Statement from End Prison Violence on the WilmerHale Report

The WilmerHale report confirms what incarcerated people, families, advocates, and survivors have known for decades: there is no functional system of oversight and discipline for correctional staff in New York State prisons, resulting in a reality in which both incarcerated individuals and correctional staff feel unsafe in New York’s prisons.

WilmerHale documents a deeply entrenched culture of abuse, cover-ups, and corruption within the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). The numbers tell the story: in 2025, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) - which is an entity within DOCCS - received 1,189 complaints of staff misconduct and substantiated just 47. This is not a system that is working; it is a system that is fundamentally unequipped or simply unwilling to deliver accountability.

The report correctly details serious deficiencies and obstacles created by the current disciplinary and arbitration process. Yet its recommendations fail to meet the magnitude of the crisis. There is no reason to believe that simply giving OSI more resources, or more investigators, will produce meaningful change. More funding for a broken system is not reform; it is just a waste of taxpayer money.

The core problem is the absence of adequate accountability. Whether due to understaffing, misplaced loyalties, or otherwise, the Department has not demonstrated that it can effectively police itself. A substantiation rate by OSI of less than 4 percent of excessive force complaints, and a concerningly common failure to seek discipline even in the rare instances where misconduct is substantiated, is indicative of failed oversight and the absence of accountability. When investigations remain within the same institutional structure they are meant to police, the result is predictable: misconduct goes unaddressed, abuse continues unabated, and public trust continues to erode.

Further, while the report correctly identifies the fallibility of an arbitration system that more often than not reinstates the officers DOCCS wishes to terminate, it recommends vesting sole and virtually unfettered disciplinary authority in the Commissioner. Real accountability cannot depend on the unchecked discretion of the agency whose employees are under investigation.

The report makes it abundantly clear that New York needs an independent entity with the authority to investigate allegations of correctional staff misconduct and to prosecute wrongdoing. That entity must be free from political or institutional influence. Until investigations are untangled from the system that enables the very abuse being investigated, the culture of impunity documented in this report will continue.

The WilmerHale report makes one thing unmistakably clear: the current model has failed. The answer is not to strengthen a broken system; it is to replace it with one that is independent, transparent, and worthy of the public's trust. 

The End Prison Violence campaign will continue advancing policies and legislation that establish investigations into incidents of violence and misconduct within the state’s prisons that ensure accountability that is not compromised by internal conflicts of interest. The campaign will also pursue reforms to strengthen disciplinary processes, including changes that require DOCCS to remove abusive staff and that prevent arbitration from routinely overturning the termination of correctional officers whose misconduct demonstrates they are unfit to serve, while ensuring appropriate due process protections.

End Prison Violence calls on Governor Hochul and the Legislature to reject half measures and enact the structural reforms necessary to end the cycle of abuse, impunity, and institutional violence in New York's prisons.

          #####