Racial bias in New York state prisons is 'fact of life,' newspaper investigation concludes
Black and Hispanic prisoners in New York prisons are disciplined and sent to solitary confinement at higher rates than whites, and the disparities are greatest when officers had greater discretion, a New York Times investigation has found.
Overall, blacks were 30 percent more likely to be cited for a disciplinary issue than whites, and were 65 percent more likely to be sent to solitary. The story is here; a separate story on the parole system is here.
The newspaper reviewed tens of thousands of disciplinary cases in 2015 and three years of parole decisions, and found that disparities persist even when differences in offenses and age are taken into account. (A greater share of black inmates in the state are in prison for violent offenses, and minority inmates are more likely to be younger.)
Some inmates said guards called them derogatory terms and physically attacked them. Some said that officers provoke altercations with racial slurs or inappropriate pat-downs and then cited them for assaults. “Whether loud and vulgar or insinuated and masked,” the New York Times reports, “racial bias in the state prison system is a fact of life.”
At the Clinton prison near the Canadian border, only one of the prison’s nearly 1,000 guards is African-American. Black inmates at the prison were nearly four times as likely to be sent to solitary confinement as whites, and the black prisoners’ average stay there was 125 days, 35 days longer than the average for whites.
The article says much of the largely white prison workforce comes from less diverse communities upstate, and many of the racial problems “stem from a fundamental upstate-downstate culture clash that plays out daily on the cellblocks.”
Many prisoners say they prefer to be housed in Sing Sing, where 83 percent of uniformed staffers are black or Hispanic, compared to 17 percent for the prison system overall. Disciplinary disparities do not exist at Sing Sing.
A spokesman for the State Department of Corrections told the Times that racial disparities could be explained by the inmates’ full disciplinary histories, data that the Times was not allowed to access. The spokesman also said that the vast majority of the agency’s workforce approach the job in a professional manner.
