New York Governor Kathy Hochul has decided to close the Downstate Correctional Facility at 121 Red Schoolhouse Road, along with five other prisons, citing low capacity and the desire to re-imagine helping incarcerated people with mental health and drug treatments services. While this maximum security prison is located in the Town of Fishkill, it is not the Fishkill Correctional Facility that is near Beacon’s high school and middle school that has been in the news lately.

The Times Union reported that Governor Hochul had indicated her desire to close more prisons two or so weeks ago during one of her COVID-19 briefings, stating: “I want to get creative with this,” Hochul said at the end of October. “I don't know if something can be used as a substance abuse treatment center. We don't need as many prisons. The number of people incarcerated has gone down dramatically in our state.”

According to the New York Times, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “shut 18 prisons during his nearly 11 years in office amid a series of criminal justice reforms that reduced New York’s prison population to its lowest level since 1984.” Although employees apparently found out this week, the Times Union reported that the president of the New York State Correctional Officer Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA), Michael Powers, said in a statement that the news “shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone,” who opposes the closing, reported the New York Times.

The closure will take place in March 2022, and moves to transfer employees to other employment positions begin now. The Downstate Correctional Facility is a major employer in the region, employing 644 people, according to the Times Union. The facility has the capacity to imprison 1,221 incarcerated people, and currently imprisons slightly over half of that, at 688 incarcerated people.

According to reporting in the Times Union, who cited a press release from DOCCS, DOCCS does not anticipate layoffs due to the closure, and will focus on “providing staff with opportunities for priority placement via voluntary transfers, as well as priority employment at other facilities or other state agencies,” and will be working with bargaining units to stay within union rules.

Said Chris Moreau, Vice President of the Mid-Hudson Region for New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) to the Times Union: “They will have to put their name in a hat and hope they can be transferred to adjacent facilities in the region. There’s no guarantee that officers who live and work and set up their families around the Downstate area aren’t going to be shipped up north, out west, hours away from their family right before the holiday season.”

Dutchess County Executive Marcus Molinaro issued a statement via press release on November 8th, the day of the announced closure: “Today’s announcement about the closure of the Downstate Correctional Facility has taken Dutchess County by surprise. There has been no coordination between the Governor’s Office and Dutchess County on the closure of this large facility, nor a coordinated plan for the future use of the parcel and the hundreds of workers who will be affected. Make no mistake: Inmates at Downstate are not being released; they will simply be transferred to remaining State prisons or to county jails throughout New York. Today's announcement only leaves Dutchess County with more questions than answers.”

According to the Times Union, DOCCS has been evaluating this, and debating about which facilities to choose. As reported in the article: “DOCCS reviewed the operations at its 50 facilities and looked at physical infrastructure, program offerings, facility security level, medical and mental health services, proximity to other facilities, and potential re-use options.”

Governor Hochul’s office has indicated new uses for the buildings that that help this population, and has been quoted as to saying she is open to new ways of benefiting people. Perhaps this re-imagining will include job training for new positions to work with incarcerated people, or people who are not sent into jail, but are heavily guided into programs.

According to a press release from DOCCS, the total number of incarcerated people in New York State is 31,469. The DOCCS press release states that this is over 50% less than what it was in 1999.

Two yesterdays ago, on April 16, 2020, Beacon Prison Action sent a press release regarding multiple new unmarked graves being dug at the Fishkill Correctional Facility. Beacon Prison Action consists of community members in the Beacon/Fishkill/Newburgh area, and is most active through the Beacon Prison Rides Project and the Beacon Prison Books Project (run closely with Binnacle Books).

The graveyard that sits near the Fishkill Correctional Facility is located through the woods beyond the Willow Loop, and behind Beacon High School.

Beacon Prison Action submitted photos of “multiple” fresh graves taken Wednesday morning (April 15, 2020). According to the press release: “Four gravestones are without identifying markers, leaving these recent casualties unnamed. A new grave, between two more markers, has yet to be filled.”

A Little Beacon Blog is pursuing information about the protocol for how it is determined for a prisoner to be buried there. If you have information, please see below.

The Prison Population By Numbers And COVID-19 Positive

According to Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS): “The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, guided by the Departmental Mission, is responsible for the confinement and rehabilitation with under 42,000 individuals under custody held at 52 state facilities and supervision of over 35,000 parolees throughout seven regional offices statewide.”

According to the USA Today Network’s Democrat and Chronicle, “New York has approximately 43,000 incarcerated individuals and 29,000 employees at its 52 state-level facilities, according to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.”

According to the DOCCS COVID-19 Confirmed page, the following COVID-19 statuses have been reported:

DOCCS COVID-10 Confirmed Cases
Staff Incarcerated Population Parolees
753 204* 29
*Of these confirmed cases, 49 are now recovered and out of isolation.

DOCCS COVID-19 Confirmed Deaths
Staff Incarcerated Population Parolees
1 5 4

New Release Of Inmates Over Age Of 55, Who Are Eligible For Release In 90 Days, No Violent Felonies, No Sexual Assault

Beacon Prison Action, as well as other groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) on March 20, 2020, have made requests of how inmates could avoid infection.

Since then, Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) has approved the release of inmates meeting different sets of requirements, which was confirmed by Melissa DeRosa, Secretary to Governor Cuomo during today’s (4/18/2020) briefing when asked about it by a reporter (see minute 31).

DeRosa confirmed that inmates who are over the age of 55, who are eligible for release within 90 days, who have not committed violent felonies or sexual assault offense, and who do not pose a threat to society can be released. DeRosa estimated the number of inmates that fit this specific criteria to be around 200 people, and confirmed it would be a “rolling release” throughout this “current emergency.”

Additional Types Of Inmates Who Have Been Approved For Release

This is not the first set of requirements that have been created so that some inmates can be offered early release due to COVID-19. According to PrisonPolicy.org:

A judge in the Bronx approved the release of 51 people jailed for alleged parole violations on Rikers Island in New York City. (April 13)
65 people have been released early from the Westchester County Jail in Valhalla, New York, following discussions between the District Attorney and the Legal Aid Society of Westchester. (April 13)
District attorneys in Brooklyn, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have taken steps to reduce jail admissions by releasing people charged with nonviolent offenses and not actively prosecuting low-level, non-violent offenses. (March 17 and March 18)
In New York state, all in-person parole visits have been suspended and replaced with telephone call, text message, and video call check-ins. (March 20). Details from TimesUnion: “As new cases and deaths from COVID-19 increased, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday ordered non-essential construction projects to stop, and a state agency told parole officers that 1,100 parole violators who are being held in jails and prisons across New York will be released.
New York City has released 200 people from Rikers Island in the past week, and expects to release another 175 people before the weekend. (March 26)
In New York, Gov. Cuomo announced that up to 1,100 people who are being held in jails and prisons across the state may be released with community supervision. (March 27)

Early prison release is being addressed at the national level. You can read about Attorney General William Barr’s directive here at The New York Times. A clip: “Attorney General William P. Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons on Friday (April 3, 2020) to expand the group of federal inmates eligible for early release and to prioritize those at three facilities where known coronavirus cases have grown precipitously, as the virus threatens to overwhelm prison medical facilities and nearby hospitals.”

Inmates With Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Beacon Prison Action also highlighted inmates who have dementia and Alzheimer’s. From their press release: “Fishkill prison itself has a special Long-Term Care unit for people with serious health conditions, as well as a Unit for the Cognitively Impaired, largely serving elderly prisoners suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia. In their last report on this prison, the Correctional Association of New York concluded, “[Our visit to this unit] reinforced the costly, cruel, and nonsensical policy of continued incarceration of people who are so physically and/or cognitively impaired that they pose no safety risk to the community and for whom there no longer remains any justifiable reason to keep them in prison.” (Fishkill Correctional Facility 2012 by the Correctional Association of New York).

Graves With No Names At Fishkill Correctional Facility

Back to the graves in Beacon, and why some markers have no names. According to Beacon’s most referenced book, “Beacon Revisited” by Robert J. Murphy and Denise Doring VanBuren, the graveyard is known as the Cemetery of Convicts, 1985. From the book: “At the edge of a stand of tall evergreens not far from Beacon’s new high school lies the state-owned cemetery wherein hundreds of unknown men and women are buried. Between the opening of the Matteawan State Hospital (then the Asylum for the Criminally Insane) in 1892, its closing in 1977, and its transformation into Fishkill Correctional Facility, about 1,800 inmates and patients were buried in the remote corner of the prison’s grounds. Today, only numbered stones mark the graves of these unfortunates.”

A Little Beacon Blog has questions and is in pursuit of the bigger picture. If you know the answer and you are an official, please comment below or email us at editorial@alittlebeaconblog.com. We are looking for answers to the following questions:

Do all of the graves state no names?
When a prisoner dies while incarcerated, what is the protocol? Are they buried there? Or are they sent to their family? Or if they have no next of kin, buried there? The DOCCS Handbook for Families and Friends is here, but doesn’t seem to mention it.
Why would new burials have no name on the marker? The prison system knows the name of the individual, but why would a name not be placed on a grave?
Are prisoners from all over New York state sent here to be buried, or just those in Fishkill Correctional Facility?