Some good news: NYCLU is suing the SCOC to get records of abusive correctional staff. Local activists have long fought to reveal the SCOC as an operation run by and on behalf of Sheriffs and mass incarcerators. A somewhat dated background piece is on the Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier website here.
The SCOC operates in almost complete secrecy: its January 3, 2024 meeting lasted all of one minute and six seconds, simply to go into closed, private session; the January 24th meeting lasted less than 3 minutes before going into private session. It rejects 97% of the thousands of grievances it receives from county jails, taking 8 seconds to review each one. That’s the state of NY justice under the SCOC.
Giving the SCOC more funds as some propose will not address this problem. An independent oversight agency with representative members of the incarcerated community is what we need.
Recent local evidence of abuse is all too clear from the Vega and Holland lawsuits. Taej’on Vega won his lawsuit, filed by Legal Services of Central New York, documenting the jail administration’s and correctional officers’ coverup of his beating and mental and sexual abuse (read a summary here).
Makkyla Holland, a Black trans woman, won her lawsuit for discrimination and abuse on the basis of her sex, transgender status, and disability. NYCLU filed on her behalf against Broome County, the County Sheriff, the jail’s medical staff, and almost a dozen correctional officers. Officers beat her, subjected her to illegal strip searches, and denied prescribed medications including antidepressants and hormone treatments.
“Strip, N-word!” That’s what Broome County correctional officers told the prone and handcuffed African American teenager as they dragged him across the floor to his cell two years ago. It got more brutal quickly, leaving Taej’on Vega naked, badly bruised, unable to breathe, coughing up blood, and sexually and mentally traumatized. And yet: a courageous mother and son triumphed in the end against all odds.
For this week a court decision came down and their lawsuit against Broome County and Correctional Officers was successful. The County and its officers were judged to have violated Taej’on’s rights and deliberately covered up evidence of the beating. A financial settlement is yet to come.
It has been a long road to some justice. At the time of the beating Taej’on’s grievance was found to have “no merit” and denied–as is almost always the case. Despite being aware of his mental health issues, he was like many others denied the multiple medications he was prescribed prior to entering the jail in October 2019. Like all, incarceration meant he was no longer working to support his family.
In the wake of the assault, unlike others, his mother managed to take video snapshots of his bruised body and pressed his case. Members of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST), including the author, visited Mr. Vega as part of a program that visits vulnerable persons who don’t have family nearby and often need a watchful presence. Just wrote letters to legislative leaders, calling for investigations. And then in June lawyers for Legal Services of Central New York filed the lawsuit against the county and the correctional officers, including the sergeant in charge at the time.
Doom County Jail?
It is rare that families have the resources or find lawyers to press such cases. But they keep coming.
Makyyla Holland recently won a stunning award for abuse in the jail, with the jail and county now required to roll back discriminatory practices, rules, and cultures against trans persons and LGBTQ persons generally. Several families have won wrongful death suits, with the Husar family’s $5 million lawsuit outstanding. An investigation by NY Focus reporters this month revealed that the introduction of more medically assisted treatment in the jail has been an abusive disaster. As the headline put it, “‘Doom County Jail’: Dysfunction Plagues Program for Incarcerated Opioid Users.”
What are the incarcerated and their families to do? Medically assisted treatment in the jail for substance users was, after all, announced with great fanfare as a major successful reform. The Holland settlement relies upon persons filing grievances as the sole enforcement guarantee. Yet those with problems like Taej’on or Makylla still only support legal claims if they exhaust, and get exhausted by, the grievance process. The evidence is clear: incarcerated persons have long been denied access to grievance slips as long reported by advocates to the local press. In 2022 an assessment of the grievance process published in the community newspaper Binghamton Bridge found that in the previous six months not a single grievance filed in the jail was forwarded to the oversight review committee of the State Commission of Correction (SCOC)—which rejected 99.7% of grievances that reached it.
The recently released 2022 Broome County Sheriff’s Annual Report confirms this continues: in the last year the vast majority of filed grievances were rejected outright, with not a single grievance about the staff, legal issues, or grievance polices and services being passed upward to the SCOC. One grievance about medical services was forwarded. And officers named in the lost lawsuits and settlements remain unpunished, in the jail, and on full pay. Lacking any real reform, how will abusive, transphobic and homophobic officers still on the payroll enforce the Holland settlement?
“All the juveniles spoke of the harsh and abusive practices [of] the Correctional Officers (COs) with many identifying in exquisite detail the beatings they endured at the hands of the COs’…. [a] youth spoke of an incident in which he was restrained in a restraint chair and then pepper sprayed while he was restrained. Still another youth spoke of the COs carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their “n-word [sic] beaters.”
As more lawsuits are lost by the County and the abuse continues, it is time for elected officials to exercise their oversight powers and investigate, including visiting the jail unannounced as they are legally empowered to do. Can they speak for basic human rights, and report their findings to the community? We all also need to thank the Taej’ons and Makyylas for their bravery and persistence.
“Strip, N-word!” That’s what Broome County correctional officers told Taej’on Vega after dragging the prone and handcuffed Black/Latino teenager across the floor to his cell. It got more brutal quickly, leaving Vega badly bruised and traumatized.
Similar stories have for years been repeated from cell to cell, from incarcerated persons to parents and friends. In this case, however, evidence exists. For Vega and his mother are courageously persistent, and Legal Services of Central New York admirably stepped in and filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Vega.
Violence vs Black Youth, Again
Vega was not alone: women, Black, Latinx, and the poor are vastly overrepresented in the jail, and those with medical and disability conditions are even more vulnerable. Mr. Vega, at the age of 19, was in that difficult position: his fiercely dedicated mother couldn’t visit, and the jail would prove a punishing place.
Mr. Vega had attended Johnson City High School with a recognized disability, including Bipolar Disorder and ADHD, but had not graduated. When he entered the jail he was knowingly denied meds for his previous prescriptions of Adderall, Geodon, Lexapro, and Risperdal.
What happened on February 10th is detailed in the lawsuit. As part of a shakedown search, correctional officers entered his unit in riot gear. Vega was ordered to lay down flat on the floor—and he did, on his stomach. As officers passed by, he asked how their day was going. For that, an officer pressed his knee on Vega’s neck and pressed his thumb on the nerves there. Sergeant Daniel Weir then ordered two officers, Richard Hrebin and Corey Fowler, to take Vega to his cell. They handcuffed him, dragged him to his cell by his outstretched arms, and proceeded to beat and slap him on the head, body and back steadily calling him the n-word. They then uncuffed and told him to “strip, n-word,” and proceeded to perform a search of his genitals and anus to humiliate him.
Court papers with these details recount that he was held so tight he could not breathe, was shaken twice, and told “do what you’re told, n-word.” After all this, they destroyed his few personal items in the cell, including family pictures, and repeatedly flushed his sheets in the cell’s toilet. Vega was then left naked in his cell, traumatized and in pain, and coughing up blood. Other officers heard Vega being pounced on, dragged to his cell and the noise of the beating, but did not intervene.
Punishing Grievances, Institutionalized Racism
On February 12th Vega filed grievances at the urging of his mother, who obtained the following pictures of his bruised and swollen face and body from a video call.
These injuries were also visible to members of the community organization, Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST), including the author, who visited Mr. Vega as volunteers, as part of a program that visits vulnerable persons in the jail who don’t have family and often need a watchful presence.
On February 14th his grievance was found to have “no merit” and denied.
This is not an isolated case. Persons incarcerated in the jail have, in the past, openly commented on the institutionalized racism there, reporting to local organizers that officers refer to their batons as “n-word sticks,” and that they have “been called N-word, monkey, and other degrading names… when we speak up we get punished by being put in the box [solitary]”.
“All the juveniles spoke of the harsh and abusive practices [of] the Correctional Officers (COs) with many identifying in exquisite detail the beatings they endured at the hands of the COs’…. [a] youth spoke of an incident in which he was restrained in a restraint chair and then pepper sprayed while he was restrained. Still another youth spoke of the COs carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their “n-word [sic] beaters.”
Taej’on and his mother have considerable courage, for it is well known that even attempts to file a grievance often result in retaliation by correctional officers. To pursue any public or legal case, however, one must legally have filed grievances. This Taej’on did, with retaliation that followed. There is no expectation of grievances being heard, even at the state level: those that get filed and sent to the State Commission of Correction are so often denied in their entirely that the State Comptroller in 2018 investigated and denounced the SCOC’s almost total rejection of all grievances.
Medical Maltreatment and Death
JUST May 23, 2019 protest outside UHS Jail Doctor’s Office
The County and the medical provider, Correctional Medical Care, have also lost a series of wrongful death suits, brought in the rare instances when families can mount a long and expensive legal case. These include the 2011 death of Alvin Rios who was left “in an emergent, life-threatening status without appropriate medical attention” before dying in his cell on July 20, 2011. Questioned about multiple deaths and the lawsuit, County Sheriff David Harder blew it off, telling the media that deaths “will happen.” In 2015, Salladin Barton, developmentally disabled and well known and liked on the streets of Binghamton, pleaded with his family: “The guards are going to kill me. You gotta get me outta here.” He died shortly thereafter. The Sheriff’s response to Barton’s family lawsuit was equally cold and blunt: “It’s a bunch of crap.”
A Federal Court judge had the last word however, issuing a blistering judgement in favor of Salladin’s Barton’s mother, Rose Carter, declaring
As a result of the ongoing failure by CMC to provision appropriate medical care to inmates at the County Jail, and the failure by these policymaking defendants to intervene to correct it, Barton died while in the County’s custody.”
The Judge went much further, declaring
“Sheriff Harder and/or Administrator Smolinsky, in their roles as policymakers for the Jail, possessed abundant knowledge about CMC’s egregious misconduct, knew that CMC was actively engaged in this misconduct at the County Jail, and yet failed to take any corrective action to prevent the substantial risk of harm those policies and practices posed to the inmates in their custody.
Another case, by the parents of Thomas Husar, is underway, seeking $5 million in damages for the death of their seriously ill son. His cries for help were ignored for at least 12 hours by correctional officers on November 2019—pleas echoed by other inmates. Lawsuits, like those on behalf of Thomas Husar and Taej’on Vega, remain the lonely possibility for unearthing brutality and corruption: there is not even the most minimal county or state oversight of jail operations. A recent state law requires police departments and county sheriffs to release disciplinary records, as might be filed for officers investigated and discharged for sexual abuse, regular drinking on the job, or bringing methamphetamines into the jail in exchange for thousands of dollars—all allegations reported to those with family members in the Broome County jail. Sheriff Harder refuses however to release any records, declaring in defiance of state law that he possesses no disciplinary records at all—as seen in multiple, denied replies to freedom-of-information requests.
And Now? Fire Harder, Terminate CMC, Investigate
The formerly incarcerated, the families of the incarcerated and the dead, and local community organizers have now collected and reported a long list of abuses and deaths to state authorities, including to the NY State Attorney General. They have testified before the state legislature. Letters have been written to legislative leaders in Albany again regarding the brutalities meted out to Taej’on Vega. This June local community organizations called upon the Governor to remove the Sheriff from office and terminate the county’s contract with the private medical company. Independent, open, and community-based investigation and oversight is dramatically needed. It is far past time for our elected officials to act. How many more beatings, how many more deaths, must pass before they take action?
Bill Martin is a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier and Bartle Professor in the Sociology Department of the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Recent Comments