'BREAK IT TO FIX IT': NAT’L JAIL EXPERT SAYS PRISON WHERE ROBERT BROOKS WAS TORTURED AND KILLED MAY HAVE TO CLOSE
FORMER PENNSYLVANIA, NEW YORK JAIL CHIEF AND CORRECTIONS EXPERT MARTIN HORN BLASTS ‘ABSENCE OF MORAL LEADERSHIP’AT MARCY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY FOR ROBERT BROOKS DEATH
VISUAL INVESTIGATION by JB Nicholas.
INTERVIEW
Jan 8., 2025
Martin Horn began his career in corrections as a parole officer in 1969. His full credentials, found here, are too numerous to list. In brief, they include running Pennsylvania's prison system, New York City's jails, including Rikers Island, New York's probation system and service as Executive Director of the New York State Sentencing Commission. Today he is Professor Emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
I interviewed Horn about the killing of Robert Brooks by guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility, a medium-security New York State prison just outside of Utica on Dec. 9, 2024. The subject was close to Horn's heart, not just because he dedicated his life to corrections, but because Horn spent two years living and teaching in Utica in the mid-1970s.
JB NICHOLAS: How did we get here?
MARTIN HORN: For this to have happened at a medium-security prison, it has to do with the culture of the prison. It's a culture that's allowed to develop over time. It demonizes prisoners. It shows an absence of leadership from the warden down.
Sid Schwartzbaum, an old colleague of mine at Rikers Island, a good jail man, he used to say, 'A fish rots from the head down.' He's right. Leadership starts at the top. It's a responsibility of the warden to create a moral atmosphere within the prison that uses authority in legitimate ways.
JB NICHOLAS: What stands out to you?
MARTIN HORN: The failure of leadership. The leader of any organization, but especially a prison, has to assert moral leadership. They have to set the tone: 'this is how we treat the people who are committed to our custody. This is our standard of care.'
Every prison is its own world. Every prison has its own culture. What I observed at Marcy tells me that this warden failed to establish moral leadership. If the warden isn't saying something to the people under him, or her, and if the captains and the lieutenants aren't saying something to the sergeants, then you're going to get this kind of terrible situation.
JB NICHOLAS: In other words, instead of clocking hours in an office, wardens need to be out making rounds around the prison at irregular times?
MARTIN HORN: Absolutely. When I ran the prisons in Pennsylvania and the jails on Rikers Island in New York City I told my wardens: 'If you're spending more than 25% of your time behind a desk you're not doing your job right.'
Did the warden come in on nights? Did the warden come in on weekends? Because that's when stuff happens. Or did this warden just work 9-to-5 Monday through Friday? You want to ask those questions.
It's very easy for a warden to get bogged down in the paperwork and the bureaucracy. And walking around the prison, everybody's got a problem they want you to solve. I did it when I was a warden. I did it when I was a commissioner. I know.
It's very easy to insulate yourself in the office and just write memos and review reports but that's not leadership in a prison setting.
JB NICHOLAS: Speaking of reports, Use of Force Reports, with photographs, are generated or supposed to be generated. These reports are transmitted up the line to the prison's superintendent and DOCCS' Central Office in Albany...
MARTIN HORN: Yes. And they're supposed to be reviewed and people are supposed to say, 'Well you didn't try to de-escalate' or 'the force wasn't justified in the first instance' or 'the force wasn't proportionate to the threat.' You're supposed to pick those things out and call people on it.
JB NICHOLAS: You're supposed to critique them?
MARTIN HORN: Yes.
JB NICHOLAS: If you were the superintendent of a prison or the commissioner of a prison or jail system, and you're getting reports with the same names on them all the time what ...?
MARTIN HORN: It should set off alarm bells. One of the things I had to learn running prisons and jails was you have to keep a database on officers. And so when an officer's name comes up in a use of force report you should pull up all previous uses of force that that officer's been involved in. And when an officer has been involved in numerous uses of force you need to take a look at who that officer is and what that officer is doing.
Sometimes you have to pull the officer off the line. You have to send that officer for retraining. Maybe you have to sit down and say to the officer, 'Chill.' Maybe you just have to give the officer a less stressful assignment. But you got to do something.
Some officers are real gung-ho and they're always in situations. Stuff happens in prisons, I'm not going to deny that. And sometimes the most good and decent and active officers get involved because they're just willing to do the dirty work.
But someone, and at the end of the day it's got to be the warden, the buck stops with the warden, someone has got to say, 'Wait a minute. Why is this guy still working this shift or this assignment?' or 'Why haven't we sent him for counseling?' or 'Why hasn't anybody sat down with this guy and said, 'You've been involved in a lot of uses of force and they're not all kosher and we got to do something about that.'
There should be a record of that. If there isn't, that's a failure.
JB NICHOLAS: How often do you see uses of force in an infirmary as opposed to other places in the prison?
MARTIN HORN: It's rare. Much less frequently. Far less frequently than other parts of the prison. Because there are witnesses in the infirmary. And there are often witnesses who are duty-bound to report. Plus, most prison infirmaries these days are heavily camera-ed ...
JB NICHOLAS: This one wasn't.
MARTIN HORN: One has to ask why? How did this one get left behind?
JB NICHOLAS: What does Gov. Kathy Hochul do now to fix it?
MARTIN HORN: You can't fix it. You can't bring this kid back. Fix what?
JB NICHOLAS: The culture.
MARTIN HORN: You have to look at what everybody who has been there in the supervisory chain has been doing.
Have the lieutenants and the captains been accurately reporting things to the deputy warden? Has the deputy warden been accurately representing the situation to the warden? Has the warden taken the time to actually review uses of force? Has the warden met with individual staff with supervisors to address uses of force?
JB NICHOLAS: Gov. Hochul has already replaced Marcy's acting superintendent, Danielle C. Medbury.
MARTIN HORN: That may not be enough. Sometimes the situation is so deeply ingrained you have to replace the entire management team. You have to start over again. You have to create a new culture.
It's also going to be really hard to be effective in this kind of setting. Staff there are going to feel, 'We're out here, doing this dirty work, nobody cares about us, the State of New York doesn't care about us, but now they're going to jump all over us.'
What I've said in other similar circumstances is it may be that you have to close the place and use a period of time to either re-train the staff or bring in new staff and management and re-open in six months or a year later with a completely different leadership team and a completely different workforce.
Sometimes you got to break it to fix it. It's disruptive and dislocating but it's the moral obligation of the state to do it right.
JB NICHOLAS: What's the biggest question in your mind about Brooks killing?
MARTIN HORN: How did the culture of this place get so distorted?
This was a known goon-squad. People even referred to it as a goon-squad, or a tune-up squad, or whatever the hell they called it. Everybody knew and nobody did anything.
They got desensitized. The leadership has to work hard to prevent line officers from being desensitized and my question is what efforts were made here to prevent that?
If you're the warden, you have to be out there. You are the moral authority in that place. You're the grown-up in the room. You have to say to your staff, 'It's an ugly job, but you took it. You get a pay-check every two weeks and you got to do it right.'
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