Finalist: The New York Times, by Michael Schwirtz, Michael Winerip and Robert Gebeloff

A New York Times investigation draws on nearly 60,000 disciplinary cases from state prisons and interviews with inmates to explore the system’s inequities and the ripple effect they can have.

By Michael Schwirtz, Michael Winerip and Robert Gebeloff

The racism can be felt from the moment black inmates enter New York’s upstate prisons.

They describe being called porch monkeys, spear chuckers and worse. There are cases of guards ripping out dreadlocks. One inmate, John Richard, reported that he was jumped at Clinton Correctional Facility by a guard who threatened to “serve up some black mashed potatoes with tomato sauce.”

“As soon as you come through receiving, they let you know whose house it is,” said Darius Horton, who was recently released from Groveland Correctional Facility after serving six years for assault.

Most forbidding are the maximum-security penitentiaries — Attica, Clinton, Great Meadow — in rural areas where the population is almost entirely white and nearly every officer is too. The guards who work these cellblocks rarely get to know a black person who is not behind bars.

Whether loud and vulgar or insinuated and masked, racial bias in the state prison system is a fact of life.

It is also measurable.

A review by The New York Times of tens of thousands of disciplinary cases against inmates in 2015, hundreds of pages of internal reports and three years of parole decisions found that racial disparities were embedded in the prison experience in New York.

In most prisons, blacks and Latinos were disciplined at higher rates than whites — in some cases twice as often, the analysis found. They were also sent to solitary confinement more frequently and for longer durations. At Clinton, a prison near the Canadian border where only one of the 998 guards is African-American, black inmates were nearly four times as likely to be sent to isolation as whites, and they were held there for an average of 125 days, compared with 90 days for whites.

A greater share of black inmates are in prison for violent offenses, and minority inmates are disproportionately younger, factors that could explain why an inmate would be more likely to break prison rules, state officials said. But even after accounting for these elements, the disparities in discipline persisted, The Times found.

The disparities were often greatest for infractions that gave discretion to officers, like disobeying a direct order. In these cases, the officer has a high degree of latitude to determine whether a rule is broken and does not need to produce physical evidence. The disparities were often smaller, according to the Times analysis, for violations that required physical evidence, like possession of contraband.

Blacks make up only 14 percent of the state’s population but almost half of its prisoners. Racial inequities at the front end of the criminal justice system — arrest, conviction and sentencing — have been well documented.

The degree of racial inequity and its impact in the prison system as documented by The Times have rarely, if ever, been investigated. Nor are these issues systematically tracked by state officials. But for black inmates, what happens inside can be profoundly damaging.

Bias in prison discipline has a ripple effect — it prevents access to jobs and to educational and therapeutic programs, diminishing an inmate’s chances of being paroled. And each denial is likely to mean two more years behind bars.

A Times analysis of first-time hearings before the State Board of Parole over a three-year period ending in May found that one in four white inmates were released but fewer than one in six black inmates were.

Even well-run prisons are dangerous. There are more than 50,000 inmates doing time at 54 prisons around the state for a range of crimes, from petty theft to multiple murders. Many interviewed by The Times, like Ibrahim Gyang, who is serving 25 years to life for killing a gang rival, were confined at maximum-security prisons. He acknowledged that inmates needed guards to keep order and protect them from being preyed on by the most violent among them.

“I just want the system to follow the rules,” he said.

Presented with The Times’s findings, officials from the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said that while there were racial issues in any large organization, these had little impact on the disciplinary system in the prisons.

“With an agency of close to 30,000 staff, the vast majority of our work force understand that it is a challenging job, and they approach it professionally,” Tom Mailey, the department spokesman, said in a statement.

The agency said that some racial disparities, like why black inmates spent more time in solitary confinement than whites, could be explained by data The Times did not have access to — most important, prisoners’ full disciplinary histories.

But the department provided no data to contradict The Times’s findings of a systemwide imbalance in discipline.

In July, Chavelo Borden, who is serving a six-year sentence for robbery, met with reporters in the visiting room at Clinton, where guards had hung a sign saying “All Lives Matter.” Mr. Borden said he and other black prisoners at Clinton were treated “like we’re another species.”

“They don’t see us with pristine eyes,” he said.

So many of the racial problems in the New York’s prisons stem from a fundamental upstate-downstate culture clash that plays out daily on the cellblocks.

The largely white work force comes from places in northern, western and central New York like Elmira, Malone, Rome and Utica. These are some of the state’s poorer and less diverse communities, where, even as far north as the Canadian border, a Confederate flag can be spotted on the back of a pickup truck or hanging from a front porch. Inmates refer to some of the big maximum-security facilities as “family prisons,” where members of the same family have worked for generations. In these communities, prisons are often seen as political spoils, fiercely protected by upstate politicians for the jobs they provide.

With the disappearance of manufacturing upstate, prisons provide many of the middle-class jobs factories once did. They are fueled by a steady supply of inmates, mostly black or Latino, who are shipped north, far from the urban areas where they grew up. More than half of the state’s inmates are from New York City or its suburbs.

Blacks and whites are treated more equitably in some of the prisons close to the city, including Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, less than an hour by train from Grand Central Terminal.

Black officers make up the majority of the uniformed staff there, setting it apart from every other men’s prison in the state. There were no disciplinary disparities between whites and blacks at Sing Sing, according to a Times review of the 1,286 violations issued to inmates there for breaking prison rules.

Inmates interviewed at prisons around the state said that if they had to do time in a maximum-security facility, Sing Sing would be the best place.

“Everyone wants to get to Sing Sing,” said Justin Shaw, an inmate who was doing time for criminal possession of a weapon.

Mr. Gyang said, “It’s coveted.”

The Story in Numbers

On the cellblocks, it is a foregone conclusion that the disciplinary system is rigged.

The uniformed staff is given almost total control over the process. Corrections officers make the charges — issuing “tickets,” in prison parlance — and hearing officers, typically sergeants, lieutenants or captains, determine guilt and decide punishment. Inmates almost always lose. At disciplinary hearings, inmates won only about 4 percent of the cases in 2015, according to the department.

The Times analyzed 59,354 disciplinary cases from last year. Systemwide, black inmates were 30 percent more likely to get a disciplinary ticket than white inmates. And they were 65 percent more likely to be sent to solitary confinement, where they are held in a cell 23 hours a day.

Last year, black inmates got 1,144 tickets that resulted in 180 or more days in isolation; white inmates received 226 tickets that had similarly long sentences.

Department officials said there were marked improvements in the past few years, thanks to a settlement the state had signed with the New York Civil Liberties Union that brought in a federal expert to oversee efforts aimed at reducing the use of solitary confinement. Between April 2014 and October of this year, the share of solitary prisoners who were African-American had decreased to 57 percent, from 64 percent, said Mr. Mailey, the department spokesman.

Taylor Pendergrass, the lead New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer in the settlement, said the department was “off to an encouraging start.”

“It will be a major undertaking to unwind decades-long practices and transform the culture of this large organization all the way down to the staff working in the cellblocks,” Mr. Pendergrass said.

There has been resistance from the rank and file. In a statement, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents guards, said the settlement with the civil liberties union had made the prisons more dangerous.

“The disciplinary system has been weakened in our prisons,” the association said. “Especially given the heavy gang presence and overwhelming increases in violent incidents, appropriate disciplinary measures are needed to maintain order and to protect other inmates, as well as staff.”

Solitary confinement is only one piece of the disciplinary process that had a disparity, The Times found, and it is unclear whether the settlement will affect other elements of the system.

Some of the starkest evidence of bias involves infractions that are vaguely defined and give officers the greatest discretion. Disobeying a direct order by an officer can be as minor as moving too slowly when a guard yells, “Get out of the shower.” It is one of the most subjective prison offenses. For every 100 black prisoners, guards issued 56 violations for disobeying orders, compared with 32 for every 100 whites, according to the analysis.

For smoking and drug offenses, which require physical evidence, white inmates, who make up about a quarter of the prison population, were issued about a third of the tickets.

Inmates have the right to appeal to an outside court and be represented by a lawyer — if they can find one willing to take their case; they almost never do. Of the tens of thousands of inmates who got disciplinary tickets in 2014 and 2015, about 280 were represented by Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, which is financed by the state. If an inmate is lucky enough to have Prisoners’ Legal Services take his case, his odds improve greatly. About two-thirds of the organization’s clients won their appeals — but by then, many had completed their solitary sentence.

Ibrahim Gyang said in an interview that at one of his disciplinary hearings, an officer called as a witness had to reread the ticket because he could not remember the case. And Mr. Gyang still lost.

It is not just that blacks fare worse: Whites are more likely to get a break. Both white and black prisoners mention the escape of two murderers from Clinton last year as a prime example of white guards’ tendency to be more trustful of white inmates.

The murderers, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, both white, got the tools they needed to cut through walls and piping because of friendships they had developed with an officer and a civilian employee, both white. “A major reason for allowing those inmates to have the latitude that they had was because they had white privilege,” said Joseph Williams, who worked for the corrections department for 47 years and was one of its few black prison superintendents. “We know if he had been black he would have never been given that wide a latitude.”

Markus Barber, a black inmate at Green Haven Correctional Facility, called it “the complexion for the connection.”

Examining One Charge: Assault

On Oct. 23, 2014, at Clinton, John Richard was stopped by Officer Brian Poupore, who took issue with his tinted glasses even though he has vision problems and had a medical permit to wear them, according to department records.

“Monkeys don’t wear glasses,” a sergeant said, according to Mr. Richard, who is serving a life sentence for murder.

When Mr. Richard refused to remove them, he said, Officer Poupore and several other guards jumped him. In their internal reports, the officers said Mr. Richard punched them several times and had to be subdued. After the encounter, Officer Poupore had a minor injury, according to the medical report, while the other officers had none.

The medical report said Mr. Richard had bruises all over his body, including his face, under his ear and on his back. He had trouble walking, the report said. His glasses were broken.

He was found guilty of assault and spent the next six months in solitary confinement.

Assault on prison workers may seem like a straightforward infraction, but a closer look reveals a disturbing pattern. There were 1,028 such violations issued in the state system last year. Black men received 61 percent of them, while white men received 9 percent. Under department rules, officers have considerable leeway over what constitutes an assault. An inmate need not cause an injury or even touch an officer.

About 20,000 uniformed officers work in the state’s prisons. During the first half of the year, 2,007 of them were involved in assault cases, according to department data, but 98 percent of them had no injuries or only minor ones, which can be as vague as “aches/pain.” Eight officers suffered serious injuries, defined as a broken bone or a puncture wound.

The Times reviewed 215 reports of assaults on staff from the first quarter of 2015, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request. The department redacted the officers’ names but not the inmates’. It also redacted most information about injuries, but in several cases, The Times was able to obtain medical records through the prisoners.

Among those reports, the cases of three black inmates — Darius Horton, Paul Sellers and Justin Shaw — followed the same pattern: All were involved in seemingly trivial disagreements with guards that led to minor altercations. And while it is hard to know who was responsible for escalating the episodes, the officers were not injured and remained on duty, while the inmates were punished with long stints in isolation.

Mr. Sellers was returning from dinner at Five Points Correctional Facility when he was stopped by an officer for taking “a loaf of state bread” back to his cell, according to the guard’s report. “Surrender the bread,” the officer ordered. Mr. Sellers refused and grabbed the shirt of the officer, who punched him in the face. He was sent to solitary for 166 days.

Mr. Shaw was stopped at Washington Correctional Facility because he was “attempting to conceal contraband,” according to the officer’s report. When challenged, “the inmate produced a stack of waffles,” the report said. Mr. Shaw was accused of then grabbing the officer’s arm and given a 180-day lockup.

Mr. Horton was caught by Officer Michael Stamp at Groveland carrying a bowl of hot water from the microwave for coffee after the common room had closed. The officer ordered Mr. Horton to leave it, he refused and they got into a shouting match and bumped shoulders, according to the report. The guard claimed that Mr. Horton then punched him. In an interview, Mr. Horton denied this, saying he was jumped by Officer Stamp and six other guards. Two of the officers had minor injuries; the other five were unharmed. Mr. Horton was sentenced to 270 days in isolation.

How much race figured in these three encounters — if it did at all — is hard to know. The guard in Mr. Sellers’s case was Hispanic; in the other two cases, the guards were white. Mr. Shaw said the officer might have just been having a bad day. “I don’t like to say everything is race,” he said.

For Mr. Horton, there was no doubt that race was at play when, as he told it, he was handcuffed and beaten by seven officers, all of them white.

“They took me out there and beat me like I got caught drinking at the whites-only fountain,” he said.

The corrections officers’ union encourages members to report even the slightest physical contact as an assault. As the union negotiates a new contract, billboards in the Albany area have shown officers with neck braces, strapped to stretchers. Assaults on staff members have increased in recent years. There were 895 cases recorded in 2015, some involving more than one inmate, compared with 577 in 2010, according to department data. More recently, assaults on staff were down by 16 percent between January and October of this year, compared with the same period last year, the department said.

Union officials did not comment on the racial disparities in discipline that The Times found.

“While facing record high levels of violence and one of the most dangerous work environments in the country, corrections officers conduct themselves with professionalism and integrity to keep our prisons secure and our communities safe,” the union said in a statement.

Inmates claim that officers regularly provoke altercations that are classified as assaults, including taunting them with racial slurs or touching them inappropriately during a pat frisk. The Times’s analysis showed that prisoners charged with failing to comply with a pat-frisk order were also often charged with assault. Over all, black men were punished seven times as often for pat-frisk infractions as white men, and among inmates under 25, blacks received 185 tickets, while whites got only 14.

One of the more humiliating abuses inmates describe is known as the “credit card swipe.” Officers order the prisoners to stand against a wall for a pat frisk and then swipe their hands aggressively between their buttocks.

If an inmate is startled and pulls a hand off the wall, the officer has a green light to use force.

Black and Mentally Ill

When a corrections sergeant stopped Rashief Bullock on his way back from breakfast at Attica Correctional Facility in January 2015, it was not for breaking a prison rule. It was because he was acting “erratic” and “fidgety,” the sergeant’s report said.

That should have been no surprise. Mr. Bullock, who is serving an eight-year sentence for selling drugs to an undercover police officer, describes himself as “mentally unstable.” Many of his letters home to his father are confused and delusional. In one he wrote, “I haven’t been talking like how I use to because I’ve been hearing voices to much.” In another he asked, “Why do these middle Eastern prostitutes Harass me everyday?”

The sergeant wrote in his report that he conducted a pat frisk and found nothing but then, as they were heading back to his cell, Mr. Bullock suddenly punched him in the face with his left fist. Mr. Bullock, who is right-handed, denies hitting anyone.

Wherever the truth lies, the incident report makes it clear that no one was hurt and that all six officers involved remained on duty.

Even so, Mr. Bullock was found guilty of assaulting an officer and spent six months in solitary confinement. Inmates with mental illness are often the least equipped to handle the stresses of a regimented prison life. They tend to act out more and are disciplined at far higher rates.

Race magnifies their problems. Of the 100 inmates statewide who were sentenced to the most time in solitary last year, more than half were minorities who at some point had been treated in prison mental health programs, according to the Times analysis.

Mr. Bullock, 32, has spent long stretches in isolation at six different prisons. “I get thrown in the S.H.U. every jail I go to because I can’t control my body,” he said, referring to solitary-confinement cells.

He is what fellow inmates call a “herb,” an easy mark for guards to pick on. Corrections officers “really don’t like me, I think,” he said.

It was the same on the outside. On the evening of Jan. 8, 2009, as plainclothes officers moved in to arrest Mr. Bullock on a Staten Island street corner, his friends drove off without him, according to the police report.

For much of the past summer, Mr. Bullock was confined to his cell for 23 hours a day after getting a ticket for “being out of place.” Given how psychotic he seemed during two recent interviews in the visiting room at Elmira, it is remarkable that he could follow any of the 120 regulations for which an inmate can be disciplined.

He described a “dimension portal” in Sudan that was a secret entrance to hell; explained that he was from “divine lineage”; and said he communicated with people in their graves, including his relative Alexander the Great.

At the time, he said he was not receiving mental health treatment or taking medication.

Mr. Bullock was not sure whether racism had been a factor in his case at Attica — where 96 percent of the officers are white, and only 1 percent black — although he said he had seen it a lot in prison. At Greene Correctional Facility, he said, an officer mocked him for “sweating like a black man at a math contest”; at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, a guard threatened to “beat the black” off him.

During the seven years in prison, he has written scores of letters to his father, Rudy Bullock. Early on, his letters were rational, focused and touching. In May 2012, he asked his father to send him a scientific calculator. Around the same time, he wrote: “Dear Pops, I wish I was home and we were going to the movies or a restaurant. I hate jail a lot. So many colored folks in jail, if I was rich I know I could of beat this case.”

But in July of that year he wrote: “I’M GOING THROUGH TO MUCH DEPRESSION. I CAN’T HANDLE THIS MUCH LONGER!” And that November: “My mental health is going horrible in here and it’s detiriating fast from being isolated in my room all day.”

“Being in the box,” he wrote in September 2014, “I have been undergoing unsurmountable stress.”

Mr. Bullock is currently doing a 90-day solitary sentence at Five Points for disobeying a direct order. He is scheduled to leave isolation on Christmas.

Paths to Improvement

No other prison in the state is like Sing Sing. Of the 686 uniformed staff members there, 83 percent are black or Latino, compared with 17 percent for the entire state prison system.

Reggie Edwards, who is serving 25 years to life for murder, said Sing Sing’s guards were often from the same neighborhoods as the inmates. Mr. Edwards said the white guards knew city life and were more likely to have black or Hispanic friends.

“They identify with us,” he said. “They see things from our perspective.”

Elizabeth Gaynes, the executive director of the Osborne Association, an inmate advocacy group, said guards at Sing Sing “see the men as less ‘foreign.’”

The disciplinary disparities in most of the other prisons do not exist at Sing Sing. Black inmates make up 57 percent of the population there and get 58 percent of the tickets.

Guards write fewer disciplinary tickets there than they do at most other maximum-security prisons. In 2015, there were 27 tickets given for assault on staff at Sing Sing, compared with 91 at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison of similar size in Comstock.

“It relieves so much stress being in one of those jails down there with all those black people,” Mr. Bullock wrote in one of his letters to his father. Being that close to home, he wrote, he could pick up Hot 97, the New York City hip-hop radio station, in his cell.

Because Sing Sing is so close to the city, with major nonprofits like the Fortune Society and the Osborne Association nearby, it has more programs than most state prisons. Inmates can get a college degree and participate in theater and art initiatives.

Sing Sing also receives more family visits annually than any other prison in the state, the department said.

For these reasons, Sing Sing is used by the corrections department as a reward for inmates with good records at other prisons.

At a graduation ceremony in mid-October, 68 men received certificates for completing a four-month parenting and relationships course as wives, girlfriends, parents and children rose for one standing ovation after another.

One woman in the audience, Joyce Newell, a nurse’s aide, said that when her son was at Clinton, 300 miles north of the city, she would have to catch a bus from the Bronx at 11:30 on Friday nights to be there in time for visiting hours on Saturday morning. She would arrive back in the Bronx at 2 a.m. on Sunday and then take a subway to her apartment. Now that her son is at Sing Sing, the trip takes her half an hour. “I visit him every week on my day off,” she said.

Sing Sing can still be brutal. One assault case examined by The Times involved an inmate named James Wright, who was released last year after completing a five-year robbery sentence. Mr. Wright argued with a guard, was pushed against a wall and subdued by four other officers, according to the incident report. The guards had no injuries; Mr. Wright’s two front teeth were knocked out.

And still, when asked if the prisons farther upstate were worse for black inmates, Mr. Wright answered, “Absolutely.”

There is evidence that the inequitable treatment of blacks in state prisons has been going on for decades. In 1993, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society, a federal judge ordered the state to correct disparities at Elmira. Based on a detailed statistical analysis, the judge, David G. Larimer, concluded that black inmates were assigned the worst prison jobs, housed on the most decrepit cellblocks and disciplined out of proportion to their numbers.

In a ruling meant to correct these imbalances, Judge Larimer mandated quotas to ensure that black prisoners would get a fair share of the good jobs and housing on preferred cellblocks. Those quotas remain in place. To this day, the Prisoners’ Rights Project receives regular reports from the corrections department listing the number of Elmira inmates by race for the most desired jobs and housing blocks.

At the time, Legal Aid also asked that discipline be monitored for racial disparities, but the state resisted.

John Boston, the lead lawyer for the prisoners, warned in court that without such monitoring, black inmates would continue to be singled out disproportionately for punishment. “Once everybody’s head is turned and we all move on to something else, the problem is likely to reassert itself,” he said at the time.

That is exactly what happened. After more than two decades, disparities in housing and jobs at Elmira have largely disappeared. But as The Times’s analysis showed, discipline in Elmira is still as racially skewed now as it was in the 1980s, with black inmates punished at about twice the rate of whites.

Bias Against Guards

It is not just black inmates who suffer harassment at the hands of white guards.

In the early 2000s, a group of white officers and supervisors relentlessly taunted and abused Curtis Brown, one of the few black guards at Elmira. According to documents from an investigation by the corrections department’s affirmative-action office, the white officers wrote “Token” on his locker, and someone attached a picture of a disheveled black man to his timecard and wrote, “This is your black ass nigger brother.”

While Officer Brown was serving in the honor guard at a funeral for a fellow officer, a corrections lieutenant, George Martin, came up to him and said, “I didn’t know they let niggers in here,” investigators reported. And at a local hockey game that Officer Brown was attending with his family, Officer Nicolo Marino said to another white guard who was present, “I see you brought your inmate porter with you,” according to a state investigation.

In a federal lawsuit filed by Officer Brown, he said that another guard once came up behind him and wrapped a chain around his neck as if it were a lynching. The suit was settled in 2009 for an undisclosed amount.

A white guard who stood up for Officer Brown was also targeted. The guard, Quentin Halm, reported in an affidavit that because they were friends, he was singled out by “bigots and racists.”

One guard said to Officer Halm that if he loved Officer Brown so much, “why don’t you kiss him on his big, fat lips?” Another suggested that he go to “cornrow school with your homey.”

Records from the state comptroller indicate that none of the white guards involved were suspended, and that several of them continued to work at Elmira for years after the state affirmative-action investigation. Whether they received some other form of punishment is not known, since state law prohibits the public release of officers’ disciplinary records.

Officer Brown, now in his 28th year on the job, is one of eight black guards at Elmira.

Through the years, the corrections department has made attempts to integrate the work force at some of the big upstate prisons. In the 1970s and ’80s, black officers from the Buffalo area were transferred to Attica. While the two communities are just 35 miles apart, Attica sits in the middle of farm fields, in the overwhelmingly white Wyoming County. The new black guards were mercilessly harassed, said Tyrrell Muhammad, who was imprisoned at Attica then and is now a project associate at the Correctional Association, an inmate advocacy group that has a state mandate to monitor conditions in the prisons. Mr. Muhammad said black officers were roughed up and humiliated in front of the other guards. Most left, he said.

Even if the department wanted to transfer black officers into the upstate prisons, a seniority provision in the state’s contract with the guards’ union would make that impossible. It is the officers who decide where they work, not the prison superintendents or even the corrections commissioner. The state is negotiating a new contract, but union officials say that seniority rules are not negotiable.

Outside Intervention

Federal intervention has been one of the few effective means of addressing the racial inequities and civil-rights violations in New York State prisons. It has worked at Elmira for housing and jobs and has been somewhat successful in holding officers accountable for the worst excesses of brutality and discrimination.

On Sept. 21, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that a group of corrections officers at Downstate Correctional Facility, in Fishkill, had been arrested over the brutal beating of Kevin Moore, a black inmate. Mr. Moore, 56 at the time, had five broken ribs, a collapsed lung and shattered bones in his face. The guards, who called themselves the Downstate Four, were also accused of ripping out his dreadlocks. One of them even bragged about using the dreadlocks to decorate his motorcycle, the indictment said.

Just as egregious was the cover-up, Mr. Bharara said: The officers hit one of their own on the back with a baton to make him appear injured, took several photos for the record and falsified reports claiming that Mr. Moore had attacked them, according to the indictment.

“Excessive use of force in prisons, we believe, has reached crisis proportions in New York State,” Mr. Bharara said at the news conference.

Like Attica and Clinton, Downstate is a particularly difficult prison for minority inmates, who, in 2015, were more than twice as likely to be disciplined as whites, The Times’s analysis showed. Blacks and Latinos got 1,078 tickets, while whites received 144.

Mr. Moore was so badly beaten that he spent 17 days in the hospital.

What happened next is a prime example of why many inmates consider the prison disciplinary system to be a farce.

Mr. Moore was issued a ticket for assault on staff and put in solitary confinement after being discharged from the hospital.

It was only when an internal affairs investigator with the corrections department intervened that Mr. Moore was let out of isolation and the assault charge was dropped.

By then, he said, he had spent 26 days in solitary confinement. After the officers were indicted, he was transferred out of state custody and moved to an undisclosed location to protect him from possible reprisals by corrections officers.

By Michael Schwirtz, Michael Winerip and Robert Gebeloff

Jaimie Davenport and Billy Cassell had their first hearings before the New York State Board of Parole earlier this year. Both were serving a maximum of six years on a burglary conviction, Mr. Cassell for breaking into storage units, Mr. Davenport for stealing cellphones.

The men are in their 30s and told the board that they had struggled for years with substance abuse — Mr. Cassell with drugs, Mr. Davenport with alcohol.

Each had served a prior sentence for theft, and each had done a stretch in solitary confinement for breaking prison rules.

Mr. Cassell was set free. But not Mr. Davenport. The board turned him down, extending his prison term for at least another two years.

For all their similarities, there was a telling difference: Mr. Cassell is white; Mr. Davenport is black.

And in New York, black men going before the parole board are at a marked disadvantage.

An analysis by The New York Times of thousands of parole decisions from the past several years found that fewer than one in six black or Hispanic men was released at his first hearing, compared with one in four white men.

It is a disparity that is particularly striking not for the most violent criminals, like rapists and murderers, but for small-time offenders who commit property crimes like stealing a television from a house or shoplifting from Duane Reade — precisely the people many states are now working to keep out of prison in the first place.

Since 2006, white inmates serving two to four years for a single count of third-degree burglary have been released after an average of 803 days, while black inmates served an average of 883 days for the same crime.

The racial disparity in parole decisions in the state is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of a broken system. Intended as a progressive tool to promote good behavior, parole has devolved into a hurried, often chaotic procedure. Inmates typically get less than 10 minutes to plead their cases before they are sent back to their cells.

The parole board has not been fully staffed for years and rarely sees a prisoner in person. Inmates are usually glimpsed from the shoulders up on a video screen.

Commissioners — as board members are called — often read through files to prepare for the next interview as the inmate speaks. The whole process is run like an assembly line. They hear cases just two days a week and see as many as 80 inmates in that time.

Board members are mainly from upstate, earn more than $100,000 annually and hold their positions for years. They tend to have backgrounds in law enforcement rather than rehabilitation. Most are white; there is currently only one black man, and there are no Latino men.

In short, they have little in common with the black and Latino inmates who make up nearly three-quarters of the state prison population.

At a September board meeting, one commissioner, Marc Coppola, complained that he had trouble keeping track of which inmate he was interviewing. “We were a mess,” Mr. Coppola said, according to video of the meeting. “We didn’t even know who was in the chair.”

Tina Stanford, the board’s chairwoman, agreed. “There are others among us who’ve had similar concerns, just for what their experience in terms of the caseload has been,” she said.

While it is not possible to know whether race is a factor in any particular parole decision, a pattern of racial inequity is clear when the data are examined on a large scale. The Times analyzed 13,876 parole decisions for male inmates over a three-year period ending in May.

The analysis included only first-time appearances before the board, which take place after inmates complete their minimum sentence. The Times took into account such factors as an inmate’s crime, age, race and previous stints in state prison.

The board rarely released violent offenders of any race, denying nearly 90 percent of them at their initial interview. But among offenders imprisoned for more minor felonies, the racial disparity is glaring. For third-degree burglars who had no earlier prison sentences, the board released 41 percent of white inmates compared with 30 percent of blacks and Latinos.

The imbalance is especially stark for younger inmates. Among male prisoners under 25 who had no prior state prison sentences, the parole board released 30 percent of whites but only 14 percent of blacks and Latinos.

The Times did not have access to the full range of information the board took into account. This includes inmates’ time in county jail, full arrest histories, complete prison disciplinary records and whether required prison programs were completed.

Still, even before a black inmate takes a seat in the hearing room and utters a word, the odds are stacked against him. Guards punish black men in some prisons at twice the rate of whites, send them to solitary confinement more often and keep them there longer, a Times analysis of nearly 60,000 disciplinary cases from last year found. And bad prison records make it that much harder to be granted parole.

The Hearings

In parole hearings that are hurried and often disorganized, the board members’ first impressions of an inmate — whether he is well spoken or inarticulate, neat or disheveled, black or white — can have an outsize impact on his future.

The Times reviewed transcripts of 109 parole hearings from the first quarter of this year, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request. They all involved inmates guilty of burglary in the third degree, like Samuel McQuilkin, a black inmate with a long history of minor crimes who was convicted of stealing chicken nuggets from a school cafeteria.

It is often hard to pinpoint what the deciding factor is for commissioners. Some focus on an inmate’s criminal record or problems with drug abuse. Others are more interested in family ties.

In an interview process that is impersonal — 95 of the 109 hearings examined by the Times were conducted by video — any rapport an inmate can establish with board members is likely to help. This can work in a white inmate’s favor. A majority of commissioners are white, and like most of the white inmates in the New York system, they come from upstate.

Matthew Conley, a 27-year-old white college graduate from Eagle Bay, in the Adirondacks, was doing time for stealing golf carts from Mohawk Valley Country Club, in Little Falls, N.Y.

While hearings usually go quickly and focus on criminal and prison disciplinary history, W. William Smith, a commissioner who is also white, spent time reminiscing with Mr. Conley about summers spent white-water rafting in the Adirondacks.

“Were you employed by Tickner’s kayak and canoe rental in Old Forge?” Mr. Smith asked.

“I was,” Mr. Conley said.

Mr. Smith said he had done similar work. “That was the best job I ever had,” he said. “Long time ago.”

Mr. Conley was released.

The tone was different at the hearing for Mr. Davenport, the black inmate convicted of stealing cellphones. When it comes to an inmate’s criminal history, commissioners are supposed to consider convictions only, but G. Kevin Ludlow, a white board member from Utica, pressed him to confess any additional crimes he might have committed.

“How many burgs have you done that you haven’t been nailed for?” Mr. Ludlow asked. “There are others out there. What do you figure, five, six? How many?”

“No, sir, this is the only one,” Mr. Davenport said. “Not that it matters — it was a crime. But this is the only one.”

Though being a parole commissioner is considered a full-time job, only two days a week are devoted to hearing cases. Monday and Thursday are set aside for travel, and Friday is reserved for interviewing crime victims’ families.

Every week, four teams of two or three commissioners are dispatched around the state to administrative offices for video conferences or one of the few facilities where interviews are still conducted in person.

The condensed schedule leaves commissioners with little time to prepare. They typically see their cases on the morning of the hearings, when they arrive to find a cardboard box with a stack of folders placed beside their chair.

According to data from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the board holds about 12,000 hearings a year and may conduct as many as 40 interviews a day. In practice, only one commissioner presides over a hearing, while the other two try to pay attention as they read files for upcoming cases, according to four former commissioners whose service on the board spanned from 2000 to 2014.

To save time, parole rulings are sometimes drafted beforehand. There are commissioners who come prepared with four or five decisions that they modify slightly to fit particular cases, said Robert Dennison, who was a commissioner from 2000 to 2007 and the board’s chairman for part of that time.

“Some of the commissioners’ minds are made up before the guy comes into the room,” he said.

Inmates complained that it often seemed as if what they had to say did not matter.

At his hearing in January, James McArdelle sounded surprised that the commissioners appeared to be paying attention. “The most I would like to say is thank you for actually listening,” he said at the time. “I have been through parole before. A lot of people don’t listen and have a prejudgment.”

The board has long been understaffed, and it now has 13 commissioners, though as many as 19 may be appointed.

Video conferences save time and may cut costs, but the former commissioners interviewed by The Times said they believed the inmates were being shortchanged.

“There are things you may not catch if it’s done by video,” said Henry Lemons, who was a commissioner from 2009 to 2012. “A person could have turned his whole life around and walks in holding a Bible. At the interview, I’m just seeing his shoulder, neck and face on the video screen.”

Former commissioners said it was common knowledge on the board that corrections officers sometimes trumped up disciplinary “tickets,” intentionally undermining an inmate’s chances of parole.

“The commissioners in some instances are savvy enough to know that somebody who hasn’t had a ticket in years that all of a sudden has a ticket right before a hearing, there might be something going on there,” said Milton Johnson, a former board member who was a Secret Service agent and served for a year ending in 2014.

While commissioners are allowed to take time to look into such cases, they almost always weigh inmates’ claims on the spot, Mr. Johnson said.

“It’s a very imperfect situation,” he said.

Inmates have little recourse to challenge parole decisions. They can appeal to the State Supreme Court, but judges in New York can only order a new parole hearing, not overturn the original decision. Even if the decision is sent back, the appeal process can take two years, and by then an inmate is usually entitled to a new hearing anyway.

Last year, a State Supreme Court judge ordered a new hearing for Rudolph Williams, a convicted murderer, and criticized the board for basing its denial on a “boilerplate list of factors” that included letters opposing his release when, in fact, there were no letters at all.

Snap Decisions

An inmate named John Kelly had his hearing last January.

“It says here, since Aug. 25, you’ve been taking your associate’s program in liberal arts,” said Gail Hallerdin, the lead commissioner for the hearing.

“That’s not me,” Mr. Kelly responded.

“What is your first name?” Ms. Hallerdin said.

“John Kelly.”

Ms. Hallerdin checked her file. “That was for Thomas Kelly,” she said.

It was a jarring example of how unprepared the board can be. Commissioners have complained that they are not always given an inmate’s complete criminal history, and sometimes cannot obtain out-of-state records. At times, two or more inmates with the same name were included in the same case file, they said.

John Kelly, who was 59 at the time, explained that he had completed only the sixth grade. “I can’t read or write,” he said. He is classified by the corrections department as seriously mentally ill and was homeless when he was arrested for shoplifting at Duane Reade.

Despite the confusion, the hearing proceeded, with the commissioners deciding to release Mr. Kelly, who is white.

Darryl Dent, a black inmate who, like Mr. Kelly, has an extensive history of petty crime and is severely mentally ill, was not so fortunate.

When he stood before the parole board in March, he was serving five to 11 years for stealing a wallet in a Manhattan church, his eighth prison stint for petty theft.

“Some people would have given you a life sentence, even though it’s not what people call the crime of the century,” said Ellen Alexander, a commissioner.

“I was a little confused because I was hearing voices,” Mr. Dent explained. “They was telling me I should commit crimes before — to make money and get involved with girls and stuff — and I went along with it.”

For people like Mr. Dent, the parole process can be especially hard to navigate. They have trouble making an argument for themselves.

In an interview with a reporter at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in September, Mr. Dent said that during his hearing, he felt rushed and could not think of the right answers quickly enough.

He had trouble making eye contact during the interview, continuously rubbed his face and stuck out his tongue compulsively, a possible side effect of antipsychotic medications.

He looked older than his years, walked with a limp as he came into the visiting room and said that if released, he would pose no danger to anyone. “I wouldn’t be able to outrun the police,” he said. “I couldn’t lift a box.”

“I really am sorry for the crimes I committed,” he told the commissioners. “I’m tired of coming to jail. I’m 56 years old, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail.”

Mr. Kelly made an almost identical plea, explaining that he had had two strokes. “I’m done,” he said. “I’ll be 60 years old. I don’t want to die in prison.”

What tipped the scales in favor of Mr. Kelly and against Mr. Dent?

The commissioners who heard their cases? The inmates’ mental health on the day of the hearing? The fact that Mr. Kelly was a rare inmate to be interviewed in person, while Mr. Dent spoke via video? Race?

Whatever the reason, the white inmate doing time for shoplifting walked out of prison.

And the black inmate who stole the wallet was sent back to spend at least two more years behind bars. “Your release would be incompatible with the welfare of society,” the board’s decision said.

Horse Trading

If there is one factor that drives the selection of commissioners, it is politics. Spots on the board are prime patronage gifts. Many board members have given generously to campaigns.

Diversity is seemingly an afterthought.

Since 2000, W. William Smith, who joined the board in 1996, has donated nearly $20,000, mostly to Republican campaigns in the Buffalo area. Commissioner G. Kevin Ludlow has given about $29,000 since 2004, primarily to conservative and Republican candidates, according to filings with the State Board of Elections.

Positions have also been given to Democratic supporters. Joseph Crangle, the son of a longtime Democratic leader, was appointed to the board by Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, in 2008. Mr. Crangle and his family have donated nearly $14,000, mostly to Democratic candidates.

Another commissioner, Lisa Beth Elovich, is the daughter of a former Democratic political leader in Long Beach and a family friend of the former Republican senator Alfonse M. D’Amato. When she was appointed in 2006, she was married to Michael Avella, who was then a counsel to the Republican majority in the State Senate.

A request by The Times to interview individual commissioners was denied by the corrections department, which oversees the parole board.

Board members are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the State Senate. Selections are typically worked out ahead of time, and at the confirmation hearings nominees usually spend only a few minutes describing their credentials before being approved.

These hearings sometimes sound like reunions of upstate law enforcement veterans. At the 2012 hearing, State Senator Patrick M. Gallivan, then a Republican member of the corrections committee and a former sheriff of Erie County, backed the appointment of Marc Coppola, his former deputy sheriff.

They joked about it. A committee member asked Mr. Coppola, “Was former Sheriff Gallivan a good boss?”

“Yes, he was,” Mr. Coppola said.

Henry Lemons, who was the lone black male commissioner for years, was not reappointed when his term expired in 2012, though he had strong credentials. He had spent 20 years with the New York Police Department, 10 years as a narcotics investigator with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, and five years as a deputy chief investigator for the state attorney general’s office.

He said in an interview that while he would have liked to be reappointed, he was unwilling to play politics.

“Commissioners who want to play this game must go around to their senators and get letters of support — that’s how it works,” he said. “My work should be enough. My decisions, I think, were solid. I didn’t want to have to ask people to write me letters saying, ‘Reappoint Henry Lemons.’ The result? Next year, I’m out.”

Instead, on June 20, 2012, the State Senate confirmed one white woman, four white men and a Hispanic woman, for a time leaving the board without a single black man.

There was a rare dissent that day. State Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson, a Democrat on the corrections committee at the time, declined to cast any confirmation votes.

“I have withheld my support of any of the candidates today in protest of the governor’s failure to appoint anyone of African descent,” said Ms. Hassell-Thompson, who is black and whose comments were recorded on video. “There is no way that I can sit here and vote for a board that does not constitute something that for me is about fairness to the numbers of prisoners that are in our prison system.”

None of those on the committee, which is controlled by Republicans, responded to Ms. Hassell-Thompson’s remarks.

In recent years, the board has become slightly more diverse — there is again a single black man, and the chairwoman, Tina Stanford, is also black — but nine of the 13 commissioners are white.

“The administration has been a strong proponent of bringing more diversity to the Board of Parole,” Jason Elan, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said in a statement. “This administration is committed to going even further and will continue to identify for appointment individuals with a broad range of professional expertise, such as social workers, defense attorneys, psychologists and others with criminal justice expertise.”

In June, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, nominated five more commissioners, including several minorities, but the corrections committee never held confirmation hearings.

Mr. Gallivan, who now leads the corrections committee, said the governor’s office was at fault for submitting the nominations only a few days before the legislative session ended.

Diversity would make the parole process fairer, said Mr. Lemons, who was named to the board by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat.

“If a commissioner is from the suburbs and is an attorney, he may not see things the way I did growing up in Bed-Stuy,” Mr. Lemons said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “I’ve spoken to commissioners who couldn’t understand why a person committed a robbery. But you might interview the person and find out he or she has been on the streets since 16 or 17 because their parents were addicts and they had to live day by day.”

He said he and his colleagues also differed in their views of white-collar crimes.

“Many commissioners would say, ‘It’s just a money crime; no one was hurt,’” he said. “Well, I’d say the person defrauded this woman out of her money and made off with a quarter of a million dollars. What’s the difference between him and a kid snatching a purse with $15 in it, and he’s doing 10 years? To me, a person with some advantages in life, some education, I expect his conduct to be better.”

Hints of Reform

The promise of parole — early freedom for acknowledging mistakes and behaving well in prison — rarely lives up to reality. Around the country, 20 states have dismantled their boards altogether. A primary problem is the arbitrariness in decision making: Why do some inmates go free while others with nearly identical records stay in prison?

“The whole field of parole, when you shine a light on it, so much of it is unforgivable,” said Kevin R. Reitz, a director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School. Mr. Reitz was involved in revising the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code to recommend the elimination of parole release.

In 2014, a state judicial commission recommended the elimination of New York’s parole board, but the political leadership in Albany has taken no action.

New York State officials over the past 20 years have adopted a hybrid system of release that is less reliant on parole. About half the state’s inmates, including most drug offenders, now receive what is called a determinate sentence, a fixed period of incarceration with limited opportunity for early release. Instead of getting a two- to four-year sentence for selling drugs, an offender may receive a sentence of three years.

The Times analyzed a decade’s worth of state prison data and found that doing away with parole eliminated the racial disparity in release rates. But it also kept inmates of all races in prison longer — which makes determinate sentences unpopular with inmate advocates.

A central purpose of parole is to give inmates an incentive to rehabilitate themselves, said Jack Beck, a director of the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog group empowered by the state to monitor prison conditions.

“Determinate sentences undermine the whole philosophy that incarceration should be a time for people to prepare themselves to integrate back into society,” Mr. Beck said.

In an effort to make the parole process more objective, New York implemented a risk-assessment tool called Compas in 2012 that seeks to measure an inmate’s chances for success upon release. Prisoners fill out a 74-item assessment form that includes their criminal history, education background and mental health status. They also answer a long list of hypothetical questions about managing money, avoiding risky situations and controlling their tempers.

Based on their answers, they are assigned scores of one to 10 that assess how likely they are to commit new crimes. Theoretically, the lower the score, the lower the risk.

Commissioners are required to take Compas into consideration, but they can ignore the results if they find that other factors, including the severity of the original crime, are more compelling.

In the 109 parole hearing transcripts reviewed by The Times, Compas scores were usually given a perfunctory mention but rarely appeared to be the deciding factor.

The Cuomo administration recently proposed regulations that would require a detailed written explanation from commissioners if they decided to ignore Compas. The regulations would also require the board to give special consideration to inmates who were convicted when they were juveniles and sentenced to a potential maximum of life in prison, taking into account their age at the time of the crime as well as “any demonstrated growth and maturity.”

But at a time when the state is specifying a detailed checklist of variables parole commissioners must consider, race is not even on the list. In fact, the state has never studied its effect on board decisions.

An Inscrutable Process

And so the inequities continue.

Braxton Bostic, a young black man, was 17 in 2014 when he and a group of friends stole money from a purse in a church. A judge gave him probation, but he missed two meetings with his probation officer and was sent to prison to serve one to three years.

Robert Summa, a 49-year-old white man, has a record dating to 1992 for theft and drug possession. In 2003, he was convicted of mugging and robbing a 56-year-old woman and sent to prison for nine years. Within a year of being released, he was convicted again, for robbing a Staten Island deli, and was sentenced to 3½ to 7 years. He has spent 12 of the past 15 years in prison.

The men had similar prison disciplinary records. Mr. Bostic had one minor infraction for creating a disturbance and being out of place; Mr. Summa had two minor infractions, according to the hearing transcript. But he also had a certificate indicating that he had completed all of his programs, which Mr. Bostic did not have. Both said they had family and jobs waiting if they were released.

Mr. Bostic expressed remorse, telling the board that he had been hanging around with the wrong crowd. “There’s really no excuse for why I did it,” he said. “I was hurting my mother, my father. They’re the only ones sending me money and letters.”

Mr. Summa was more vague about his crimes. “It is actually not that I am stealing,” he told them. “It is that I buy these things from people in the neighborhood. I know they are stolen when I bought them, but for the price I get them, I can’t say no.”

The board sent Mr. Bostic back to prison for at least a year; he is incarcerated at Wyoming Correctional Facility.

Mr. Summa was freed in July.

But that did not last.

In September, he was caught on video robbing a Chinese restaurant on Staten Island.

He told the police he had been drinking heavily, blacked out and did not remember committing the robbery, though he pleaded guilty after seeing the security video.

Shortly afterward, a reporter visited him on Rikers Island to ask about the board’s decision to release him.

Mr. Summa said that given his lengthy criminal history, he had not expected it. “I was surprised,” he said.