This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE · June 13, 2025
The bill package will now head to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, and she could either sign, veto, or scale it back through amendments to the legislation.
By Chris Gelardi , New York Focus
Amid one of the most chaotic years for New York’s prison system in recent memory, the state legislature passed a limited omnibus prison reform bill Thursday night, hours before one of its chambers closed out its lawmaking for the year.
The bill is the legislature’s response to the state prison agency’s mounting scandals. In December, body-worn cameras captured corrections officers taking turns beating a handcuffed incarcerated man named Robert Brooks, who died hours later. The killing sparked nationwide outcry and served as a backdrop for months of tumultuous events that followed, including a three-week corrections officers strike, another alleged killing at the hands of prison guards, and two contentious legislative hearings.
Prison reform-minded lawmakers compiled a 23-bill package to address what they described as systemic issues underlying Brooks’s death. State Senate and Assembly leaders then picked seven of them, plus three other prison reform bills, to include in the omnibus. Both chambers passed that bill Thursday night, shortly before the Senate ended its annual legislative session early Friday morning. (The Assembly has delayed the end of its session to next week.)
Most of the provisions in the omnibus legislation center on beefing up prison oversight and transparency.
“This bill is a serious step toward finally reforming our prisons,” Julia Salazar, head of the Senate corrections committee and the original sponsor of most of the bills in the omnibus, said in a statement. “There is more work to do, including an expansion of pathways for release, but this is progress, it will make a difference, and I’m proud to stand behind it.”
A few reform advocates echoed the praise, while others criticized the final legislation’s limited scope. The Legal Aid Society said that it “represents a colossal failure by lawmakers to meet this moment.” Detractors were especially frustrated that it left out parole and sentencing reform — longstanding demands from advocates and a top priority for Brooks’s father, a central figure in this year’s campaign.
“I’m so disappointed,” Susan Shervington, an activist with VOCAL-NY, said in a statement. “I’m happy they’re passing oversight and accountability bills, but real accountability means passing reforms that will get people out of prisons, end qualified immunity, and allow people to challenge wrongful convictions.”
The bill package will now head to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, and she could either sign, veto, or scale it back through amendments to the legislation.
The prison omnibus’s path to passage is a case study in New York’s top-down legislative system.
In May, Governor Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders reached an agreement on New York’s budget after hashing out the state’s most consequential legislation in a cordoned-off room. The final budget was over a month late, leaving lawmakers roughly a month before the end of session to push for other bills.
At hearings last month, progressive legislators teased a sweeping reform package, but it wasn’t until last week that the legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus unveiled the 23-bill Robert Brooks Blueprint for Justice and Reform.
The blueprint included oversight and accountability measures, legislation that would enshrine new incarcerated people’s rights, and parole and sentencing reform, among other bills. Almost all of them had already been introduced, but most hadn’t made it out of key Senate or Assembly committees — the first major hurdle in the traditional legislative process.
During crunch time, however, the traditional process flies out the window. As New York Focus has reported, the final weeks of session see the committee system rendered mostly meaningless, with Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and a group of leadership-picked senators choosing which bills go up for a vote and which die.
Stewart-Cousins’s and Heastie’s offices took the Robert Brooks Blueprint and created their own list of passable bills. They were compiled into the prison omnibus and introduced on Monday as legislation sponsored by the chambers’ corrections committee chairs, Salazar and Assemblymember Erik Dilan. Leadership then rushed them through to floor votes in the two chambers. Bills to give incarcerated people more opportunities for early release, guarantee in-person visitation, allow DOCCS to quickly discipline abusive officers, and expand prison mental health services, among others, were left on the chopping block.
“We just submitted the [blueprint] bills to leadership, and internally they talked,” said Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, chair of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus. “Our leaders listened to us, and they came up with this bill package to look at accountability and how we can at least begin the path of making our correctional facilities more transparent and accountable.”
Stewart-Cousins’s and Heastie’s offices did not respond to requests for comment before press time.
Asked about the exclusion of parole and sentencing reform, Solages said there’s still too much opposition among legislators.
“We have to build capacity for these bills, because they’re not ready yet. There are members who are not ready to vote for them,” she said. “It’s not the end of the story. This is just the beginning.”
The final legislation has the potential to ramp up scrutiny and oversight of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
At the same time, it includes some of the least ambitious of the Robert Brooks Blueprint proposals. Half of included measures would address prison abuse only when it results in the worst case scenario of death. Six of the bills would boost outside agencies that investigate systemic issues, but they’d leave DOCCS mostly responsible for investigating individual complaints against its officers — a dynamic that advocates, incarcerated people, and some former staff have described as key to enabling a culture of violence.
“Oversight and transparency are important and necessary, but they are not enough,” Thomas Gant, a formerly incarcerated organizer at the Center for Community Alternatives, said in a statement. “If lawmakers are serious about honoring Robert Brooks and preventing future deaths, they must offer real pathways home for incarcerated people who have transformed while inside.”
The oversight bills will empower two bodies outside of DOCCS. One would give the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit tasked with monitoring the prison system, automatic access to certain prison agency records. It would also give the organization the authority to conduct spontaneous oversight visits; currently, it needs to give the prison system 72 hours’ notice.
Another portion of the prison omnibus will expand the State Commission of Correction, or SCOC, an oversight body led mostly by former law enforcement that concentrates its limited resources on county jails and rarely uses its full power to enforce corrections standards. The legislature boosted the commission’s budget this year and required it to inspect every jail and prison once a year. If Hochul signs the omnibus bill, it will add to those efforts by expanding SCOC’s commissioner ranks to include health experts, a formerly incarcerated person, a criminal defense lawyer, and other non-law enforcement members.
Other parts of the legislation would require DOCCS to install surveillance cameras in all but a few select areas of prison facilities; direct SCOC to perform a study on deaths in state prisons; and give the commission branch that investigates deaths access to full autopsy reports.
“For those of us who are legislators, [Brooks’s] murder lit a fire under us to increase oversight and accountability to protect our incarcerated community members,” Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who sponsored the standalone version of the SCOC expansion bill, said in a statement.
“There is a crisis in our prisons and jails, and oversight alone won’t solve it,” she said. “I will not stop fighting for the rights and dignity of my community members on the inside.”