What’s most shocking is that none of the bystanders are shocked.
I’m talking about the December 9 murder of Robert Brooks by correctional officers at the Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate New York. New York Attorney General Letitia James recently released bodycam video from four officers who were present while other officers beat Brooks senseless in the prison infirmary. He was declared dead a few hours later.
The videos are horrific. Let me just put it this way: During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump said the country needed “one real rough, nasty,” and “violent day” of police retribution in order to end crime. If anyone wants to see what that might look like—if they want to see what it looks like for agents of the law to beat a defenseless human being, and to keep pummeling him long after his face is bloody and his body is limp—they should watch these videos. For everyone else, I don’t recommend it.
Yet as horrific as the beating was, it is not what struck me. Those who murdered Brooks will be held accountable, and I imagine I will have a great deal to say about what accountability might look like in essays to come. Crimes like this, by those who wield the power of the State, pose a particular challenge to abolitionists, and it is not a challenge that should go unanswered. But in this essay, I want to talk about culture.
As their colleagues beat a man to death with bare hands and booted feet, about 15 correctional officers milled around and watched with the same indifference they would have if they were watching someone paint a barn. This only happens if their culture embraces it. But what does that really mean? What does it mean, literally and practically, to work in an environment that makes this behavior so utterly unremarkable? What are the unwritten rules and norms that must exist for this behavior to take hold?
Let’s start with the obvious: At a minimum, it means that violence against prisoners is normal. Perhaps not lethal violence, but brutality nonetheless. Think about it: if this assault had been out of the ordinary, we would’ve seen it in the faces and the body language of those who were present. They would’ve crowded to watch or perhaps turned away. They would’ve reacted somehow—a wince or a grimace, or maybe just a nod—and in that brief, involuntary reaction, we would understand that they were seeing something new, or at least uncommon. That a line was being crossed. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing. Truly, that is the most astounding aspect of the videos. You cannot watch them and pretend this is a story about a few bad apples.
But it’s not simply violence that has been normalized. So too is the secrecy. Needless to say, this posse of correctional officers did not know they were being filmed. In fact, the officers wearing the bodycams did not turn them on, and because they didn’t turn them on, they clearly thought their cameras were not recording. But that was their mistake: the cameras were in standby mode. There was no audio but the video was still recording the entire scene. Were it not for this mistake on the part of these four officers, the beating would have taken place in secret, and there would have been no record of how Brooks sustained his fatal injuries, as every officer on the scene plainly expected. Despite the presence of bodycams, there is a norm of secrecy.
And of course, secrecy only works if can be sustained, which means there is also a norm of silence. The COs who murdered Robert Brooks in plain view of their colleagues obviously expected that no one would ever utter a word against them. You don’t see this sort of behavior unless everyone understands and obeys the unwritten rule: no CO rats out another CO. In fact, this code apparently extends to medical staff. At least one person, who appears to be a medic, was present during the beating and examined Brooks afterwards. One of the videos captures this person smiling and laughing with some of the COs while the beating was taking place. None of this would have occurred unless everyone in the room could be absolutely confident that brutality by a CO will never become known. And you only acquire that sort of confidence through repeated experience.
Then there has to be a norm of impunity. Not every beating culminates in a prisoner’s death, which means that on at least some occasions, a prisoner who survives a beating might be inclined to lodge an internal complaint against a CO (though that would certainly risk retaliation). That complaint will be adjudicated by another CO or prison employee. But a norm of silence means that no one can ever accept the word of an inmate against that of a CO. A CO who beats a prisoner has to be assured that if there were ever an internal inquiry, all COs would band together, including the CO who decided his fate. We don’t see this behavior unless officers who brutalize inmates know they will never be held to account.
Finally, and most importantly, there has to be a norm of dehumanization. We would recoil in horror and howl with rage if we saw people treat a mule the way these officers treated Robert Brooks. A murder like this only happens when correctional officers believe they share nothing, including their humanity, with the men in their care. This allows them to free themselves from our familiar moral restraints, giving them just enough space to treat a fellow human being far worse than we would a dog.
Now that you have a sense for the culture at Marcy Correctional Facility, think about what has to exist for this culture to come about. Think what it signifies about leadership, for instance. Do you really believe the grotesque culture on display December 9 could come into existence and embed itself without leadership being aware? I suspect at least some levels of senior leadership, at Marcy and perhaps elsewhere, understand the culture perfectly well. Indeed, they may have benefited from it. (And frankly, if leadership didn’t know that their subordinates were behaving this way, what does that say? From an organizational perspective, that’s almost as bad.)
Think what it means for training. Because COs work together in a tightly confined space, the established culture has to be communicated to every CO in the facility, including officers who transfer from other units and newbies who have just started their career. How do these newcomers learn the rules that never get put on a page? How do they come to understand the price of disobedience? This is not about the formal training that every CO receives, but what a former police chief once described to me as the culture of the locker room, where staff are indoctrinated to the norms that actually shape day-t0-day behavior.
And think what it means for the people who live under this ruthless domination. Think about the people who depend for their safety and well-being on the very correctional officers who built and enforce this culture of violence, silence, secrecy, impunity and inhumanity. Think what it must mean every time a CO has a grudge against a prisoner. Or about the fact that Brooks was killed in the infirmary, where a prisoner is brought for care. Think what it means to live in a place where, at any moment, you could be taken out and beaten to death by those paid to protect you, and that barring some freakish mistake, no one would ever know what happened.
No good can come from this vicious killing. But if New York takes it as an opportunity to scrutinize its entire prison system, from root to branch, in order to understand how and why this culture arises and endures, and most of all, how it might be changed, perhaps the murder of Robert Brooks will not be in vain.
As always, and in the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at jm347@cornell.edu.
