New York judges who sentence people to prison or jail will soon be required to make regular, in-depth visits to correctional facilities — a sweeping reform advocates hope will give jurists a deeper understanding of incarceration.
Under a new rule approved by the state’s court system, judges will tour housing units, intake areas, medical and mental health clinics, recreation spaces and other parts of prisons and jails on a recurring basis.
Judges will also be required to meet with incarcerated people to promote direct dialogue.
The change follows years of uneven compliance with an existing visitation requirement, with some judges ignoring the rule entirely and others showing minimal compliance by simply walking into the entrance area of correctional facilities, according to judicial insiders.
“The implementation of this proposal will make New York a national and international leader in connecting the judiciary with the too-often-overlooked corrections system,” Michael Mushlin, a longtime prison-rights advocate and law professor emeritus at Pace University, told The City Reporter.
Members of the subcommittee that crafted the proposal said their own prison visits left lasting impressions. During one visit to Sing Sing, they met Carlos Herring, an incarcerated man who later wrote to thank them.
“The meeting with the judges was tremendously powerful,” Herring wrote. “For incarcerated men, the only time we speak to judges is to defend ourselves against something. To sit down with judges and have a real conversation is life-changing.”
Detainees put makeshift decorations in their Rikers Island jail cell windows, Dec. 8, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Mushlin has spent years pushing the court system to adopt the visitation reform.
The new rule will take effect Jan. 1, 2028, to give a task force of trial court judges and court officials time to develop a plan for implementing the initiative.
The state court system will likely have to add administrative staff to coordinate. Gov. Kathy Hochul did not set aside any new money for the plan in this year’s state budget.
The proposal would take some judges out of commission for at least a day. That will put an added strain onto an already short-staffed system.
The initiative is aimed at strengthening a requirement that has existed for decades.
Under current rules, judges who handle criminal or family cases must complete a cycle of facility visits within one year of taking office and repeat the process every four years.
The visits were put on the books as part of a series of reforms enacted after the 1971 Attica prison uprising, in which 43 people — mostly incarcerated men — were killed after state troopers stormed the facility.
But the reform essentially failed in part because there was no internal system to coordinate the visits or specific rules determining what those drop-ins should entail, according to Mushlin and other criminal justice reformers.
The change — to formally amend Part 17 of the Rules of the Chief Judge — was initially announced in November.
Mushlin credited the rule’s adoption in part to an unusually broad coalition of supporters who weighed in during the public comment period.
The court system received 146 comments totaling more than 400 pages from judges, attorneys, correctional administrators, medical and mental health professionals, academics, clergy members, formerly incarcerated people and advocacy organizations, according to Mushlin.
“The outpouring of support from so many different corners of the justice system was extraordinary,” Mushlin said. “Without it, I very much doubt we would have achieved this milestone.”
Despite the broad public participation, the court system has resisted releasing the comments.
Michael Siudzinski, counsel to the state court system, repeatedly denied The City Reporter’s requests for the records, first arguing they were exempt from disclosure as “intra-agency” communications and later saying they remained under review by court officials.The court system has still not made the comments public.
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