“I just want the system to follow the rules,” he said. He acknowledged that inmates needed guards to keep order and protect them from being preyed on by the most violent among them. Many interviewed by The Times, like Ibrahim Gyang, who is serving 25 years to life for killing a gang rival, were confined at maximum-security prisons. There are more than 50,000 inmates doing time at 54 prisons around the state for a range of crimes, from petty theft to multiple murders. And each denial is likely to mean two more years behind bars.Ī Times analysis of first-time hearings before the State Board of Parole over a three-year period ending in May found that one in four white inmates were released but fewer than one in six black inmates were.Įven well-run prisons are dangerous. But for black inmates, what happens inside can be profoundly damaging.īias in prison discipline has a ripple effect - it prevents access to jobs and to educational and therapeutic programs, diminishing an inmate’s chances of being paroled. Nor are these issues systematically tracked by state officials. The degree of racial inequity and its impact in the prison system as documented by The Times have rarely, if ever, been investigated. Racial inequities at the front end of the criminal justice system - arrest, conviction and sentencing - have been well documented.

The disparities were often smaller, according to the Times analysis, for violations that required physical evidence, like possession of contraband.īlacks make up only 14 percent of the state’s population but almost half of its prisoners. In these cases, the officer has a high degree of latitude to determine whether a rule is broken and does not need to produce physical evidence. The disparities were often greatest for infractions that gave discretion to officers, like disobeying a direct order. But even after accounting for these elements, the disparities in discipline persisted, The Times found. At Clinton, a prison near the Canadian border where only one of the 998 guards is African-American, black inmates were nearly four times as likely to be sent to isolation as whites, and they were held there for an average of 125 days, compared with 90 days for whites.Ī greater share of black inmates are in prison for violent offenses, and minority inmates are disproportionately younger, factors that could explain why an inmate would be more likely to break prison rules, state officials said. They were also sent to solitary confinement more frequently and for longer durations. In most prisons, blacks and Latinos were disciplined at higher rates than whites - in some cases twice as often, the analysis found. Whether loud and vulgar or insinuated and masked, racial bias in the state prison system is a fact of life.Ī review by The New York Times of tens of thousands of disciplinary cases against inmates in 2015, hundreds of pages of internal reports and three years of parole decisions found that racial disparities were embedded in the prison experience in New York. The guards who work these cellblocks rarely get to know a black person who is not behind bars. Most forbidding are the maximum-security penitentiaries - Attica, Clinton, Great Meadow - in rural areas where the population is almost entirely white and nearly every officer is too. “As soon as you come through receiving, they let you know whose house it is,” said Darius Horton, who was recently released from Groveland Correctional Facility after serving six years for assault. One inmate, John Richard, reported that he was jumped at Clinton Correctional Facility by a guard who threatened to “serve up some black mashed potatoes with tomato sauce.” There are cases of guards ripping out dreadlocks. They describe being called porch monkeys, spear chuckers and worse. The racism can be felt from the moment black inmates enter New York’s upstate prisons. The scourge of racial bias in New York State’s prisons

Blackguards 2 hang prisoners or not