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I witnessed the brutality of America’s prisons first hand. We need urgent reform | Alex Duran

When a camera records an act of lethal violence against someone in official custody, the state cannot hide what it typically keeps in the dark. That’s what happened when correction officers murdered Robert Brooks at Marcy correctional facility in New York. Restrained in handcuffs, Brooks was beaten to death by officers unaware that their own body-worn cameras were documenting every blow.

The deaths of Brooks and another handcuffed man, Messiah Nantwi, were the catalysts of a recent investigation by the New York Times that found guards in New York prisons use violence at alarming rates. Because the public is largely unaware of what their tax dollars fund behind prison walls, these revelations are significant. But the violence is not unique to New York.

The states that lock up the most people – Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama – are the places where watchdogs keep uncovering horrific conditions, from medical neglect that has killed at least 50 people, to jail systems like Mississippi’s where authorities literally cannot say how many people have died. Oversight is sometimes the only thing ensuring a prison sentence does not become a death sentence.

I know how easily cruelty becomes routine when no one is watching. I served 12 years in New York state prisons for a Bronx shootout that left one man dead.

Basic oversight is the exception, not the rule. A 2024 overview by the National Conference of State Legislatures found only 19 states have “fully independent, permanent” prison-oversight bodies that meet a basic standard of external accountability.

There is one way to pierce the opacity of our prison systems, however. Contraband cellphones, smuggled in by guards and sold to prisoners on the black market, can capture these deplorable conditions in grainy, devastating detail.

Nowhere is this violence more overwhelming than in Alabama, where close to 300 incarcerated people died in 2024. More than 100 perished in just the first half of 2025. Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s new documentary The Alabama Solution, which I co-produced, uses this footage to reveal a system so lawless and predatory that the state fights harder to criminalize and block cellphones than to confront the cruelty they expose.

The Hobbesian world of Alabama prisons – men bleeding from stab wounds, others strung out on drugs, slumped against walls, convulsing, or lying totally still – was intimately familiar to me. After I was released in 2016, similar memories haunted my mind. Nights when a man’s screams ricocheted down the tier as he was beaten by guards. Mornings when we’d wake to someone dangling from a bedsheet after begging for mental health care that never came. Smells of Corcraft germicidal cleaner mixing with blood after a stabbing. Once home, I was often at a loss for words when asked what prison was like. How do you convey the terror of lying in your bunk, counting the footsteps of guards approaching? How do you explain the particular silence that follows watching a man get dropped to the concrete, coughing up teeth?

When I watched the cellphone footage from Alabama’s prisons, I recognized my own experiences. This is the achievement of fearless incarcerated men in the film like Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council Jr, who weren’t just documenting harm, but imagining a different kind of system.

The brutality we see in many state prisons is a choice. This summer, on a visit to the Maine state prison, I witnessed men use email, Zoom and other digital tools as part of programs instituted by Randall Liberty, the forward-looking Maine corrections commissioner. When prison leadership has nothing to hide, incarcerated people have access to technology that would make it easy to document abuses.

New York has recently taken a step in the right direction. The governor, Kathy Hochul, signed a long-fought overhaul of the State Commission of Correction, the body charged with ensuring that jails and prisons are safe and humane. The new law expands the commission from three to five members and for the first time mandates that people with lived experience of incarceration and expertise in public and behavioral health be included. What happens next will determine whether this reform becomes real or simply another layer of bureaucracy designed to absorb outrage while leaving violence untouched.

The cruelty we see in New York and Alabama is fundamental to America’s very beginnings. After the revolution, early reformers declared the gallows barbaric and imagined prisons as a “civilized” alternative. But from the start, these cages were filled with people pushed to the margins of a new nation, and mortality rates rivaled the colonial punishments reformers claimed to leave behind. Two and a half centuries later, our prisons are still deadly, still in need of reform.

It shouldn’t take suing departments of corrections or capturing atrocities on illegal cellphones to see what happens behind prison walls. The US supreme court justice, Louis Brandeis, famously stated that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Nowhere is the bright light of transparency more urgently needed than in our prisons.