive rebellion in the New York City jail system.
We found out about the campaign the correction pigs have to increase their manpower and their appropriations. To do this they instituted the slowdown and harassment programs with the purpose of provoking an incident, so that they could use their goons on us and call it a ‘prison riot’; in other words, no matter what we did, the pigs would achieve their objectives and our conditions would remain the same. The demands of the pigs for more pigs, more jails and more money for them are in contradiction to our needs and interests.
But Governor Hochul’s narrative is no less fraudulent, albeit in a different fashion, for its attempt to promulgate the notion that Brooks’s killing is exceptional and his killers simply bad apples. Nothing could be further from the truth. Prisons in the United States are saturated with white supremacist ideology and anti-Black violence. As such, they can be accurately framed as sites of normalized race war.
Formerly incarcerated journalist JB Nicholas has reported in the Freelance that, back in 2022, an incarcerated man named William Alvarez testified under oath that Glenn Trombly and Anthony Farina, both now under indictment for Brooks’s killing, were part of Marcy Correctional Facility’s “beat-up squad” and are well-known for terrorizing incarcerated people with impunity. At roughly the same time that Alvarez was testifying, a prison watchdog agency released a report citing accusations by incarcerated people that Marcy Correctional Facility was beset with “rampant abuse by staff,” including “physical assaults,” a “retaliatory environment,” and “a significant number of instances of racialized abuse and discrimination.” Early last year, attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of two people incarcerated in Great Meadow Correctional Facility, who were allegedly waterboarded and, along with dozens of others captives, systematically beaten, reportedly while representatives of DOCCS’s internal investigations unit—headed by Chris Martuscello, the prison commissioner’s brother—watched these abuses occur.
This normalized race war is also a gender war, as racial violence is often enacted in intensely sexualized ways. Late last year, Governor Hochul attempted to contain the intensifying public relations crisis at Marcy by replacing the prison’s beleaguered warden, Danielle Medbury, with NY DOCCS veteran Bennie Thorpe. But shortly thereafter it was revealed that Thorpe has two pending court cases in which he is accused of raping women while they were incarcerated in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Sexual violence against people of all genders and sexualities is endemic to prisons; in half of reported instances, the alleged perpetrators are guards.
It is crucial to recognize that these nominally illegitimate and illegal acts of carceral violence—assault, harassment, murder, rape—have analogues that are seen as entirely legitimate and legal. For example, Columbia University’s Center for Justice refers to New York’s “new death penalty” to draw attention to the growing number of people who die in prison, often in unspectacular ways. Similarly, strip frisks and body cavity searches are entirely normal aspects of incarceration, despite being recognized as institutionalized forms of sexual assault.
Consider that one of the primary demands of the striking guards—which the state appears poised to grant them—is that New York cease enforcing the Human Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, otherwise known as the HALT Act. Passed into law in 2022 as the result of a protracted grassroots campaign, the act limits the length of time incarcerated people can be subjected to solitary confinement and prohibits using the practice against people who are pregnant, disabled, under the age of twenty-one, or over the age of fifty-five. It also provided incarcerated people with a process for contesting their isolation. Multiple pending lawsuits reveal that the HALT Act was not being effectively enforced before it was temporarily suspended as a result of the strike. Nonetheless, the HALT Act has shifted the balance of power within the prison system and the strike is the latest move in a protracted effort by prison guards to “eliminate” the law.
In Tip of the Spear, I show how the massive proliferation of prison-based solitary confinement was part of New York’s counterinsurgency response to the historic 1971 rebellion in Attica and to anti-carceral Black radicalism more broadly. Widely recognized as a form of torture that produces lasting psychological and physical disability, solitary confinement is asymmetrically weaponized against Black and Latinx people, those with a high level of political consciousness, and those who refuse to submit to state authority. As an extreme example of the harm these wartime conditions produce, twelve people held at Virginia’s Red Onion supermax prison recently set themselves on fire, largely in protest of the prison’s use of solitary confinement and to expose what they describe as a culture of racial violence.
About their experience working in the New York State prison system during the guard strike, one of the National Guardsmen said the following: “Each prison is different but across the board it’s just terrible. We all agree that Afghanistan was better than the conditions in these prisons.” Perpetuating the dominant narrative, the press seized upon the soldier’s apt comparison to affirm the guards’ demands for improved working conditions: wage increases, staff increases, more overtime.
But what the reporting left out is that more than 30,000 incarcerated people—most of them Black and Latinx—are literally trapped within this same war zone. The fact that people incarcerated in prisons and people working in prisons—all trapped, though in different ways—universally find them deplorable should cause us to think seriously about what prisons are and what they do.
Prisons, in fact, do quite a lot, and how they work has everything to do with class warfare. On one side of the bars, prisons function as receptacles for society’s outcasts—the racialized poor, the unemployed, the mentally ill, gender rebels, what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called the “relative surplus population.” On the other side of the bars, they function as a jobs program for those tied to rural geographies, places that have been ravaged by what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms “organized abandonment.”
The war-like working conditions of the guards is a testament to the fact that, within the broader structure of racial capitalism, their social position is not much higher than that of the incarcerated people over whom they exercise the power of life and death. They too are expendable. The state made this clear when, in response to the Attica rebellion, it sent in armed state and local police, mercilessly killing ten guards who had been taken hostage. “I don’t have any memory of signing a paper where I was to expect that my employer might kill me or consider me disposable,” said John Stockholm, a surviving guard who had been captured during the rebellion.
As I show in Tip of the Spear, prison construction exploded in the wake of the Attica rebellion. State actors justified this massive project by highlighting that it would improve two types of security. They claimed, on the one hand, that more prisons would provide the public and the guards with greater security from the criminalized and racialized poor. On the other hand, they maintained that more prisons would provide economic security for upstate New York’s mostly white workforce as it struggled to make ends meet in a rapidly deindustrializing economy.
As this post-Attica carceral development strategy continued into the 1980s and 1990s, prisons were transformed into an important wedge that encouraged white guard laborers to see their class mobility as necessarily tied to the criminalization and subjugation of the racialized poor. It mystified the ongoing class war between labor and capital and naturalized the white supremacist race war. This partly explains why the guards remain unable to forge political solidarity by linking their abysmal working conditions with incarcerated people’s abysmal living conditions. This lack of solidarity (lack even of public recognition that solidarity might be possible), is consistent with the long history of how carceral “fraternal organizations” function as a reactionary political force against progressive and working-class movements, including organized labor.
By thinking about the prison as war, we disabuse ourselves of the misconception that the prison system is broken and needs fixing. Rather, the war analytic helps us conceptualize carceral institutions as engines of disinformation, white supremacy, violence, and class antagonism, processes that stabilize a social order structured by inequality and exploitation. The framework of war also helps us orient our response. The contradictions of the New York guard strike reveal that prisons are not only instruments for controlling those locked inside cages; they also control those guarding the cages. The prison has incarcerated the guard’s imagination such that the only way they can envision themselves moving up is by stepping on someone else’s neck.
Image: t_h_e_h_i_d_d_e_n_ / Unsplash
