It’s been 54 years since the infamous Attica prison uprising, when incarcerated men took over the maximum-security facility in western New York for nearly five days and drew nationwide attention to the abuse, neglect and racism they’d endured.

The uprising prompted New York state to implement a number of prison reforms, including improved access to hygiene items, visits, education, religious services and avenues to report mistreatment. Yet the policy changes weren’t a cure-all: Though the state enacted more reforms and saw its prison population decline in the decades that followed, abuse and neglect remained a fact of prison life and rarely made headlines.

Then came the murder. On Dec. 9, 2024, guards at central New York’s Marcy Correctional Facility beat a 43-year-old incarcerated man named Robert Brooks, injuring him so severely that he died the next day.

Unbeknown to the officers, some of their body-worn cameras were on a standby mode and recorded silent video of the killing, which the state Office of the Attorney General released later that month. The footage showed Brooks in a green prison uniform, slouched on a medical examination table, his wrists shackled behind his back and face bleeding. Guards shoved an object into his mouth, threw him against a window, and took turns punching his face and body.

The video sparked national outrage, followed by an aggressive response from corrections officers, leaving the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, which runs the state prison system, in a prolonged political and operational crisis. It was, in its own way, an Attica moment, arguably leading to more scrutiny and more tumult than the system has seen since September 1971.

First came calls for reform. Officials and advocates trained their eyes on corrections officers, calling for greater oversight of DOCCS and accountability for abusive staff. Lawmakers compiled a legislative package with the backing of Brooks’s father, who has become a reluctant leader in New York’s prison reform movement. Legislative leaders took some of the least ambitious parts of the package and passed them as an omnibus in June. The legislation hit Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk on Monday; she has 10 business days to sign it into law.

Hochul, meanwhile, announced a suite of her own policies and funding initiatives seeking to beef up DOCCS’ existing oversight and accountability mechanisms. DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello put his weight behind the measures, saying at the time that the Brooks video changed his perception of the system in which he’d worked for nearly three decades.

“It made me question everything,” he said. The governor and legislature’s moves did not take up advocates’ proposals to reform sentencing and parole, nor some reformers’ more ambitious accountability goals, like creating an outside body to handle investigations of abuse.

Then came blowback. Hours after a special prosecutor announced the impending arrest of the guards who killed Brooks, corrections officers launched a wildcat strike, which quickly spread to all of DOCCS’ 42 facilities.

With the strike came pandemonium. DOCCS locked down the prisons, and Hochul deployed the National Guard as emergency staff. The troops and the few guards who didn’t abandon their posts struggled to keep the incarcerated population fed and showered, sometimes sleeping in the prisons between back-to-back shifts.

The striking guards said that they launched their action over unsafe working conditions. They argued that the path to safety involved repealing one of the system’s most significant humanitarian reforms in decades, a solitary confinement law that DOCCS never fully implemented.

Two weeks into the strike, another group of guards allegedly beat another incarcerated man, 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi, to death at a prison across the street from Brooks’. One officer kicked Nantwi in the face with a two-step running start, “like he was making a punt in a football game,” his cellmate told New York Focus in March. Another punched his face until he was unconscious, he said.

The strike ended after three weeks and multiple ultimatums from prison agency administration. Around 2,000 guards didn’t return to work after DOCCS’ final offer. DOCCS fired them, leaving a large hole in what the prison agency describes as an already understaffed corrections officer corps.

DOCCS has remained below its target staffing levels since. The agency launched an aggressive recruitment campaign, but the number of guards working for DOCCS has dropped since the end of the strike, according to data kept by the Office of the State Comptroller and obtained by New York Focus.

On Feb. 1, before officers launched the strike, DOCCS employed more than 14,200 corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants, the data show. As of April 1, after the mass firings, that number had dropped to 12,600. And as of Nov. 1, it had dropped again to just over 11,900.

The lack of security staff has contributed to continued chaos in the prison system. Without enough guards to supervise programs and escort incarcerated people from one area to another, some facilities have left prisoners locked in their cells for upwards of 23 hours a day, including in scorching heat. College courses have been canceled, as have programs that incarcerated people need to earn time off their sentences. The dysfunction trickled down to local jails, which had to absorb a backlog of thousands of people sentenced to state time whom the prisons didn’t have the capacity to take.

On top of the operational crisis, DOCCS has come under increased scrutiny by watchdogs and the press. In March, New York Focus chronicled a history of alleged nepotism within DOCCS’ top administration and its lackluster internal accountability office, which is supposed to keep abuse in check. In August, the HALT Solitary campaign found that the 2024 suicide rate in New York state prisons was triple the rate over the previous two decades and four times higher than the national prison average. In November, The New York Times and New York Civil Liberties Union found that prison staff use of force has been rising over the past decade and becoming more vicious. This month, The Marshall Project uncovered a decade’s worth of lethal medical neglect in DOCCS facilities.

And on Saturday, an incarcerated man at Attica told the local Free Lance News that guards beat him for testifying in Brooks’ murder trials.

On Tuesday, Martuscello, the commissioner, issued a statement acknowledging the need for more changes.

“As Commissioner of DOCCS, it is my responsibility to ensure we do not look away from what happened to Robert Brooks,” he said. “The question before us is not whether we remember but how we move forward. How do we rebuild trust with the people in our custody, the communities to which they will return, and the families who expect their loved ones to be treated with basic dignity?”

To Ahmed Greene, who is currently incarcerated at Wende Correctional Facility and has served on committees aimed at convincing DOCCS administrators to improve conditions for prisoners, the turmoil since Brooks’ killing and the guard strike represents decades of inaction coming home to roost.

The state never learned its lesson after Attica, Greene said: “They had 50 years to figure this out.”

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This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/368trn9p.