That thing where they had his handcuffed arms pulled up backward over his head, the North Vietnamese did that to John McCain and our other prisoners of war. And the boot stomp to the groin, while he’s bound and restrained, Solzhenitsyn wrote about that happening in Stalin’s prisons.
And the standing around, maybe grinning, doing nothing, assenting through inaction, that’s what they had at Auschwitz.
And at Marcy. An anonymous backwater New York prison where a few weeks ago a 43-year-old inmate from Rochester seems to have been sadistically and systematically beaten to death by a handful of corrections officers.
He was Robert Brooks, and he was seven years into a 12-year sentence for savagely stabbing his girlfriend. It was charged as attempted murder and pled to assault and he went away. He came back a few days ago, in a box.
Today, his family is memorializing him. A few days ago, they watched the video of him being killed. The video that has since spiraled around the Internet, sickening all who see it and revealing a horror that few could imagine and none can deny.
In the prison system of the State of New York, under a weak and unpopular governor and an acting corrections commissioner up to his eyeballs in nepotism, under a legislative scheme that has overcrowded prisons, undercut correctional officers and stripped most legal means of disciplining prisoners.
Not in some dark and distant unenlightened day, but this month, in this country, while Christmas music played on the radio. A savage, methodical beating conjured up in the depths of hell.
A powder keg that made the old people think of Rodney King and the young people think of George Floyd. A handful of uniformed white guys beating a handcuffed and barely conscious black man. One monster rearing back like a mule and putting a karate side kick into his crotch, rupturing his scrotum.
That was on America’s phones, and on its evening news, and forever on its heart.
Somehow, the prisons of New York had become so poorly governed, the screening and supervision of correctional officers so failed, that this could happen. That it could be carried off in a manner that seemed almost commonplace. That such torture as this could be happening amidst a group of more than a dozen professionals and not a one of them had the morals, the courage or the integrity to object or come to this man’s aid.
It was a nightmare come true, a nightmare that took a man’s life and from which his family can never escape.
A nightmare that lends credence to claims of institutional racism and a criminal justice system designed to warehouse and degrade black Americans. I, personally, don’t believe those claims. But I can’t deny this event, and I can’t argue against the conclusions people might draw.
When word first came that an inmate had died, I said that I wasn’t confused about who the good guys were, and that until we got more information we needed to give the correctional officers the benefit of the doubt. I almost immediately heard from people in the criminal justice community, people who also wear uniforms or go into courts to seek justice for victims. I learned that Robert Brooks had been handcuffed when he was assaulted, and I learned the specifics of the injuries, and I learned the horrific details of the video, and I reported all these things, and then we all saw the video ourselves.
It turned out I had been confused about who the good guys were.
It turned out that the most progressive state in the nation has possibly the most oppressive prison system.
At least it did that day in that room in the case of that man.
As I watched and rewatched the video, I couldn’t help but notice the American flag on the uniform jackets of the correctional officers. I was enraged that these men had disgraced that flag by carrying it into such a dishonorable deed.
But it is what it is, a reality to which we all are now witnesses.
And justice must be done.
The officers involved ought to spend the rest of their lives in prison. The commissioner and his siblings should be fired. The Department of Corrections should be overhauled from top to bottom. The legislature should impose greater accountability standards for both inmates and officers. The prisons should be properly staffed and funded, and cameras should be everywhere all the time.
And the governor should be held accountable. This was on her watch. This is her state government. She rules with an iron fist, and she is responsible for this.