Tag: Broome County Jail Death

Twice as Deadly as Rikers Island?

In 2025 the death rate in the Broome County Jail was over twice that of New York City’s notorious jails. Why? What can be done about it?

In New York City rising death and abuse rates drove a tidal wave of protest. The result? New York City’s jails were put under a Federal monitor while protest continued at the doors of City Hall and Rikers Island. New York State prisons—with death rates also lower than Broome County—are also under attack. The trigger here was dramatic, unexpected, and successive video footage of the brutal beating to death of two incarcerated and shackled men, Robert Brooks and Nanti Messiah. A statewide storm of protests ensued. Reforms and more oversight funding have been promised by the Governor and legislators.

No such inquiries much less oversight has emerged in Broome County or other rural and upstate counties. And these counties hold twice as many women and men as New York City.

Why so much death?

The number of deaths in prisons and jails vary considerably year by year. One might speculate that 2025 was an exceptional year in Broome County and New York City. But death rates are rising in many jails. Why? Reporters, activists, and state officials all look for explanations by turning to medical care. Has that been a factor in Broome?

It’s hard to know. No public explanation has been offered by the Sheriff, County Coroner, or the State Commission of Correction (SCOC) for the 2025 deaths of Chelsey Davis and William Warnock Jr. We may not know for years, if ever. The SCOC is required by law to issue a report on all deaths in jails and prisons, but it often takes years before the SCOC releases death reports to families and the public. And these are so heavily redacted as to render them, to be charitable, useless. Are there coverups? We don’t know

Take for example the last published report for Mitchel Lindow, who died in the Broome County jail on November 4^th, 2022. The SCOC report was issued much later, in March 2024. It is almost wholly redacted as you can see here:

What can family and friends and the public learn from this? What little text is visible admits repetitive medical malfeasance on the part of the jail administration, medical provider, and County Coroner. In short brief sentences we learn that Lindow was not given a medical examination and history upon admission to the jail as required by state law. We also find out that physicians should have been informed of Lindow’s dangerous high blood pressure results—but were not. One wonders what the blacked-out paragraphs might tell us. Most damning however is the revelation the SCOC could not hide: Broome County misdiagnosed the cause of death. It was not due to a heart attack: “The attending pathologist misdiagnosed the cause and manner of death and that Lindow’s death was attributed to a fentanyl overdose.”

Wilson Hospital, from which jail physicians have been drawn, was told to revise the official cause of death in its files. The Broome County Jail physician and the private, for-profit medical contractor, PrimeCare Medical, were told to examine and report back on why medical records and assessments were so faulty. One wonders if that report has ever been produced.

Apparently no one read and acted upon the June 2023 SCOC report of the previous person to die in the jail, Brandon Loori, which bluntly stated that “there was a complete failure by the medical staff to properly assess and provide treatment for a gravely ill individual… had Loori been timely sent to the hospital for a diagnosis and treatment, his death could have been prevented.” That report was heavily redacted as well:

And where did the fentanyl that killed Mr. Lindow come from? If you can attribute Lindow’s death to a heart attack, one need not apparently pursue the matter. Doing so has proven to be inconvenient. In the previous year an officer was discovered smuggling in meth, Adderall and other substances into the jail–but was tried and convicted only for bribery. He served no time, pleading addiction due to a past sports injury and ongoing treatment. This is defendable: substance use is an illness and people need treatment and not criminalization. The all too obvious contradiction here is that neither the Sheriff nor District Attorney apply this principle to other county residents. Far from it: they have launched a new drug war which has contributed significantly to increasing the daily jail population by fifty percent over the course of 2025.

Nor are the irregularities around Loori’s and Lindow’s deaths isolated cases. The Broome County Jail, its private medical provider, and the Sheriff have lost successive lawsuits over wrongful deaths (Alvin Rios, Salladin Barton, Thomas Husar), sexual and racial abuse (most recently the Holland case), and the beating of youth (the Vega and Legal Services youth case). Many cases have been settled out of court, with the county government refusing to reveal financial losses—despite rulings by the State Committee on Open Government that payments cannot be shielded by non-disclosure agreements with individuals.

This is the residue of entrenching mass incarceration: too many ill people are classified as criminals and incarcerated when they need medical treatment instead. County funding for the health department has been severely cut while jail funding and staffing have been dramatically expanded. Jails have now become responsible for drug and mental health treatment. But jails are not medical centers and cannot be turned into them. The evidence is all too clear that these county policies are deadly.

How might the tide of abuse and death be turned back? People have turned to multipole state and local agencies and met, so far, only obstacles and obfuscation.

State Commission of Correction?

One might start with the state institution charged with oversight of jails, the State Commission of Correction (SCOC), which has for years been composed of Sheriffs and jail administrators. It is charged by state law to conduct regular inspections of all jails but has in practice long failed to do so as documented by state audits (e.g. State Comptroller here) and successive investigative media reports (e.g. by NYFocus here). Its ways are mysterious, with few public meetings and little transparency as state legislators and community activists have long known and shown.

Indeed, the SCOC has been most effective in supporting Sheriffs and dictating the building and staffing of ever larger jails. Recent public protests have led to a new law that gives the SCOC more funding and the appointment of two part-time commissioners. The reform was so watered down however that advocates for the bill, the Jails Justice Network, organized a December 23, 2025, protest against the Governor’s and legislative leadership’s evisceration of the legislation.

If the state has failed to exercise oversight, what of local authorities who oversee and fund the jail’s daily operations?

County Health Department?

One might take the next step and approach the County Health Department. State law requires the Sheriff to request annual inspections by the County Health Department. But no inspections take place. The Sheriff simply tells the SCOC that “the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection” (2022 inspection p. 6).

March 2022 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the Broome County Jail, “Commission staff spoke with administration and noted that the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection.”

State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7015.3 “The chief administrative officer shall request that the local health authority with jurisdiction over the facility perform annual inspections of the facility. The results of such inspection shall be recorded in writing, together with a summary of the action taken to address any deficiencies, and maintained on file at the facility.”

Audits?

The Broome County Audit of the jail regularly reports inadequate financial accounting. The 2024 audit focuses only on profits from the commissary fund (which had a balance of $496,202 effectively a slush fund for the Sheriff) and found no policies or procedures to track revenue and expenditures. Revenue-generating contracts for food, health, and hygiene products were all long expired. No regular auditing of the jail’s out-of-state medical provider Correctional Medical Care and now PrimeCare Medical appears to take place. Financial losses due to court actions over inadequate care by PrimeCare Medical are frequent in Broome and surrounding counties.

A subsequent audit of PrimeCare Medical operations in Broome discovered that PrimeCare had long been charging the county for hours of services not rendered to the incarcerated, covering dental to mental health care. But this was oddly not determined to be fraud. Why CMC officials did not face felony charges under Theft of Services and Grand Larceny laws was never explained. CMC was simply allowed to pay back the funds—slowly over twelve months, with no interest.

Elected Officials?

One might finally turn to elected state officials who guard both the purse and health of county residents. By state law elected state representatives are empowered to conduct oversight visits to county jails, unannounced and with staff in hand. Some legislators in other counties have done so. But large demonstrations and protests at the Broome County Jail, in Albany, and at successive County legislative meetings have not persuaded Broome County’s Senator and Assembly representatives to ever make an oversight visit.

ICE Enters

Recent overcrowding in the jail due in large part to an expanding influx of ICE and Federal detainees has put yet further pressure on medical care. As an official ICE detention center, the jail has witnessed rapid, short inflows and outflows of ICE detainees. For detainees it is an immediate problem: how can you get adequate medical care? People go to the medical unit to find no one speaks their language. Local residents in the jail are fearful too, with one attempting to file a grievance over inadequate screening of new arrivals.

Sheriff Frederick Akshar :  “This is where I am today. If tomorrow, ICE said ‘we need your assistance’ in some effort, I would help them… I do want to be abundantly clear though, that if any one of our federal partners, regardless of what letter the agency starts with, asks me for help today, tomorrow, a week from now, the answer would be yes.”  WSKG, March 28, 2025 “Broome County Jail opts into federal immigration enforcement program”

In the last two months, whole sections of the jail have gone into masked isolation mode, including pods containing ICE detainees. After at least one person was taken to hospital and tested positive for TB, rumors arose of active TB cases in the jail. In this instance the Health Department, so absent otherwise in jail medical dilemmas, held an extraordinary joint press conference with the Sheriff at which the Broome County Health Department Medical Director, flanked by the Undersheriff, Sheriff, and County Executive, told the public not to worry, there is no confirmed case of TB, “there is no outbreak.”

Looking forward

Broome County regularly achieves the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of all 62 New York Counties. Community organizations, activists, and families have mounted impressive campaigns in the last ten years against racialized mass incarceration and mass policing, ranging from rallies at the jail, to court watches, to marches for the treatment and not criminalization of those with disabilities and mental health and substance use illnesses.  To date state and county legislators have failed to listen, continuing to entrench the long-term trend of decreasing funding for local health resources while steadily increasing funding for the jail. As long as these commitments and policies hold, it is hard to be optimistic about the health of county’s residents outside as well as inside our supersized jail.