Finalist: The New York Times, by Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project and Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip

A Brutal Beating Wakes Attica’s Ghosts

By Tom Robbins

ATTICA, N.Y. — On the evening of Aug. 9, 2011, one month before the 40th anniversary of the bloody Attica prison riot, a guard in that remote facility in western New York was distributing mail to inmates in C Block, one of the vast tiers of cells nestled behind its towering 30-foot walls.

The prisoners were rowdy that night, talking loudly as they mingled on the gallery outside their cells, a State Police inquiry found. Frustrated, an officer shouted into the din: “Shut the (expletive) up.”

Normally, that would be enough to bring quiet to C Block, where guards who work the 3 to 11 p.m. shift are known for strict, sometimes violent, enforcement of the rules. This night, somewhere on the gallery, a prisoner shouted back, bellowing “You shut the (expletive) up.” Emboldened, the shouter taunted the officer with an obscene suggestion.

Inmates were immediately ordered to retreat to their cells and “lock in.” Thirty minutes later, three officers, led by a sergeant, marched down the corridor. They stopped at the cell of George Williams, a 29-year-old African-American from New Jersey who was serving a sentence of two to four years for robbing two jewelry stores in Manhattan.

Mr. Williams had been transferred to Attica that January following an altercation with other inmates at a different facility. He had just four months to serve before he was to be released. He was doing his best to stay out of trouble. His plan was to go home to New Brunswick and try to find work as a barber. That evening, Mr. Williams remembers, he had been in his cell watching the rap stars Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy on television, and missed the shouting on the cellblock. The guards ordered him to strip for a search and then marched him down the hall to a darkened dayroom used for meetings and classes for what they told him would be a urine test.

Mr. Williams is 5-foot-8, and a solid 170 pounds. But corrections officers tend toward linebacker size, and the three officers towered over him. The smallest was Sgt. Sean Warner, 37, at 5-foot-11, 240 pounds. Beside him was Officer Keith Swack, 37, a burly 6-foot-3 and some 300 pounds. A third officer was standing behind the cell door. Mr. Williams thought it was Officer Matthew Rademacher, 29, who had followed his father into the job six years earlier. Officer Rademacher was six feet tall and weighed 260 pounds. All three men are white and had goatees at the time.

Mr. Williams was wondering why a sergeant would be doing the grunt work of conducting an impromptu drug test when, he said, a fist hammered him hard on the right side of his rib cage. He doubled up, collapsing to the floor. More blows rained down. Mr. Williams tried to curl up to protect himself from the pummeling of batons, fists and kicks. Someone jumped on his ankle. He screamed in pain. He opened his eyes to see a guard aiming a kick at his head, as though punting a football. I’m going to die here, he thought.

Inmates in cells across from the dayroom watched the attack, among them a convict named Charles Bisesi, 67, who saw Mr. Williams pitched face-first onto the floor. He saw guards kick Mr. Williams in the head and face, and strike him with their heavy wooden batons. Mr. Bisesi estimated that Mr. Williams had been kicked up to 50 times, and struck with a dozen more blows from nightsticks, thwacks delivered with such force that Mr. Bisesi could hear the thud as wood hit flesh. He also heard Mr. Williams begging for his life, cries loud enough that prisoners two floors below heard them as well.

A couple of minutes after the beating began, one of the guards loudly rapped his baton on the floor. At the signal, more guards rushed upstairs and into the dayroom. Witnesses differed on the number. Some said that as many as 12 officers had plunged into the scrum. Others recalled seeing two or three. All agreed that when they were finished, Mr. Williams could not walk.

His ordeal is the subject of an unprecedented trial scheduled to open on Monday in western New York. Three guards — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — face charges stemming from the beating that night. All three have pleaded not guilty. An examination of this case and dozens of others offers a vivid lesson in the intractable culture of prison brutality, especially given the notoriety of Attica, which entered the cultural lexicon as a synonym for prison havoc after 43 men died there in 1971 as the state suppressed an uprising by inmates. This account is based on investigative reports and court filings, as well as interviews with people on both sides of the bars at Attica, state officials and prison reform advocates.

After the beating ended, an inmate who was across from the dayroom, Maurice Mayfield, watched as an officer stepped on a plastic safety razor and pried out the blade. “We got the weapon,” Mr. Mayfield heard the guard yell.

Mr. Williams was handcuffed and pulled to the top of a staircase. “Walk down or we’ll push you down,” he heard someone say. He could not walk, he answered. His ankle was broken. As he spoke, he was shoved from behind. He plunged down the stairs, crashing onto his shoulder at the bottom. When guards picked him up again, he said, one of them grabbed his head and smashed his face into the wall. He was left there, staring at the splatter of his own blood on the wall in front of him.

When an inmate is accused of serious violations in one of New York State’s maximum security prisons, standard procedure calls for him to be placed in solitary confinement in the Special Housing Unit. Stays in “the Box,” as the unit is called, can last weeks, months, even years. But when the detail arrived at the Box with Mr. Williams that night, the officer in charge refused to accept him, telling the officers to take him to the prison infirmary. “We can’t take him in here looking like that,” Mr. Williams heard the officer say.

Extensive Injuries

At the infirmary, Katherine Tara, a nurse who had been working at Attica for just 10 months, saw cuts over Mr. Williams’s eyes and blood on his mouth and clothing. He told her his vision was blurry and that he thought his ribs were broken. With officers nearby, he said nothing about how he had been hurt. Ms. Tara later told investigators that she had treated other inmates in what are called “use of force” cases. This one was excessive, she said. She called the prison’s medical doctor, who agreed with her: Mr. Williams needed to go to an outside hospital.

As Mr. Williams waited in the infirmary, several guards involved in the episode arrived, including Officers Rademacher and Swack. Mr. Williams heard someone boast that there would be no consequences for the beating: “The (expletive) that happened upstairs isn’t going to be nothing.”

Mr. Williams was taken first to a hospital in Warsaw, the county seat of Wyoming County, where Attica is. But the injuries were too severe for the doctors there to treat. Packed up again, he was driven to Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, 50 miles away.

As he rode the highways of western New York that sweltering night, Mr. Williams worried that if he were to return to Attica, he would be killed. He asked a medical attendant to lend him his cellphone so he could call his family. The attendant refused.

In Buffalo, his injuries were tallied: a broken shoulder, several cracked ribs and two broken legs, one of which required surgery. Doctors realigned it, using a plate and six screws. Mr. Williams also had a severe fracture of the orbit surrounding his left eye, a large amount of blood lodged in his left maxillary sinus, and multiple cuts and bruises.

One doctor who treated Mr. Williams asked a guard what had happened. He should not have had the weapon, the guard replied.

Back at Attica, the same explanation was entered on official reports. In what is known as an unusual incident memo, guards detailed Mr. Williams’s alleged infractions, including the razor blade and ice pick-like shaft they said they found on him. On C Block, an inmate named Raymond Sanabria, who worked as a porter mopping the gallery, was ordered to “hurry up and clean up the blood.” Officers warned him to keep quiet, Mr. Sanabria later told investigators.

Another inmate said Officer Rademacher had ordered him to clean up more blood from inside the office of the C Block hall captain, where guards had gathered after the beating. The inmate, Peter Thousand, said he had also been told to bring a bag of blood-soiled shirts to a courtyard where officers kept a barbecue pit. Prison officials later concluded that the shirts had been burned there.

The inmate witnesses told investigators something else: If the guards were looking to punish the prisoner who had shouted out the curses earlier that night, they had grabbed the wrong man.

To George Williams, the astonishing thing is that the charges of savagery and cover-up stemming from that hellish night have not been buried, but will be recounted in the weeks to come before a jury in the village of Warsaw, 14 miles from the prison.

A Violent Past

Attica Correctional Facility sits amid rolling hills of corn fields, tall silos and gambrel-roofed dairy barns. Residents like to say there are more cows than people in Wyoming County, although the heaviest concentration of humanity is the 2,240 inmates packed behind the great gray prison walls that measure more than a mile around and are topped by red-shingled turrets where armed guards stand watch.

Opened in 1931, the prison has long been the largest local employer. More than 600 officers patrol the prison today, all but a handful of them white. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the prisoners are black or Hispanic, almost half of them imported from New York City and its suburbs. The prison sustains the local economy. In all, it encompasses 1,000 acres, including a farm where inmates worked until budget cuts ended the program. Nearby is a cemetery where prisoners are buried when no one claims their remains. Older headstones carry no names, just identification numbers.

Looming over everything at Attica is the riot. The state commission that investigated the September 1971 uprising memorably described it as the bloodiest single encounter, Indian massacres aside, between Americans since the Civil War. Forty-three men died there, 89 more were wounded. Eleven of those killed were state workers, eight guards and three civilians. All but one had been held as hostages and died in a deadly hail of friendly fire after Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller ordered the authorities to retake the prison after a four-day standoff with mutinous inmates. One guard died two days earlier as a result of a beating inflicted by prisoners the day the riot erupted.

The rest of the victims were inmates. Twenty-nine were killed by police bullets fired in the Sept. 13 retaking of the prison. Three more were executed by other inmates during the takeover for actions deemed counter to the rebellion.

To those who work at the prison, the history of the riot is an everyday reminder of the danger that inmates, who greatly outnumber guards, could take over at any time. Mark Cunningham, an Attica sergeant whose father was killed in the retaking, tells all new recruits about the events of 1971. “I make sure it gets talked about,” Sergeant Cunningham said. “You do certain things a certain way because it wasn’t done one time and the inmates took control.”

Attica’s special tensions were long evident to Brian Fischer, who spent 35 years working in the state prison system, the last six as corrections commissioner, before he retired in 2013. “Attica has a unique personality, in part because of the riot,” Mr. Fischer said in an interview. “There’s an historical negativity if you will,” he added. “That doesn’t go away.”

Whatever the problems, the good pay and benefits that come with a job at a maximum-security prison like Attica are a trade-off for policing those serving the longest sentences for the worst crimes. “It’s the magna cum laude of prisons,” Richard Harcrow, an Attica guard for 31 years and former union president, said.

New York has 17 maximum security facilities, a constellation that sprawls from Sing Sing just north of New York City, to Clinton near the Canadian border, to Elmira, just north of Pennsylvania. They are often places of strife and violence, although most of what goes on remains shrouded from view both by remoteness and official secrecy.

The “unusual incident” involving George Williams in 2011 was initially recorded as just another time when officers were compelled to use force to defend themselves and do their jobs. There were 563 inmate assaults on prison employees recorded inside New York’s prison system that year, the vast majority in the maximum facilities. Over all, the state prison population has shrunk substantially in recent years, down 25 percent from a peak of 71,600 in the late 1990s when the Rockefeller drug laws sent thousands of men and women away to serve long sentences.

In January, the state had 53,000 prisoners in custody. The decline has allowed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut the total number of facilities to 54, from 67. But there are no plans to eliminate any of the maximum security prisons, which house 44 percent of New York’s inmates, said Anthony Annucci, the acting corrections commissioner.

Closings of any kind have been vigorously resisted by the New York State Correction Officers Police Benevolent Association, which represents the state’s 20,000 corrections officers. Partly, it is simple bread-and-butter unionism: Shutdowns mean lost jobs. Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer said he had encountered stiff union resistance when he tried to trim the state’s vast prison facilities. “Their political heft in districts where prisons were significant employers drove the opposition,” he said.

But recent closings, the union says, have led to inmate overcrowding and understaffing of guards, making their jobs far more dangerous. As proof, the union points to the recent rise in inmate assaults on staff, which reached 747 last year. In October, union leaders rallied outside Attica, where 85 cells meant to hold a single inmate are double-bunked. “Our officers have been stabbed and suffered compound fractures by inmates,” said Michael Powers, the current union president. “The state can’t continue to downplay the situation.”

State officials say what they call the “uptick” in inmate attacks is not linked to the closings, but have agreed to review staffing changes with the union.

The other uptick in prison violence is in the use of force by officers. While officials are supposed to track every time a body hold, baton strike, closed fist or chemical spray is employed by guards, inmates argue that does not always happen. Still, the number of recorded incidents rose by 25 percent between 2009 and 2013, with most of them taking place in the maximum security facilities.

Unlike Rikers Island, the huge New York City jail complex that has been roiled by revelations about the mistreatment of inmates in the past year, what occurs in the toughest state prisons has garnered little public notice. At Attica, most violent encounters between inmates and guards are handled internally. Charges are filed against the offender, a hearing is held and then a sentence is imposed, usually a hefty term in the Box. Inmates are invariably convicted. Of the 228 cases at Attica in which inmates were accused of assaulting corrections employees between 2010 and 2013, only one prisoner was found not guilty of all charges. Everyone else was sent to the Box for periods ranging from two to 16 months, records show.

These records were obtained by the Correctional Association, a 170-year-old nonprofit that monitors conditions in New York’s prisons. “It’s a kangaroo court,” said Jack Beck, the association’s project director, who has been inspecting New York prisons for more than 30 years.

An Inquiry Begins

Had the nurse on duty the night George Williams was beaten played down his injuries, he believes the episode would have been logged as one more inmate assault on staff members. “She was a blessing,” he said. “If she hadn’t of said I needed a surgeon, I would have been dead.”

Instead, Mr. Williams’s case took a very different route. The corrections department’s inspector general began an inquiry, and the State Police were soon called in as well. Over the following weeks, investigators asked guards, inmates and medical personnel what they had seen.

Many did not want to talk about it. Under their union contract, corrections officers are obligated to answer questions only from their employers and have the right to refuse to talk to outside police agencies. State Police investigators attempted to interview 15 guards; 11 declined to cooperate.

Inmates on C Block were reluctant to talk for their own reasons. More than two dozen said they had seen Mr. Williams marched past them and had later heard his screams. But those with the clearest view of what happened inside the dayroom balked at telling what they saw, saying they feared retaliation.

To get their stories, the State Police had the corrections department relocate five inmates to other prisons. Only after he was moved 100 miles east to Auburn Correctional Facility did Chris Tessitore recount how he had heard officers voicing anger at the curses screamed out that night. Mr. Tessitore said he had seen a guard aiming kicks at Mr. Williams on the floor but had averted his gaze when an officer looked in his direction. The screaming, he said, “went on for three to five minutes.”

An inmate named Alex Harris, who was relocated to Downstate Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, said that as he watched the beating, a guard had yelled to “get off the gates” — a command issued when officers do not want an audience. He said he had turned away to watch TV, but he still heard Mr. Williams pleading for his life.

A month after the beating, just as corrections officers and residents of the village of Attica were marking the anniversary of the 1971 riot, the corrections department issued formal “Notices of Discipline” to five officers. The notices sought their dismissal for using excessive force on Mr. Williams, submitting false documentation and lying to the inspector general.

The move prompted an immediate rebellion among Attica’s corrections officers, who began a by-the-book work slowdown. Such job actions are not uncommon, officials acknowledge, with the only victims being the inmates whose meals, programs and visitors are all delayed. The slowdown continued for several days until supervisors intervened. A few days later, after two fistfights among inmates in the yards, the entire prison was placed on lockdown. For five days, inmates were confined to their cells as officers conducted a prisonwide search for weapons. Union leaders later said that 60 weapons had been found, many of them in C Block — proof, they said, of the dangers the guards charged in the episode involving Mr. Williams faced.

Still, the investigations continued. On Dec. 13, 2011, a state grand jury in Warsaw handed up criminal indictments against four Attica guards: Sergeant Warner, along with Officers Rademacher, Swack and Erik Hibsch, who was accused of joining in the beating in the dayroom. The four were arraigned in State Supreme Court in Wyoming County on charges of first-degree gang assault, a law commonly used to help tame gangs like the Crips, Bloods and Latin Kings that thrive inside New York’s prisons. The charge carries a minimum sentence of eight and one-third years in prison and a maximum of 25 years. Additional felony counts accused the officers of filing false reports and tampering with evidence. The charges against Officer Hibsch were later dropped.

It was the first time, state officials said, that criminal charges had been brought against corrections officers for a nonsexual assault on an inmate.

Attica’s guards took the news as a direct attack on their ranks. Fund-raisers were organized for the indicted men. Blue ribbons — blue for the color of their uniforms and the symbolic “Blue Wall” of corrections solidarity — were printed with the slogan “Attica United.” A Facebook page was created. Donations flowed in from prison guards’ unions across the country. Inside Attica, the officers made another kind of statement: Doors decorated with inmates’ murals were repainted black, with a wide blue stripe across them.

Union leaders denounced the charges. “They did not go after this guy,” the union’s western regional representative, Al Mothershed, told a Rochester television station. “They did not beat him up intentionally. They used the amount of force that was necessary to gain control of this inmate and keep him from attaining a weapon.”

State corrections officials acknowledged in a statement that the department had referred the case to prosecutors, but stopped short of condemning the attack. The indictments, it said, were “troubling.”

The choice to refer the case to law enforcement was made by Mr. Fischer, the corrections commissioner at the time. “This was something too obvious to ignore,” he said. The “beat-down,” he added, was the worst such incident on his watch. “It was clear to me that a number of officers had acted together. It wasn’t something that spontaneously occurred, like in the middle of the hall.”

Mr. Williams was sitting in another prison dayroom when news of the arrests came on television. “I almost passed out,” he recalled.

Beatings Were ‘Normal’

Inmates at Attica were stunned by the indictments as well. To them, the remarkable thing about the beating Mr. Williams endured that August night was not the cynical way in which it seemed to have been planned, or even the horrific extent of his injuries. What was truly notable was that the story got out, and that officers had been arrested and charged.

“What they did? How they jumped that guy? That was normal,” said a prisoner who has spent more than 20 years inside Attica. “It happens all the time,” he said. That view was echoed in interviews with more than three dozen current and former Attica inmates, many of whom made the rounds of the state’s toughest prisons during their incarceration. They cited Attica as the most fearsome place they had been held, a facility where a small group of correction officers dole out harsh punishment largely with impunity. Those still confined there talked about it with trepidation. If quoted by name, retaliation was certain, they said.

Those now beyond the reach of the batons described life at Attica in detail. Antonio Yarbough, 39, spent 20 years in the prison after being convicted of a multiple murder of which he was exonerated in 2014. Unlike Mr. Williams, Mr. Yarbough could go head-to-head with the biggest of Attica’s guards: He is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds. But he said that fear of those in charge was a constant. “You’re scared to go to the yard, scared to go to chow. You just stay in your house,” he said, using prison slang for a cell.

That fear was palpable to Soffiyah Elijah when she visited Attica a few months before the beating of Mr. Williams as the Correctional Association’s newly appointed executive director. The organization holds a unique right under state law that allows it to inspect state prisons. “What struck me when I walked the tiers of Attica was that every person, bar none, talked about how the guards were brutalizing them,” Ms. Elijah said. “There are atrocities as well at Clinton and Auburn, but the problem is systemic at Attica.” In 2012, the association began calling for Attica to be shut down. “I believe it’s beyond repair,” Ms. Elijah said.

Mr. Fischer, the former state corrections chief, reluctantly agreed with the conclusion that Attica should be closed. “Of all the maximum security prisons, I would probably argue, given the history of it, we’d probably be better off if we did,” he said.

Inmates say a minority of guards engage in brutality, but those who do exert a powerful influence throughout the prison. Officers viewed as too lenient often received warnings of their own. A common tactic used to punish inmates without having to file paperwork is to shut down power for a row of cells. “When the power goes off, nothing works,” one inmate explained. “The light goes off, the water won’t come out of the sink, the toilet won’t flush.” One officer who turned the power back on after a guard on an earlier shift had shut it down got a note left on his desk: “Inmate Lover,” it read, according to a prisoner who saw it.

Behind bars, where the grapevine is the chief source of news, stories can quickly grow exaggerated. Several prisoners said that Mr. Williams’s eye was knocked out of his head. That did not happen. But reports filed by guards often followed a script as well. Phrases like “removed his left hand from the wall, violently driving his elbow toward me” show up repeatedly in officers’ reports.

That is what happened, officers stated, on Jan. 21, 2011, when they pulled Sergio Barnes, a 33-year-old inmate from Rochester serving 25 years to life for murder and robbery, out of line for a frisk. Although surrounded by four guards, officers said Mr. Barnes wheeled around suddenly, punching one “in the face with both fists” and tackling another. In the melee that followed, he was slammed to the ground and struck multiple times with fists and batons.

Mr. Barnes was punished with 11 months in solitary confinement for assaulting staff members. He filed a prisoner grievance, but it was denied because he had no witnesses. The story of his encounter surfaced only because he filed suit in federal court, saying he had been beaten without cause. In his complaint, Mr. Barnes said that, after being frisked, a guard he later identified as Gary Pritchard Jr. slugged him in the eye, while others struck him in the head and body with their batons. Mr. Barnes said that after he had been shackled, guards rammed him face-first into a wall. “If you thought you were ugly before, look at your face now,” Mr. Barnes said Officer Pritchard taunted him, adding a racial slur.

Lawyers for the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, but it was allowed to proceed and, in a rare victory for inmates who file motions themselves, Mr. Barnes later obtained a court-appointed attorney. Last October, the state, without admitting wrongdoing, agreed to pay Mr. Barnes $9,800 to settle the case.

In recent years, the state has settled several civil cases in which defendants in the Williams beating case were cited. One inmate was awarded $9,000 after accusing Officer Rademacher of pinning him against the wall and choking him while he was beaten by another guard. In September, the state paid $7,000 to settle a suit in which a C Block inmate claimed that guards wearing paper bags on their heads had sprayed him with a mix of vinegar, feces and machine oil in his cell. Among those the inmate cited were Officers Pritchard, Rademacher and Swack.

“You settle lawsuits for a lot of different reasons,” Mr. Annucci, the acting corrections chief, said when asked about the settlements. But he conceded that some guards pose problems. “Do I have rogue correction officers at Attica or Clinton or Great Meadow? Yep. Do I have to rigorously pursue those rogue officers when I find evidence that they’ve engaged in excessive force or have done something untoward to the inmate population? Absolutely.”

The surest way to catch officers using excessive force is on camera, but at Attica, there are few. Unlike most state maximum security facilities, the cameras are confined to the mess halls, the Box and — in a bid to catch drug smuggling — the visiting room.

Inmates have long sought cameras in the corridors, said James Conway, a former Attica superintendent whose father and uncle worked as guards at the prison. “They suspect there is physical abuse and the cameras will protect them,” said Mr. Conway, adding that he never had the money to install them. Pressed about Attica’s dearth of cameras, Mr. Annucci, the acting commissioner, said some 500 would be installed there this year.

Cases Against Guards

But even with evidence, officers can be difficult to fire. Consider the case of Gary Pritchard Jr., a legendary figure among both staff and inmates, and an example of just how hard it is to make changes in places like Attica. A corrections officer for 25 years, Officer Pritchard, 49, has worked at Attica since 1994. Last year, with overtime, he earned $128,000. Yet over his career, he has been named as a defendant in at least 24 federal civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates, some of which listed him by his nickname.

“His jailhouse name was ‘Preacher,’ ” Rene Peterson, 61, who was imprisoned at Attica from 2000 to 2001, said in an interview. “Before he beat your ass, he want to say verses out of the Bible.”

David Anderson, 40, who was released from Attica in late 2013, also mentioned Officer Pritchard. “They call him Preacher because he’s got all kinds of Bible scriptures on him,” Mr. Anderson said. He cited Officer Pritchard’s alleged role in a group known to prisoners as “the Black Glove Crew.” It was a “beat-up squad,” he said, one that routinely doled out punishment to prisoners.

Prison officials say that the Black Glove Crew is an inmate myth. The name, they said, stems from the black, puncture-resistant gloves that officers were provided in the late 1990s to protect against infections. The authorities later replaced the black gloves with blue ones. But the stories lived on, fed by a stream of violent episodes involving glove-wearing guards in places like Attica’s C Block.

At least seven of the suits that name Officer Pritchard, who did not respond to telephone messages left with state and union officials as well as family members, have been settled by the state. In March, the state agreed to pay $6,000 to settle a suit by an inmate who said that while frisking him, Officer Pritchard had squeezed his testicles hard enough to make him cry, and had then beaten him brutally along with other guards, a claim mirrored in other lawsuits that date back to 1994.

State lawyers still opted to go to trial in January to contest a claim filed by a former inmate, who has since undergone gender reassignment surgery, who said that Officer Pritchard and other guards had beaten her while calling her a “freak.” Medical records showed that the former inmate, Brian Woodall, who is now Misty LaCroix, had a black eye and a broken rib. But the state’s lawyers said the injuries were most likely self-inflicted.

When Officer Pritchard took the witness stand in Federal District Court in Rochester, Ms. LaCroix’s lawyer asked him to show the jury the tattoos by which Ms. LaCroix had recognized him. The judge ordered him to comply. Officer Pritchard, a well-built man with a brush haircut, rolled up his sleeves, exposing drawings on both arms that included a skull, a knife, a spider, “Mom” and “Jesus,” and a phrase, “Angels All Around Me.” Asked if he routinely carried a baton, Officer Pritchard said, “I carry the biggest one they will give me.” He said that he had been present when the attack allegedly occurred, but denied there had been an altercation. After his testimony, a doctor testified that it would be almost physically impossible for Ms. LaCroix to have broken her own rib. Later that day, the state’s lawyers agreed to pay $80,000 to settle the case.

Despite what Mr. Annucci described as a “zero-tolerance policy for unacceptable behavior,” the corrections department has had difficulty reining in problem guards. Years before Officer Pritchard was accused of using fists and batons on Mr. Barnes, Ms. LaCroix and others, corrections officials had tried to fire him when he worked at Auburn in 1993. The union appealed his termination, and an arbitrator reduced the penalty to a one-month suspension.

Officer Pritchard then transferred to Attica. He did so, he said during a deposition in Ms. LaCroix’s case, because he considered it “the best facility in the state,” one with “an overall team spirit.” In 1997, administrators at Attica tried to fire him as well for beating an inmate. “I used my baton with everything I had,” Officer Pritchard said in his deposition, delivering a blow “that resulted in a couple of missing teeth.” He had done nothing improper, he said. An arbitrator disagreed but kept his punishment to a $1,500 fine.

In one suit that is still active, state officials acknowledged that the corrections department’s inspector general had investigated 26 separate complaints against Officer Pritchard between 2001 and 2007, without bringing charges against him.

Between 2009 and 2013, the corrections department did bring charges against other officers 190 times for abuses of inmates at various prisons around the state, according to records obtained by the Correctional Association. Most of those cases were settled. In the 25 cases arbitrators heard involving the alleged abuse of inmates, only six officers were ordered terminated, primarily for having improper relationships with inmates.

In a 2012 case, the department tried to fire an officer accused of having struck an inmate “35 times with a baton, then twice more after he was handcuffed,” and then filing a false report about the confrontation. An arbitrator ordered a seven-month suspension.

The department’s negotiated settlements are often mild as well. Five correction officers charged in 2011 with using force on a shackled inmate and then lying about it to the inspector general were allowed to resolve the matter by paying fines ranging of $1,800 to $3,000. The specifics of these disciplinary cases are another secret of the state prison system. Under New York’s civil rights law, personnel records for corrections officers (as well as for many police and fire departments) are deemed confidential and “not subject to inspection or review.” Individual records like Officer Pritchard’s emerge only when subpoenaed in lawsuits, and then are usually kept under seal.

Even when it comes to deciding where officers should work, prison administrators have little leverage. James Conway, the former Attica superintendent, said he had tried at one point to get Officer Pritchard into a job where he did not interact with inmates. But under the officers’ union contract, Officer Pritchard did not have to give up his post. Officers choose their job assignments based on seniority, and Officer Pritchard had won his job by bidding for the position.

“He develops his own little posse in C Block,” Mr. Conway said. “The younger officers would look up to him because he had this reputation of being a tough guy, a by-the-book guy.”

A Deadly Riot

In September, Mr. Annucci became the first commissioner to attend the annual memorial ceremony at Attica for corrections workers killed in the riot. “Time does not heal all wounds,” he told the small crowd. “Certain wounds and scars went too deep to ever heal.”

It was a simple and somber event held on a grassy plain outside the arched, gothic doors of the prison’s main entrance. There was an honor guard of corrections officers, a bugler playing taps and an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The center of attention was a tall granite marker that listed the names of the 11 prison employees who died. The 32 dead inmates were unmentioned, their names nowhere to be found inside or outside the prison. The reason, several participants in the ceremony said, was simple: The inmates caused the riot.

Michael Smith, a former corrections officer who was one of those taken hostage during the standoff, saw it somewhat differently. Mr. Smith was 22 at the time of the riot and had been at Attica for just a year. He got along with most inmates, he said as he sat in his living room 30 miles south of the prison. “I treated everyone respectfully and I expected to be treated with respect in exchange.” But tensions had built throughout summer 1971. “You could just feel it,” he said.

A few weeks before the riot, two inmates showed him a letter they had drafted to send to the corrections commissioner at the time, Russell Oswald, and Governor Rockefeller. “They wanted better education, more religious freedoms and more than one roll of toilet paper a month,” Mr. Smith said.

On Sept. 8, officers mistook a pair of sparring inmates for a serious fight. It proved the riot’s spark. When guards tried to take the men to the Box, prisoners began to throw cans. The next morning, inmates who were returning from the mess hall erupted at Times Square, as the intersection of the prison’s four tunnels is called, fatally beating Officer William Quinn, 28, a father of three girls. Mr. Smith was guarding men in the metal shop when the siren wailed. Within minutes, a surge of rampaging inmates had burst inside. Mr. Smith was knocked to the floor and kicked repeatedly until a pair of inmates intervened. They led him out, through a prison that was spiraling into chaos. “They were lighting anything that would burn, beating up anyone who was administration,” he said.

At Times Square, other prisoners grabbed Mr. Smith, taking him and 37 other hostages to D Yard. Prisoners were gathering weapons, he said, “clubs, hammers, baseball bats, knives.” A group of Muslim inmates became the hostages’ protectors. Blindfolded, they heard speeches over the next two days by inmate leaders and outside observers summoned by the rebels, including the radical lawyer William M. Kunstler; Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party; and State Assemblyman Arthur Eve of Buffalo. The inmates issued a list of demands, many of them from the letter Mr. Smith had seen. Added to the list was amnesty. Officer Quinn’s death was a deal-breaker.

On Sunday, his third day as a hostage, Mr. Smith was interviewed by a television crew that had been allowed into the yard. He called for Governor Rockefeller, who had refused to come to Attica, to “get his ass here now.”

By then, the governor had decided to end the standoff. On Monday morning, under an ominous sky, Mr. Oswald, the corrections commissioner, issued an ultimatum to the prisoners. The inmates responded by grabbing eight hostages at random, including Mr. Smith, taking them to a catwalk above the yard and threatening to execute them. Mr. Smith was seated in a chair, surrounded by three men armed with a hammer, a spear and a knife. He realized that one of the armed men was Don Noble, an author of the letter to the governor. A helicopter made two low passes overhead, followed by a popping sound as a gas was dropped into the yard. Gunfire erupted. “All hell broke loose,” Mr. Smith said.

State troopers armed with rifles and shotguns did most of the shooting, but corrections officers fired as well, despite being ordered not to. As bullets whizzed past, Mr. Smith felt Mr. Noble yank him off the chair. Mr. Smith believes the action saved his life, but he was still struck by five bullets, four of them from an AR-15 automatic rifle. The gunman, he is sure, was a fellow corrections officer who had gotten the weapon from the prison arsenal and had mistaken him for an inmate.

He lay on the catwalk, unable to move as the firing continued. “It seemed like it was going on forever,” he said. Later, an ambulance took him to a hospital in nearby Batavia, where he had multiple operations over the next six months.

Shortly after the clouds of gas lifted, a state official said that the slain hostages had died from slashed throats. Michael Smith, the official said, had had his testicles severed and stuffed in his mouth. None of it was true. Two hostages suffered severe cuts from would-be executioners, but the wounds were not fatal. Autopsies performed by medical examiners confirmed that gunshot wounds were the cause of death in all of the hostage fatalities. And none of the inmates had guns.

Still, the vivid pronouncement by the authorities stuck in many minds. Deanne Quinn Miller, whose father, William, was the riot’s first victim and who, with Michael Smith, helped found a group called Forgotten Victims of Attica, said that many residents continued to believe the stories. “You can’t have that conversation with them,” she said. “It’s what they’ve decided.”

Lingering Pain

For many years, inmates observed Sept. 13 by sitting in silence at breakfast in the mess hall. Sometimes there would be a slow, dirgelike drumming of spoons. But the protests gradually faded away. “Either they don’t know, or they’re scared,” one Attica inmate said.

George Williams knew about Attica’s history but had not concerned himself with it. “I wasn’t there for that,” he said during an interview in November in a New Brunswick restaurant. Now 32, he is a good-looking man, with a broad face, wavy, close-cropped hair and a bright smile. As he talked, he dabbed steadily at his nose, a residual effect of the sinus damage from the beating three years ago. Other mementos included a left eye more sunken than the right, and a leg that, he said, “is always bothering me.” Less visible are the headaches and nightmares. “I still can’t sleep,” he said.

After he was released from the hospital, Mr. Williams was sent to a different maximum security prison, near Buffalo. He finished his sentence in January 2012 but was soon behind bars again, in New Jersey, for a probation violation. Doctors there said he had post-traumatic stress disorder after he described flashbacks and waking from nightmares in a sweat.

He still does not know why he was singled out at Attica. “I was doing my time,” he said. “I was ready to go.” He was released from jail in New Jersey just before Thanksgiving. His crimes, he said, were a product of being “young and dumb.” In the hospital, he worried that if he died, his family would assume it was “because of something I did.”

Mr. Williams is now trying to raise money for barbering school tuition. Of the criminal case against the Attica guards, he expressed wonder that it was still active. “I don’t want it to be a cliché, but I just hope that justice is served,” he said. “That’s it.”

The trial is scheduled to begin on Monday. The defendants — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — have retained some of western New York’s top criminal defense lawyers, thanks in part to help from fellow officers. The fourth guard, Officer Hibsch, was given immunity to testify, but lawyers for the defendants have indicated that they are not concerned with his testimony. “There were all kinds of plea offers,” Norman Effman, who represents Officer Rademacher, said. “Our clients could walk away if they were willing to resign their jobs. They maintain their innocence; they did nothing wrong.”

Officer Hibsch returned to work at Attica after an arbitrator ruled in May that his use of force in the dayroom on the day that Mr. Williams was beaten was “not unjustified.” After hearing from 39 witnesses, including Mr. Williams and several other C Block inmates, the arbitrator ordered Mr. Hibsch reinstated with back pay. Corrections officials said that, as a personnel matter, they could not discuss the decision.

Inmates still incarcerated at Attica said there were high hopes that the case would spur changes in how the prison was policed. Those hopes have since ebbed. The only way to get attention, they said, is something dramatic. “We feel Albany doesn’t give a damn,” one inmate said, voicing despair rather than menace. “No one on the outside is going to change anything. Guys say: ‘We need a riot. It’s the only way to stop it.’ ”

This article is by Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

New York Inmates Report Beatings and Retribution by Prison Officers

By Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip

Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.

As the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: “Where are they going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?” One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.

Hours earlier, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat had made their daring escape from the unit — called the “honor block” — where they were housed. Now it appeared that Mr. Alexander, a fellow convicted murderer who lived in an adjoining cell, was being made to suffer the consequences.

For days after the June prison break, corrections officers carried out what seemed like a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates, particularly those on the honor block, an investigation by The New York Times found. In letters reviewed by The Times, as well as prison interviews, inmates described a strikingly similar catalog of abuses, including being beaten while handcuffed, choked and slammed against cell bars and walls.

They were also subjected to harsh policies ordered by the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision: Dozens of inmates, many of whom had won the right to live on the honor block after years of good behavior, were transferred out of Clinton to other prisons. Many were placed in solitary confinement, and stripped of privileges they had accrued over the years — even though no prisoners have yet been linked to Mr. Matt’s and Mr. Sweat’s actions.

Indeed, it is prison employees who have been implicated: One has pleaded guilty to aiding the escape; another faces criminal charges; nine officers have been suspended; and the leadership of the prison, in Dannemora, has been removed.

More than 60 inmates have filed complaints with Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, an organization that assists indigent prisoners. And 10 members of an inmate council at Clinton signed a letter last month to state corrections officials making similar allegations.

“We have been daily getting complaints along these lines from around the state,” said Michael Cassidy, a lawyer for Prisoners’ Legal Services.

After The Times published its findings, the corrections department released a statement saying the inmate complaints had been under investigation for several weeks and had “also been referred to the state inspector general.”

“Any findings of misconduct or abuse against inmates will be punished to the full extent of the law,” the statement continued.

Several inmates interviewed by The Times said they had been visited by members of the department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Frantic Questioning

The accounts suggest that as corrections officers frantically pressed for information that could lead to the capture of the two prisoners, and perhaps exonerate themselves for the security lapses that contributed to the breakout, they resorted to brutal tactics that most likely violated department regulations.

Victor Aponte, who worked in the prison tailor shop where Mr. Matt also had a job, said a guard with an American flag tattoo, known at the prison as Captain America, tied a plastic bag around Mr. Aponte’s neck in an interrogation and tightened it until he passed out. Reggie Edwards, who supervised the tailor shop, said corrections officials put him in solitary confinement for three weeks and threw out most of his belongings, including his family photographs and his wedding ring.

After a three-week manhunt, a federal agent shot and killed Mr. Matt on June 26. Two days later, a State Police officer shot Mr. Sweat, and he was captured.

Mr. Alexander got the news at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, where he had been transferred. He said he had earned his place on the Clinton honor block because he had not been written up for any serious infractions since entering the prison system in 2004. He occupied the cell next to Mr. Matt, who was in prison for murdering his boss and then cutting up the body. (Long before he cut his way out of prison, Mr. Matt was known around Clinton by the nickname Hacksaw.)

For Mr. Alexander, his cell’s location apparently made him a target for investigators.

The night of the escape, Mr. Alexander said, he worked late at the tailor shop, and when he returned to his cell around 9:45 p.m., Mr. Matt gave him bowls of salad and fried chicken that had been bought at the commissary. “He told me: ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the bowls from you in the morning,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

He said he was awakened around 5:15 a.m. for the morning count. “The officer comes banging on the bars,” he said. “He goes to Matt’s cell and bangs on the bars, and then he leaves and he bangs on Dave’s bars.” When there was no response, he said, a sergeant and several guards rushed up and down the cellblock shouting to one another that two inmates were gone.

“The sergeant comes over to me: ‘You hear something? You had to hear something,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

It would be several hours before the first details of the escape were made public. Around 11 a.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured the honor block and inspected the holes the inmates had cut in the backs of their cells with hacksaw blades.

Governor’s Stare

The governor then stopped to question Mr. Alexander.

“Must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Mr. Cuomo asked, according to video of the exchange. Then, Mr. Alexander said, the governor “gave me his best tough-guy stare and walked off.”

Later, the governor said he would be “shocked” if any corrections officers had been involved.

Twice during the day of the escape, Mr. Alexander said he was questioned by investigators from the State Police and the corrections department inspector general’s office.

Then, around 8 p.m., he was handcuffed and taken to a broom closet where, he said, three corrections officers whom he had never seen before interrogated him. An officer wearing a jacket with the initials C.I.U. — Crisis Intervention Unit — sat down and asked him, “Do you know the difference between this interview and those other interviews?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

This time, the officer warned, there were only uniformed guards in the room, Mr. Alexander said.

“The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall,” he said. “Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach.”

With each punch, Mr. Alexander said, the officers shouted another question.

“The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat,” he added.

When Mr. Alexander repeatedly insisted that he had no information, one officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

The officer then put the bag over his head and started beating him again, Mr. Alexander said.

He said the interrogation lasted about 20 minutes, and he was then taken, bleeding, back to his cell.

Later, Mr. Alexander said, the same officer “began quietly taunting and threatening me, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Fat Boy, we’ll be seeing you really soon.’ ”

In a letter to Prisoners’ Legal Services, Mr. Aponte, who also worked in the tailor shop, described going through a similar interrogation two days later.

One officer stood in front of a window blocking the view into the room, he wrote, while another guard in a C.I.U. windbreaker tied a garbage bag around his neck, “using the plastic bag as a hanging noose.”

“I don’t know how long he hung me up like that because I passed out,” Mr. Aponte wrote.

Mr. Aponte, along with several other inmates, said they were initially denied medical care. Days later, when he was finally taken to the prison clinic, officers warned him not to tell the medical staff how he got his injuries, he wrote in a letter.

“The sergeant tells me that I’ve been in prison for a long time and I should know better, that if I didn’t tell the nurse that was going to examine me that nothing has happened that they were going to kill me for real this time,” he wrote.

Paul Davila, another resident of the honor block, wrote in his complaint that after he was beaten during an interrogation, he was pressured to “sign a report stating, ‘I was not assaulted.’ ”

“Left with no other choice,” he wrote, “I signed.”

In the two weeks after the escape, inmates from Clinton’s honor block were dispersed, many of them sent to solitary confinement at other prisons. Some said they were beaten during their transfers by officers from the department’s Correctional Emergency Response Team, known as CERT.

“The CERT team rushed into my cell, threw me down on the bed, twisted my wrist and yelled at me not to resist,” an inmate, Manuel Nuñez, wrote in a letter, adding that later they “assaulted me while I was cuffed, chained and shackled.”

Gantlet of Guards

He said when he and other inmates were lined up to board a corrections bus, officers passed by, punching them.

During an interview last week at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Westchester County, Mr. Nuñez showed reporters purple scars around his right ankle that he said were the result of CERT officers’ intentionally shackling him too tightly.

Some of the former honor block residents have lost privileges that had taken years to earn at Clinton. Mr. Edwards, who had supervised 50 inmates at the prison tailor shop, had been able to earn as much as $45 a week. Since being moved to Sing Sing, he has been working as a porter making $3 a week. “They took everything from me,” he said. “They did everything they could to blame the ones who stayed.”

Mr. Alexander said that days after being beaten up, he was moved, first to the Upstate Correctional Facility in Franklin County and then to Shawangunk Correctional Facility. In the process, he said he lost his TV, his diaries, family photos and a decade’s worth of letters from his mother and aunt that he had laminated with packing tape for safekeeping.

Despite all this, Mr. Alexander and many others interviewed said they did not resent the two escapees. Mr. Sweat was serving life in prison with no possibility of parole for shooting a sheriff’s deputy in the back 20 times and then running him over. Faced with that kind of time, some said, they may well have considered escape.

“I can’t say what I’d do; I didn’t have the time Sweat has,” said Mr. Alexander, who has spent 11 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2023. “So no, I don’t resent them. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”

Inmates said the freedoms awarded on the honor block were not what led to the escape. Investigators have found that it was a corrections officer and civilian supervisor who smuggled in the tools that aided Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat. And because of security lapses, officials say, Mr. Sweat was able to spend night after night preparing an escape route, cutting through the backs of their cells, a brick wall and a steel steam pipe.

Investigators and inmates say that instead of making hourly rounds of the cellblock each night, as they were supposed to do, most guards slept through much of their shift.

“Laziness caused that incident, not privileges,” Mr. Davila said.

Inmates joked that the only ones walking the cellblocks on the overnight shift were the cockroaches.

Inmates’ Account: No Officers Punished Amid an Inquiry in New York State

By Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz

On the evening of April 21 in Building 21 at the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Samuel Harrell, an inmate with a history of erratic behavior linked to bipolar disorder, packed his bags and announced he was going home, though he still had several years left to serve on his drug sentence.

Not long after, he got into a confrontation with corrections officers, was thrown to the floor and was handcuffed. As many as 20 officers — including members of a group known around the prison as the Beat Up Squad — repeatedly kicked and punched Mr. Harrell, who is black, with some of them shouting racial slurs, according to more than a dozen inmate witnesses. “Like he was a trampoline, they were jumping on him,” said Edwin Pearson, an inmate who watched from a nearby bathroom.

Mr. Harrell was then thrown or dragged down a staircase, according to the inmates’ accounts. One inmate reported seeing him lying on the landing, “bent in an impossible position.”

“His eyes were open,” the inmate wrote, “but they weren’t looking at anything.”

Corrections officers called for an ambulance, but according to medical records, the officers mentioned nothing about a physical encounter. Rather, the records showed, they told the ambulance crew that Mr. Harrell probably had an overdose of K2, a synthetic marijuana.

He was taken to St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital and at 10:19 p.m. was pronounced dead.

In the four months since, state corrections officials have provided only the barest details about what happened at Fishkill, a medium-security prison in Beacon, N.Y., about 60 miles north of New York City. Citing a continuing investigation by the State Police, officials for weeks had declined to comment on the inmates’ accounts of a beating.

An autopsy report by the Orange County medical examiner, obtained by The New York Times, concluded that Mr. Harrell, 30, had cuts and bruises to the head and extremities and had no illicit drugs in his system, only an antidepressant and tobacco. He died of cardiac arrhythmia, the autopsy report said, “following physical altercation with corrections officers.”

The manner of death: Homicide.

Previous Reports of Violence

No officers have been disciplined in connection with the death, officials said. A classification of homicide is a medical term that indicates the death occurred at the hands of other people, but it does not necessarily mean a crime was committed.

Inmate witnesses at Fishkill say they are the ones who have been punished. Several described being put into solitary confinement and threatened with violence after speaking with Mr. Harrell’s family, their lawyers and with news reporters.

The Times documented similar allegations of abuse from inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., where in June two convicted murderers escaped, resulting in a three-week manhunt. There, inmates described being beaten and choked with plastic bags by corrections officers seeking information about the escapees. Many were then thrown into solitary confinement.

The prison building where Mr. Harrell was housed has long been singled out as a violent place. In 2013, the Correctional Association of New York, a 171-year-old inmate advocacy group with a legislative mandate to inspect New York State prisons, published a report documenting “harassment and provocation” by officers working in Building 21 from 3 to 11 p.m. This was the same time frame when Mr. Harrell died. The association, which found similar problems in 2005, briefed officials with the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in fall 2013, including the acting commissioner, Anthony Annucci, as well as Fishkill’s superintendent, William J. Connolly, who resigned this month.

Even so, inmates said, the problems have persisted. Five weeks before Mr. Harrell’s death, David Martinez, an inmate in Building 21 who was serving time for attempted murder, among other charges, filed a grievance saying he was being assaulted and harassed by officers, and asking that the officers on that shift “be split up.” In a subsequent letter, he described them as “a group of rogue officers” who “go around beating up people.”

In July, another inmate, Rickey Rodriguez, said that officers beat him so severely that he lost his two front teeth and had to be hospitalized. Interviewed a little more than a week after he was released from prison, Mr. Rodriguez, who was serving time for attempted murder, was still covered with cuts and bruises, and the white of his right eye was stained red with blood. “They go out of their way to pick and choose to beat on guys,” he said.

The State Police plan to turn over the evidence gathered to the Dutchess County district attorney’s office “in the very near future,” said Beau Duffy, an agency spokesman. The corrections department said it was cooperating with the State Police.

“Anyone found to have engaged in any misconduct or in any legal violations will be disciplined and prosecuted,” the department said in a statement.

The Times pieced together the events leading to Mr. Harrell’s death from 19 affidavits and letters written by inmates and obtained through the law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman, which is representing Mr. Harrell’s family. Most of the inmates shared their affidavits on the condition that their names not be used, because they said they feared retribution from corrections officers. Three agreed to be interviewed with their names made public.

According to Luna Droubi, a lawyer at the firm, at least nine of the inmates who saw what happened had been placed at some point in solitary confinement. She said that the firm would soon file a lawsuit in connection with the death, and that there was a need for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate.

The inmates witnessed the encounter from several vantage points, including a day room and bathroom just a few feet away. Two described being at the bottom of the staircase and seeing Mr. Harrell come falling down.

Inmate witnesses are typically viewed with skepticism by investigators, but the accounts from Fishkill are strikingly consistent. Inmates there are serving sentences for felonies, such as drug crimes and murder, but have earned the right to take part in programs like work-release.

Mental Illness

No one could say for sure what set off the confrontation with Mr. Harrell. There were no surveillance cameras in that area, according to inmates, and corrections officials acknowledged that there are only a few for the entire prison.

James Miller, a spokesman for the corrections officers’ union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, said in an email last month that Mr. Harrell was “acting violently and appeared delusional as a result of apparently ingesting drugs.” While trying to subdue him, one guard had several ribs broken, Mr. Miller said.

Officials have described abuse of K2 by inmates as a problem throughout the state prison system.

On Monday, Mr. Miller wrote in an email that the union was “reviewing all the facts before rushing to judgment.”

“Rather than simply relying on allegations made by a handful of violent convicted felons,” he wrote, “we will continue to work with our partners in law enforcement to ensure a resolution to this tragic incident.”

Mr. Harrell had served several stints in prison for drug crimes starting in 2002. He had five disciplinary infractions while incarcerated, including one days before his death for possessing contraband, according to prison records. None involved violence.

Inmates and family members say that any erratic behavior more likely stemmed from his mental illness. In the weeks before his death, they said, he had been depressed. In 2010 he learned he had bipolar disorder and was hospitalized, according to medical records. His wife, Diane Harrell, said that when he was not taking his medication, he would go through the house turning over family photographs for fear they were staring at him. He also believed the television was talking to him, she said.

Mr. Harrell also had a history of heart disease and drug abuse, which the autopsy report said contributed to his death.

The day he died, several inmates described him as being depressed and withdrawn. Ibrahim Camara said he found Mr. Harrell sitting alone, watching television and asked what was wrong. “I said, ‘Is it your mom, family or something?’ ” Mr. Camara recalled in a phone interview from prison. “He shook his head yes.” Mr. Harrell’s mother had died in November.

Around 8:30 that night, Mr. Harrell — whose nickname was JRock — told two officers that his wife and sister were coming to pick him up and take him home, according to one inmate’s affidavit.

His earliest release date from prison was September 2020.

The officers called for medical and mental health assistance but could not reach anyone, the inmate reported. Soon after, the inmate said that two more officers arrived. “I believe JRock panicked after seeing all those officers surrounding him,” the inmate wrote. “JRock jumped up and ran.”

Mr. Camara said he was in the day room, watching a playoff game between the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers, when he heard a commotion in the hallway. “Me and other inmates, we hear the walls shaking, doom, doom, doom, doom,” he recalled. “Somebody opened up the door and looked outside, and said, ‘Yo, that’s JRock they got out there.’ ”

He was on the floor, face down and handcuffed, several inmates said. In short order, a large group of officers converged around him. The inmates in their affidavits and letters identified nine officers by name as being involved.

“I saw the officers kicking him, jumping on his head multiple times and screaming, ‘Stop resisting,’ even though I didn’t see him moving,” wrote Mr. Pearson, who has since been released after serving two years on a weapons charge.

None of the affidavits or letters mentioned Mr. Harrell’s fighting back or speaking during the encounter. Several said that once he was on the floor, handcuffed, he stopped moving, and a few of the inmates speculated he may have already been dead by then.

Indeed, Mr. Camara said inmates were surprised that Mr. Harrell, who was over six feet tall and weighed 235 pounds, did not try to defend himself. “People was even mad, I was mad,” he said. “You’re a big guy and you let these people literally kill you.”

The inmates said that during the encounter, an officer they identified as Robert Michels appeared to have a medical emergency. Mr. Pearson, who later identified Officer Michels through a Facebook photo, said he saw the officer “rip open his shirt and he was gasping for air and grabbing his chest.”

Officers went to attend to Officer Michels, who was soon carried out on a stretcher, inmates said.

Identifying the Guards

Most of the inmates could identify the officers by last names only, which they spelled in a variety of ways in their affidavits. In a database of New York State employees, SeeThroughNY.net, there are several Fishkill officers who appeared to match the guards most often named by the inmates as being directly involved in the encounter. They are Thomas Dickenson (named by 10 of the inmates), John Yager (10), Officer Michels (nine), Bryan Eull (five) and a white woman they knew only as “Ms. B” (four).

They also identified the ranking officer at the scene as Sgt. Joseph Guarino. Reached by telephone, Sergeant Guarino confirmed he was present that night but said he could not comment.

Neither the corrections department nor the union would confirm the names of the officers. Reached by phone, several of the officers declined to comment. Others did not respond to voice mail messages, emails or messages sent through Facebook.

Through the years, Sergeant Guarino, 60, has been sued several times by inmates accusing him of brutality. One case was settled by the state in 2012 for $60,000 and another in 2011 for $65,000. In a 2011 deposition, he said inmates typically filed about 30 grievances against him a year and referred to him by the nickname Sergeant Searchalot.

Four inmates wrote that after Officer Michels was taken away, they heard Sergeant Guarino order officers to throw Mr. Harrell down the stairs.

“Harrell came rolling sideways down the stairs,” Mr. Martinez wrote, adding that he had a “bedsheet tied all around his body and he was in mechanical restraints.”

Mr. Martinez said that two officers he identified as Mr. Eull and Mr. Dickenson then tried to put Mr. Harrell into a wheelchair but had difficulty lifting him.

Mr. Harrell, he wrote, “was not responsive at all” and “kept sliding off the wheelchair.”

Another inmate who was nearby said that Officer Eull ordered him to stop looking, and then grabbed him and pushed him into a corner. “He then told me, ‘You better forget what you saw here if you ever want to make it home,’ ” the affidavit said.

An inmate looking out of his cell wrote that he saw Mr. Harrell being taken away. The inmate wrote that he had seen 10 to 15 corrections officers “surrounding a wheelchair being wheeled out of the building with a white sheet draped over a body that could have been naked because I seen bare feet dragging on the ground.”

According to records from the ambulance service, a call came reporting a possible overdose at the Fishkill prison at 9:16 p.m.; the ambulance team arrived there at 9:30 p.m. and reached Mr. Harrell by 9:34 p.m. “Staff reports that pt. was possibly smoking K2 and became very aggressive, shortly after he went unresponsive and into cardiac arrest,” the records said.

The next morning at 7:30, Mr. Harrell’s sister, Cerissa Harrell, received an anonymous call from an inmate in Building 21.

“He called me and said, ‘Sam got hit the night before and they took him and he hasn’t been back and nobody has heard or seen from him,’ ” Ms. Harrell said.

“You could hear the franticness in his voice,” she added.

A half-hour later, she said, someone from the corrections agency called to say her brother was dead.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A state inquiry found that Mr. Bukowski used excessive force on him and lied about it. (Chad Batka for The New York Times)

By Tom Robbins

A few days after Ramon Fabian arrived at the Ulster Correctional Facility on the southern edge of the Catskill Mountains last year, a guard conducting the morning head count yelled at him to shut up.

Inmates at Ulster, a medium-security New York State prison, are required to stay in place and keep their voices low during the count. Mr. Fabian, who was serving a one-year sentence for a drug conviction, had been talking to another inmate, but he said in a recent interview that he thought he had been following the rules.

After the count was over, the guard escorted him past a set of double doors out of view of other inmates and the prison’s electronic surveillance cameras. Mr. Fabian said the officer, Michael Bukowski, a seven-year veteran, had then ordered him to face the wall and brace himself in the “pat-frisk” position, arms outstretched and legs spread. As he did so, Mr. Fabian recalled, he looked down and saw the toe of a boot swinging up between his legs.

He saw a flash of light, felt a piercing pain and collapsed. “He told me to get up, but all I could do was crawl back to my cube,” Mr. Fabian, who is now 21, told investigators later. He lay on the floor in his cubicle in the prison’s dormitory, groaning and crying, for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. In the mess hall, a sergeant sent him to the prison’s medical unit. He was soon loaded into a van and driven 80 miles north to a hospital in Albany. Doctors there performed emergency surgery, removing part of his right testicle.

Questioned by an investigator from the state corrections department’s inspector general’s office a few days after the episode on July 22, 2014, Officer Bukowski said he knew nothing about the injury. He said he had “counseled” Mr. Fabian about keeping quiet during the count. He acknowledged that he had raised his voice, and that when he sent Mr. Fabian back to his cubicle, the inmate was “crying a little.”

Corrections officials concluded that the guard had used excessive force and was lying. Officer Bukowksi was suspended without pay on July 31, 2014, and the department soon moved to fire him.

More than a year later, however, Officer Bukowski is still a state employee. His disciplinary case remains unresolved, although he faces a criminal charge of assault. His case, described in court documents and interviews, offers a stark example of the intricate protections that shield New York’s 20,000 corrections officers, even when there is compelling evidence of abuse.

Since 2010, the state has sought to fire 30 prison guards accused of abusing inmates through a convoluted arbitration process that is required under the union contract. Officials have prevailed only eight times, according to records of disciplinary cases released under state Freedom of Information Law requests.

Those records show that most abuse allegations never reach the arbitration level: Another 80 cases brought against corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants since 2010 were settled directly with their unions for penalties other than dismissal, such as suspension.

Officer discipline has taken on special significance as New York faces fresh accusations of brutality in its vast incarceration system of 53,000 inmates. After three guards at Attica Correctional Facility pleaded guilty in March to beating an inmate there, new accusations were leveled against guards at Clinton Correctional Facility, where prisoners said they had been beaten after two inmates escaped, and at Fishkill Correctional Facility, where an inmate died after an altercation with officers. Critics including the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors the state’s prisons, say the episodes show that the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has often ignored brutality.

Current and former corrections officials say the union contract deserves part of the blame. “It is tough to get rid of a bad officer, just like it’s tough to get rid of a bad teacher,” said Brian Fischer, a former superintendent at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the state corrections commissioner from 2007 to 2013. “It’s very frustrating.”

‘A Culture of Arbitrators’

Shortly after the department informed Officer Bukowski that he would be fired, his union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, filed a grievance contesting the charges. When the corrections department declined to settle the case for a lesser penalty, the union moved to put the matter before an arbitrator, a contractual right.

Arbitrators are not chosen at random. Rather, both sides review a list of candidates and rate them based on how favorably inclined they believe they will be toward their arguments. Arbitrators, who earn $1,000 to $1,800 a day, often try to find a middle ground to avoid antagonizing either side, some officials complain.

“We have a culture of arbitrators who engage in ‘split the baby,’ no matter the offense,” said a state corrections official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.

Ann Lesser, a vice president for labor, employment and elections for the American Arbitration Association, disputed that claim. “I don’t believe that is what happens,” she said. “Arbitrators make their decisions based on the facts.”

Under the state’s contract with the union, the arbitrator’s decision is considered final and binding. Even errors of law or fact by the arbitrator are insufficient to overturn a decision, courts have ruled. Decisions can be vacated only if it can be shown that they were somehow irrational or violated public policy.

For the Bukowski case, the parties settled on a veteran arbitrator, Larry Dais, a former assistant vice president of Columbia University who had been hearing labor disputes since 1999. Over three days last fall, Mr. Dais heard testimony and evidence. The union maintained that Officer Bukowski was innocent and described him as “a dedicated correctional officer.”

Mr. Dais ruled in November that Officer Bukowski was guilty of using excessive force and lying to investigators. But noting in his five-page decision that it was the officer’s first such infraction, Mr. Dais reduced the penalty from dismissal to a 120-day unpaid suspension.

Because corrections officers have the contractual right to pick work assignments based on seniority, the ruling would have allowed Officer Bukowski to return to the Ulster prison after completing his suspension.

In addition to the internal disciplinary proceeding, Officer Bukowski was indicted in Ulster County in March on a charge of misdemeanor assault. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial on Oct. 26. Under the state’s public officers law, a misdemeanor conviction would not automatically bar him from keeping his job.

Officer Bukowski did not respond to requests for comment made through his lawyers, his union and his Facebook account. Reached at his home, Mr. Dais declined to comment. “I would not be comfortable speaking about it until it’s fully resolved,” he said.

The specifics of most officer discipline cases are kept largely out of public view. Under state law, the personnel records of corrections officers, like those of police officers and firefighters, are exempt from outside scrutiny. The records obtained under the Freedom of Information Law provide only some spare details.

In 2013, the corrections department agreed to a 19-day, unpaid suspension for an officer charged with falsely reporting an episode in which he was accused of “unjustified, unauthorized use of force” — striking an inmate on the head. Last year, an officer accused of lying about using “verbal and physical” force on an inmate was allowed to return to work after a 20-day suspension without pay. Another officer, cited for “unauthorized and excessive” use of force on an inmate, settled the charge with an eight-day unpaid suspension.

Corrections department officials declined to comment about disciplinary issues, saying they did not want to aggravate labor relations. After the convictions of the Attica guards, the state’s acting corrections commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, said he would push for “substantial changes” during contract negotiations next year that would allow him “to appropriately discipline any security staff who commits egregious acts of misconduct.”

In a statement, a spokesman for the union said members “conduct themselves with professionalism and integrity on a daily basis.”

“In the event of a disciplinary process initiated by DOCCS,” the statement continued, referring to the corrections department, “there is an expectation by the union that the process is done fairly and is not biased towards any member.”

In sharp contrast with the corrections department, the State Police have great latitude in disciplinary matters. Charges against troopers are heard by three commissioned officers, two appointed by the state police superintendent and one chosen by the troopers’ union. The panel’s decisions are subject to the superintendent’s final approval. A similar arrangement governs disciplinary actions against New York City officers, with the police commissioner retaining final say.

Guards Are a Political Force

Part of the difference in bargaining rights stems from the turbulent labor history of New York’s prison guards. In 1979, corrections officers walked off the job for 16 days in a contract dispute. Gov. Hugh L. Carey responded by calling out the National Guard to run the prisons. The walkout violated the state’s Taylor Law, which bars strikes by public employees, but after paying modest fines, the guards won a new contract with better wages and bargaining conditions.

Despite the decline in the number of state prisons to 54 from 67 as the inmate population has fallen, the officers’ union remains a political force upstate thanks to the presence of its sizable membership in the constellation of prisons that dot the northern New York landscape from the Vermont border to Lake Erie.

But union resistance has not been the corrections department’s only obstacle to enforcing discipline. Last year, the head of the agency’s inspector general’s office — the unit that handles internal investigations, including those involving allegations of inmate abuse — abruptly retired amid an inquiry by state investigators into claims of sexual harassment in the office.

In January, the unit’s former No. 2 official, James Ferro, was arrested in a case brought by Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on charges of bullying and sexually harassing one of his investigators. The conduct continued, Mr. Schneiderman alleged, even after the victim complained to Mr. Ferro’s supervisor. Mr. Ferro has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial in November in State Supreme Court in Albany.

Department officials say operations within the unit, which was renamed the Office of Special Investigations, were not hampered by the allegations. But after the arrest of Mr. Ferro, officials brought in two outsiders from the state attorney general’s office to take charge. Most of the office’s investigators are corrections officers recruited from within the department’s ranks, officials acknowledge. They are members of the same union as the guards they are investigating, and sometimes return to uniformed jobs. Corrections officials say the unit benefits from insider knowledge, but the overlap has long troubled critics of the agency.

“To me, that is really problematic,” Jack Beck, director of the Prison Visiting Project for the Correctional Association, said. “If you know you are going to come back and work with these guys, what is the incentive for being critical?”

Among prisoners, allegations of staff misconduct have remained high even as the prison population has fallen. According to the corrections department’s most recent annual report on grievances filed by inmates, there were 5,471 complaints lodged against staff members in 2013, an increase of 175 from the previous year. The department does not provide a breakdown of the types of misconduct alleged in the complaints. But the annual report’s language conveys an overall official skepticism about the claims. “The perception among staff is that some of the harassment complaints are filed in an attempt to discredit misbehavior reports” against inmates, the report states.

The suspicion that claims of abuse are invented or embellished by inmates lingers throughout New York’s correctional establishment, among both labor and management. Advocates for those behind bars acknowledge that it happens. “Clearly, there can be exaggeration,” Mr. Beck said. “I’ve been doing this for almost 35 years. I don’t believe every story I hear. But when you start putting those stories together, you say, ‘This makes a lot of sense.’ ”

The skepticism inevitably affects the way inmate testimony is viewed in arbitration proceedings, officials say. That problem played out in 2011 when the department tried to persuade an arbitrator to allow it to fire a guard at a medium-security prison in Oneida County who was alleged to have beaten and stomped on a partially disabled prisoner.

The inmate said the guard, Michael Wehby, a 24-year corrections department veteran, had first teased him about a protective helmet he wore to avoid injury during seizures. When the inmate objected, he said, Officer Wehby took him to an alcove where he allegedly kicked and beat him with a radio.

Evidence was introduced that showed bruises on the inmate. But after hearing conflicting versions of the episode from other guards, the arbitrator decided against dismissal and sent Officer Wehby back to work. The guard was criminally charged, but a jury found him not guilty of two assault charges and deadlocked on a third charge. Officer Wehby later resigned after a deal was reached that let him retire with a full pension. He did not respond to requests for comment relayed through his union, his lawyer and his Facebook account. Michael Daley, who represented Officer Wehby in the criminal trial, said criminal charges should never have been brought. “The arbitrator had already ruled that he was entitled to have his job back,” Mr. Daley said.

Decision Overruled

In the Bukowski case, corrections officials decided on a rare course of action: They refused to abide by the arbitrator’s decision. “The feeling was, ‘How can we leave this guy out there unsupervised?’ ” the corrections official said.

After the department refused to allow Officer Bukowski back to work, union lawyers sued on his behalf. In court papers, they cited longstanding court precedents that had upheld the right of arbitrators to render decisions without judicial interference. In an affidavit countering that argument, Patrick J. Griffin, a corrections department assistant commissioner, wrote that the sanction imposed on Officer Bukowski by Mr. Dais “was grossly disproportionate to the actions” and went against clear public policy on inmate abuse.

In a decision handed down in July, Justice Kimberly A. O’Connor of State Supreme Court in Albany agreed with the corrections department. A 120-day suspension for the kind of assault for which Officer Bukowski had been found guilty, Justice O’Connor wrote, “shocks the judicial conscience and cannot be upheld.” That was true, she added, “especially given the arbitrator’s findings of guilt as to all charges.” She ordered that the case be reheard. The union has appealed her decision.

A union spokesman referred questions to its lawyer, William Golderman, whose firm handles most arbitration hearings for corrections officers. Mr. Golderman declined to comment. “It’s in litigation,” he said. “Let the process take its course.”

Mr. Fabian, who is tall and soft-spoken, got out of prison just before Christmas. On parole, he worked at a grocery near his home in the Inwood section of Manhattan until it closed. He is now trying to go back to school to get his high school equivalency diploma and has retained a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit. Asked recently about what happened to him at Ulster, he lowered his head and shook it back and forth. “I just don’t want to ever go back there,” he said.

This article is by Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

By Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip

Inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility in northern New York said the guards who beat them in the days after a brazen escape in June wore no name badges and did not identify themselves.

But one guard, the inmates said, stood out. He had a large tattoo of the American flag down his left arm and was known around the prison as Captain America.

No officer has been publicly implicated in any wrongdoing since an investigation by The New York Times nearly two months ago found what appeared to be a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates after the escape at the prison.

Now, through interviews with inmates, The Times has identified Captain America as Chad Stickney, a gang intelligence officer and onetime steward in the state corrections officers’ union.

The inmates’ willingness to come forward and be named speaks to their growing frustration with the pace of the investigation into their allegations. Amid worsening violence at the prison, some inmates said they had been subjected to further harassment after speaking out.

In the frantic days after the prison break, inmates said in letters and interviews with The Times that guards handcuffed them, took them for questioning into areas of the prison with no cameras, punched them and slammed them against the wall. One inmate described having a plastic bag pulled over his head and being threatened with “waterboarding.”

Victor Aponte, 60, who is serving a life sentence for kidnapping and rape, said it was the officer known as Captain America who tied a plastic bag around his neck like a noose during an interrogation and pulled it so tightly that Mr. Aponte passed out.

Later, Mr. Aponte said, he had asked around at the prison and had learned that the guard was Officer Stickney. Three other prisoners who were at Clinton at the time of the escape, Rashad Scott, Eddie Matos and Luis Zenon, also told The Times that Officer Stickney was Captain America.

Mr. Zenon, along with another inmate, Paul Davila, also named a second prison employee, Kevin Norcross, as being present during some beatings. Mr. Davila said that Mr. Norcross had identified himself as a member of the internal affairs unit with the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. While Mr. Norcross did not take part in the beatings, the inmates said, he witnessed them.

Inmate accounts are frequently viewed skeptically by investigators. The Times interviewed six inmates at two different prisons for this article, and while they gave consistent accounts, their version of events could not be independently verified.

Officer Stickney did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did Mr. Norcross.

Neither Officer Stickney nor any other officer accused of taking part in beatings after the escape has been criminally charged. James Miller, the spokesman for the corrections officers’ union, said that no officer had been disciplined in connection with the allegations and that Officer Stickney has had a clean disciplinary record in his 18 years as a corrections officer.

Michael Powers, the president of the corrections officers’ union, said in a statement that had there been cases of brutality, officers from state, federal and local law enforcement agencies working inside the prison after the escape would have been aware of it.

“It is troubling and irresponsible to report allegations against officers as fact,” Mr. Powers said. “Most New Yorkers would question the validity of accusations coming from convicted violent felons, who have long criminal histories and nothing to lose by making such claims.”

Officer Stickney, who was chief steward for the corrections officers union at the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility before moving to the Clinton prison in 2012, has been sued three times for alleged assault and harassment.

One of the lawsuits was terminated after the inmate who filed it died. Two others are still active, including a suit filed in September by Terry Daum, an inmate who claimed that Officer Stickney punched him several times in the head and grabbed his genitals during a search. The lawsuit also said “Stickney utilized his hand to aggressively rub plaintiff’s rectum like a credit card swipe and then attempted to jam his fingertips into plaintiff’s rectum.”

Four months after two convicted murderers, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, escaped through the tunnels under the prison in Dannemora, N.Y., Clinton remains a tense place. There have been at least three major brawls among inmates, with officers using tear gas and, in one case, live ammunition to bring the prison under control, according to the corrections department.

The state’s inspector general is expected in the coming months to release a report detailing security lapses that led to the escape. And the corrections agency has promised to investigate inmates’ claims of abuse.

Asked at a recent news conference whether there was a problem with brutality by guards in the state prison system, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that while there might be a few isolated incidents, officers were doing a “good job.”

“State prisons are filled with very dangerous people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said. “They are policed by a relatively small number of correction officials, who are unarmed, I might add. It is a very, very difficult job. They have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt.”

The Correctional Association of New York, an inmate advocacy group with a legislative mandate to monitor the prisons, recently interviewed 30 Clinton inmates who described continuing abuse. Of those, two said they had been assaulted by Officer Stickney before the escape; one of the two claimed a plastic bag had been placed over his head during an interrogation.

After complaining about the beatings to investigators, lawyers and reporters, the inmates appear to have suffered further consequences.

Mr. Aponte, who described being choked by Officer Stickney, said in a prison interview in September that after the publication of the article in The Times, he was visited by a corrections department investigator who sought more information. Mr. Aponte said he told the investigator who Captain America was.

The status of that investigation is unclear. But Mr. Aponte said that after speaking with The Times, he was locked in his cell for 23 hours a day and not told why. Patrick Alexander, another inmate who spoke with The Times, was confined to his cell for a disciplinary infraction he believes was fabricated.

After speaking with investigators, Mr. Aponte wrote a letter to the authorities requesting a transfer to another prison because he feared for his safety. He received no response for more than a month.

“I’m afraid of retaliation,” he said in an interview in September. “I know how they operate.”

After The Times inquired about Mr. Aponte’s request, corrections officials transferred him this week.

The prison break in early June set off a manhunt. Mr. Matt was killed by a federal agent three weeks later; two days after that, Mr. Sweat was captured.

The escape highlighted serious security failings at Clinton. Investigators say officers would routinely sleep during overnight shifts, allowing Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat to spend hours each night searching the prison’s underground tunnels for a way out.

Joyce E. Mitchell, a former civilian employee at Clinton, was sentenced this week to a minimum of two years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to providing Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat with hacksaws and other tools. A guard at the prison has also been criminally charged. Nine officers were suspended after the escape, and the prison’s leadership team, including the superintendent, was removed.

No inmates have been charged in the breakout.

In a memorandum dated Sept. 16, the corrections department warned officers not to punish inmates who spoke to the news media. “An inmate who has been interviewed by representatives of the news media shall not be subject to departmental discipline or any other adverse action,” the memo said.

Mr. Alexander said that was exactly what happened to him after he told The Times that officers had beaten him and threatened to use waterboarding during an interrogation shortly after the escape.

At Shawangunk Correctional Facility, where he was transferred, Mr. Alexander said he had been verbally harassed by officers who referred to him as the “Clinton inmate” and called him a snitch.

He has also been subjected to frequent frisking by guards, he said, and kept his boots untied so that they could be removed quickly during searches.

In a September interview, Mr. Alexander said that he had not been compensated for personal possessions lost during his transfer from Clinton, including photo albums, journals, a hot plate, a lamp, beard trimmers and a 13-inch color television.

On Aug. 25, Mr. Alexander said that within a few hours of signing a consent form to be interviewed by CNN, he had been singled out by guards to provide a urine sample. Though he had never had a drug infraction during his 11 years in prison, or any other serious disciplinary issue, according to his records, an officer said he was suspected of using marijuana.

A week later, according to prison records, the test came back positive for THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana.

The corrections department uses a drug test called EMIT that some medical professionals say can yield a false positive for THC. The results from the test given to Mr. Alexander should have been verified using a second method, said Dr. Louis Baxter, director of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. The Times provided Dr. Baxter with a copy of Mr. Alexander’s urinalysis records. “This test I reviewed could have been positive because of the use of ibuprofen,” he wrote in an email.

The corrections department said in a statement that the drug-testing method had been challenged in court and found reliable. Mr. Alexander, the statement said, was one of four inmates chosen to be tested as part of an investigation into drug use at Shawangunk.

At a prison hearing, Mr. Alexander said he had not used marijuana and accused officers of falsifying the test results to punish him for speaking to the media.

The hearing officer found him guilty, confined him to his cell for 30 days and stripped him of privileges, including using the phone and the commissary, for 90 days.

The officer also wanted the television removed from his cell, but Mr. Alexander said that would not be necessary because the corrections department had already lost it.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Death May Have Been Forgotten if Escape Hadn’t Exposed a Prison’s Secrets

By Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz

DANNEMORA, N.Y. — Inmates who have served time at the Clinton Correctional Facility here tell of being taken aside by a sergeant soon after they arrive and given a warning: Cross the guards, and bad things can happen.

And they do. Inmates describe being ambushed by guards and beaten, taunted with racial slurs, and kept out of sight, in solitary confinement, until the injuries inflicted on them have healed enough to avoid arousing suspicion.

One story in particular has been passed along over the last few years as a kind of parable of brutality and injustice on the cellblocks. Leonard Strickland was a prisoner with schizophrenia who got into an argument with guards, and ended up dead.

In the inmates’ telling, the guards got away with murder, ganging up on Mr. Strickland and beating him so viciously that he could barely move. The guards deny this, saying they acted only in self-defense and did what was necessary to subdue an out-of-control prisoner.

But what came next is indisputable. In a security video obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Strickland is seen in handcuffs, barely conscious and being dragged along the floor by officers, while a prison nurse standing close by does nothing. Even as he lies face down on the floor, near death, guards can be heard shouting, “Stop resisting.”

By the time an ambulance arrived, medical records described Mr. Strickland’s body as cold to the touch and covered in cuts and bruises, with blood flowing from his ears.

The 2010 case fits a troubling pattern of savage beatings by corrections officers at prisons across New York State and a department that rarely holds anyone accountable, issues that have been highlighted in a series of articles over the past year by The Times and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization.

Mr. Strickland’s death was only briefly noted in local newspapers, and probably would have been forgotten by all but the officers and inmates. But the escape of two murderers from Clinton in June attracted extraordinary attention to the maximum-security prison, and details about its inner workings, long held secret, have started to reach outsiders.

Investigations by The Times uncovered the serious security lapses that made the escape possible, as well as beatings by guards during the interrogations that followed. State officials have said they are investigating the abuse claims, but there is little to indicate any results will come of it.

The internal affairs unit of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has long been mired in dysfunction. Its former director of operations is awaiting trial on charges of sexually harassing several subordinates.

Officials with the State Police and the local district attorney’s office could not recall the last time charges had been brought against an officer at Clinton for excessive force, if ever, though inmates have filed scores of brutality lawsuits in recent years. The United States attorney for the Northern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over nearly half of the state’s 54 prisons, has not brought a brutality case involving a state corrections officer in at least five years, according to a spokesman.

In the Strickland case, the police and the district attorney concluded there had been no criminal wrongdoing, though two state prison watchdog agencies, the State Commission of Correction and the Commission on Quality Care and Advocacy for Persons With Disabilities, issued highly critical reports documenting numerous misleading and false statements by officers.

The dozen or so officers and medical personnel identified in the investigations either still work at Clinton or other state prisons, or were promoted or retired with full benefits. In the years since the Strickland case, several of them have again been accused of brutality by inmates.

The Times was able to piece together the story behind Mr. Strickland’s death by reviewing internal corrections department reports, log book entries and statements by the officers involved, along with the autopsy report and records by paramedics and emergency room doctors. Separately, six inmate witnesses were tracked down and interviewed at four prisons around the state.

The Times was also able to obtain a copy of a hand-held security video recorded by an officer that documented the last 45 minutes of Mr. Strickland’s life. It was made public last month, after the newspaper petitioned the court and argued for its release in the course of a lawsuit filed by the Strickland family. Usually these suits are dismissed or settled before they reach trial. But the family’s decision to push ahead with the case compelled the officers involved to testify in court several weeks ago, and made public evidence that would normally be off limits.

Accountability is typically elusive in these kinds of cases. Officers rarely speak up about wrongdoing for fear of reprisals from their fellow guards and will lie to protect them, current and former corrections officials said. They are also shielded by a union that even high-ranking members of the corrections department acknowledge holds tremendous sway over what goes on inside the prisons.

A corrections department spokesman said officials could not comment on the Strickland case because of the pending litigation, and the acting commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, declined a request for an interview.

At a news conference in September, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo dismissed the possibility that officer brutality in the state prison system was a serious problem, suggesting that force is sometimes necessary to keep order. “They have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The Bottom of the Stairs

Among the state’s 17 maximum security prisons, Clinton has a reputation for being particularly violent. While racial tension is a fact of life in many prisons, inmates say it is especially bad at Clinton, located in this rural area not far from the Canadian border. The prison is the biggest local employer and pays a good wage by regional standards. All but a few of the 950 guards, including those involved in the altercation with Mr. Strickland, are white.

A majority of the inmates, like Mr. Strickland, are black and come from New York City, 300 miles to the south; they say they face a constant barrage of racial slurs.

Two years before Mr. Strickland’s death, another black inmate, Bradley Ceasar, died under similar circumstances.

Mr. Ceasar, 52, who was developmentally disabled, got into a confrontation with guards on Aug. 11, 2008, and within hours was dead. Officers and a nurse ignored his repeated pleas for help and provided no medical care, investigators said. An autopsy later determined that his ribs had been so badly broken that his lungs could not inflate properly, and he suffocated.

The department determined that the officers’ actions were appropriate, and in the end, the only person disciplined was a prison nurse, Beth Farnan, who was fined $500. She remains employed at Clinton.

Like Mr. Ceasar, Mr. Strickland was not known as a violent inmate. While many of the prisoners at Clinton are serving sentences for murder, rape and other brutal crimes, Mr. Strickland had been convicted of criminal possession of a weapon.

He had not committed a serious disciplinary infraction during his previous four and a half years in prison, according to state records. At the trial, Sgt. Betsy Whelden-Berglund said that for six months in 2009 she had overseen the cellblock where he was housed and had had no problems with him.

Mr. Strickland, however, did have a history of behaving erratically. By summer 2010, he had stopped taking medication for his schizophrenia, according to prison records. At various times, his mother, Selena Strickland, said, he claimed that he had had a baby, that he was God, that he was a millionaire and that he was married to Beyoncé. That August, when his mother last visited him, she said, “he was talking out of his head.”

On the morning of Oct. 3, 2010, the 44-year-old Mr. Strickland was upset that a guard had confiscated a plastic hand mirror, according to several accounts. Not long after returning to the cellblock from breakfast, he got into a disagreement with an officer.

From this point on, the stories told by guards and inmate witnesses diverge widely.

In the guards’ version, described at trial, Mr. Strickland argued with an officer, Casey Strong, after being ordered to gather his possessions and go downstairs to be locked into a new cell.

Among inmates, Officer Strong was considered trouble. He had a history of violent confrontations. Over an eight-year period he had been injured during fights with inmates and gone on disability leave three times, he testified at the November trial. He said that he had retired last summer, at 36, and was unemployed and collecting disability insurance.

Officer Strong asserted in his trial testimony that Mr. Strickland punched him in the shoulder during the dispute. To defend himself, Officer Strong said, he punched Mr. Strickland twice in the head and once in the chest. He said he grabbed the inmate in a bear hug, and they struggled and both fell down the concrete stairs.

Officer Strong was able to stop himself halfway down, he said, but Mr. Strickland fell to the bottom. Despite the fall, several officers said, Mr. Strickland was able to jump to his feet and start fighting with a second guard, Cory Liberty. According to the court testimony, Officer Liberty then punched Mr. Strickland several times, while Officer Strong used his baton to hit him in the back and legs repeatedly.

By then nearly two dozen officers, responding to a call for backup, had surrounded Mr. Strickland.

And still he continued to “struggle violently,” Officer Liberty contended. Only when four guards grabbed a limb each and pinned him to the ground was he finally subdued, several testified.

A prison accident report filed shortly after the episode listed only minor injuries to the officers, mostly bruises and pulled muscles. The two guards who had repeatedly punched Mr. Strickland also had swollen right hands. (Another officer later testified at trial that she had suffered broken ribs, but this was not mentioned in medical documents.)

The officers said Mr. Strickland had no visible injuries. Nor, they said, did he ever complain about being hurt.

In interviews, inmates said the guards were lying.

Three — Kevin Goode, Walter Maddox and Frank Povoski — said they witnessed Mr. Strickland being pushed, not falling, down the stairs. And three — Mr. Goode, Mr. Povoski and another inmate who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution — said they saw him lying, badly injured, at the bottom. Two said that after being beaten by several guards, he was dragged away screaming.

Accounts by prisoners are often viewed skeptically. But the six were all interviewed separately; five were serving time in four different prisons and the sixth had been released. Their versions differed in some details. One said the events unfolded after they came back from breakfast; another said it was after recreation. One prisoner said Mr. Strickland was handcuffed before he was pushed down the stairs; another said it was after.

But the basic story the men told was the same: Mr. Strickland was pushed down a flight of stairs, and then beaten nearly to death by a large group of guards.

Mr. Maddox, whose cell was on the same tier as Mr. Strickland’s, watched events unfold from about 25 feet away, he said. He recalled Mr. Strickland’s making a sound as though he was terrified when he was shoved down the stairs.

Mr. Goode was head porter on the cellblock, and he said he was buffing the floor at the foot of the stairway that morning. He said that before Mr. Strickland was pushed, an officer yelled a racial slur. As Mr. Strickland fell downward, Mr. Goode said, his skull hit the concrete steps several times. At the bottom he pulled himself into a tight fetal position, as about 10 officers took turns kicking him in the head and the ribs, Mr. Goode said.

They “beat this kid to zero,” he said.

Mr. Povoski, who watched from a floor above, said Mr. Strickland lay so still he assumed he was dead.

‘Is He Breathing?’

After a physical encounter with guards, inmates, as a matter of standard practice, are taken to the prison emergency room to be examined.

When Mr. Strickland arrived, the officers said, he resisted them, disobeying their orders, refusing to stand or walk, and repeatedly kicking them. They testified that they responded professionally, transporting Mr. Strickland from the prison emergency room to the mental health ward, and providing appropriate first aid.

The officers’ sworn statements bear little resemblance to the images captured that morning on the 45-minute video.

Investigators from the commissions of both correction and quality care reviewed the video and wrote reports that were highly critical of the guards’ response, as well as the medical care provided by the prison nurse. “Strickland did not resist the officers, nor was he out of control,” the quality care commission report said.

As the video begins, Mr. Strickland is seen wearing white boxer shorts and a brown T-shirt, torn across his left shoulder. A large, purplish bruise is visible. He is cuffed from behind and pressed against a cinder block wall by two officers, Terry James and Kevin Trombley.

“Inmate Strickland, you’re going to comply with a strip frisk, do you understand me?” said Sgt. Steven Sweeney, who was supervising.

Mr. Strickland looks unstable on his feet. His head is down. Over the next few minutes, he appears to grow weaker, at one point slumping over and trying to hold his head up with his right arm. It seems only the guards are keeping him from falling over.

Then he slumps to the floor.

The guards standing around him continue shouting throughout. “Stop resisting.” “Don’t push back.” “He’s still fighting.”

The lawyer for the Strickland family, John Seebold, contended that at this point in the video the officers were acting as if he was resisting to justify their brutal treatment of him earlier.

After five minutes, while Mr. Strickland seems barely conscious, the officers decide to take him upstairs to the mental health ward and give him an injection to calm him down.

There is a gurney a few feet away, but Officers James and Trombley grab Mr. Strickland by his arms, which are still handcuffed, and lift them until they are hyperextended behind his head. Then they drag him out of the room. (In Sergeant Sweeney’s subsequent report, he wrote, “I directed the officers to assist him to the elevator using professional techniques.”)

They drag him onto the elevator, take it to the third floor, then drag him off, dropping him face down in a hallway, still handcuffed. (“I again directed staff to assist inmate off the elevator in which staff complied,” Sergeant Sweeney wrote.)

While Mr. Strickland is left lying on the ground for more than two minutes, motionless, several officers step over him.

At 9 minutes 15 seconds into the video, someone is heard asking, “Is he breathing?”

For the next 35 minutes, as nurses and officers perform CPR, Mr. Strickland is unconscious and unmoving, yet remains handcuffed. (Asked at trial why the handcuffs were not removed, Sergeant Sweeney answered, “Medical’s involved, but he’s still a disciplinary problem for me.”)

The video concludes at 10:15 a.m., as Mr. Strickland is loaded into the back of an ambulance and the doors close behind him.

Still Handcuffed

State investigators were scathing in their assessment of the medical response by the prison nurse, Robert Fitzgerald. A report by the State Commission of Correction said Mr. Fitzgerald “showed complete disregard of the obvious signs of a nonresponsive inmate.”

On the video, Mr. Fitzgerald is seen standing nearby and doing nothing as Mr. Strickland collapses onto the emergency room floor, and is dragged to the elevator.

Instead of riding in the elevator along with the officers to provide care for Mr. Strickland, Mr. Fitzgerald took the stairs. Again he is seen on the video off to the side, watching for nearly three minutes while Mr. Strickland lies motionless in the hallway of the mental health clinic, near death.

When asked during a deposition why he did not intervene sooner, Mr. Fitzgerald said he had to wait for Sergeant Sweeney to determine that the inmate was no longer a safety risk.

But when Sergeant Sweeney was asked during the trial why it had taken him so long to give Mr. Fitzgerald permission to treat the inmate, he said that the decision on when to intervene was Mr. Fitzgerald’s.

“Medical should have did something,” the sergeant testified.

Thirty-one minutes into the video, Mr. Fitzgerald can be heard complimenting an officer administering CPR. “You’re doing great,” the nurse says.

In reality, those present were doing a poor job, according to the medical experts who testified for the plaintiff and the defense at the trial. Because Mr. Strickland was handcuffed from behind the entire time, his back was not flat against the floor, compromising the effectiveness of the CPR, both doctors testified. And instead of continuously applying CPR, the staff took numerous breaks.

Not until the ambulance crew arrived, 30 minutes after Mr. Fitzgerald first noted that Mr. Strickland had stopped breathing, did he suggest removing the handcuffs.

“Is there any way we can get those cuffs off the back of him?” Mr. Fitzgerald asked an ambulance worker.

“I don’t think he’s going to go anywhere,” she answered.

The ambulance arrived at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital at 10:40 a.m., and at 10:45 Mr. Strickland was formally pronounced dead.

A Curious Diagnosis

The medical report by the ambulance crew detailed extensive injuries: bruises all over Mr. Strickland’s body, including his forehead, head, left cheek and shoulders; a missing tooth on the upper left side of his mouth; blood and clear fluid coming from his ears; bloody abrasions on both knees; and markings suggesting that something may have been placed around his neck.

The autopsy by the county coroner concluded that Mr. Strickland had died of cardiorespiratory arrest due to cardiac ischemia, meaning his heart could not get sufficient oxygen and ceased to function.

At the trial, the medical expert for the Strickland family, Dr. Alan Schechter, an emergency room physician at Montefiore Medical Center, testified that based on the autopsy results he believed Mr. Strickland died when his heart gave out from “stress induced by the altercation.”

“If he did not have the stressful events, he would not have had a heart attack,” said Dr. Schechter, who handles quality care reviews of emergency room deaths at Montefiore.

Had Mr. Strickland received the proper medical care, the doctor testified, “more likely than not he would have survived.”

Dr. Donald Doynow, an attending physician in emergency medicine at St. Peters Hospital in Albany, was the medical expert for the state. He testified that the coroner’s autopsy results were incorrect, and that the inmate had instead died from a condition known as Excited Delirium Syndrome.

It is a controversial diagnosis, viewed with skepticism by many in the medical profession. The syndrome is not listed in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, nor is it recognized by the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association.

It is, however, recognized by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Dr. Doynow said studies had found that among the groups most vulnerable to Excited Delirium Syndrome were males who suffered from mental illness and stopped taking their medication. One of the most prominent symptoms, he said, is the loss of the ability to feel pain, which could explain how a prisoner might be able to repeatedly resist the physical restraints applied by corrections officers.

Dr. Doynow said the syndrome could bring about cardiac arrest.

When pressed about the syndrome, Dr. Doynow, who has been practicing medicine since 1988, testified that he himself had never seen a case of it.

Seeking Answers

At Clinton there is a committee of inmates designated to meet regularly with the prison management team as well as uniformed officers, to discuss issues of concern. Typically, the topics might include the handling of proceeds from bottle returns, or the distribution of stamps.

Not at the meeting held on Nov. 22, 2010. Mr. Strickland’s death, and brutality at the prison, were at the top of the inmates’ agenda.

Committee members complained that violence by the guards was out of hand. They asked that the administration provide them with a copy of the Strickland autopsy report and requested an investigation into the alleged beating of an inmate, Thomas Murphy, who they said had been badly injured 20 minutes before Mr. Strickland, by guards “wearing steel toe boots.”

Among the administrators present at the meeting were the prison’s superintendent, Thomas LaValley, and two of his deputies, along with Sergeant Sweeney.

According to the minutes of the meeting, the prison administrators responded that “all allegations of abuse are investigated,” and “when the autopsy is completed it will be public knowledge.”

Mr. Povoski, who was vice president of the inmates’ committee at the time, said the autopsy was never received and brutality at the prison continued, unabated.

A Brutal Legacy

n the years since, several officers involved in the Strickland case have been named in lawsuits filed by other inmates alleging brutality.

A suit filed last year by one inmate, Moshe Cinque Canty, claimed that a group of officers, including Sergeant Sweeney, handcuffed him, beat him and dragged him around by his dreadlocks. The officers shouted racial slurs, the suit claims. One guard yelled for the officers to pull the dreadlocks from Mr. Canty’s head and “choke the nigger with them,” the suit says.

According to Mr. Canty, who is serving time for attempted murder and robbery, when the beating was over Sergeant Sweeney told the others to straighten up their clothes, saying, “We have to look professional.”

In a legal filing, the officers denied all of Mr. Canty’s accusations.

Another pending suit from last year names Sergeant Sweeney along with Kevin Trombley, the officer who handcuffed Mr. Strickland and helped drag him to the elevator.

Edwin Banks, who is serving time for drug possession, said in the suit that Officer Trombley had repeatedly harassed him about his dreadlocks. One morning, after breakfast, according to Mr. Banks, Officer Trombley, Sergeant Sweeney and others severely beat him. Mr. Banks claimed that the sergeant then had the guards carry him by his limbs to the infirmary, with one officer grabbing his shirt collar so tightly that he passed out.

Lawyers for the officers have not yet filed a response to the accusations.

In each of these cases, inmates said they had filed grievances with the prison administration and written letters to Albany, including to the governor. Nothing came of them.

Within two weeks of Mr. Strickland’s death, several inmates said, they were questioned by the State Police and internal affairs investigators with the corrections department. Most said they did not know the names of the officers involved but would have been able to make identifications if they saw them again.

The Times has interviewed more than a dozen inmate witnesses in connection with several brutality cases in recent months, and not one had been shown photos of suspect officers by state investigators, they said.

Partly because the video evidence in the Strickland case was so compelling, investigators with the corrections department referred the case to the State Bureau of Labor Relations for possible departmental disciplinary action.

Nothing happened. The state agency that oversees licensing of medical professionals did not pursue the matter either.

The State Police concluded “that no criminal conduct of others contributed” to the death, and the Clinton County district attorney declined to present the case to a grand jury.

The officers and the nurse involved either continue to work for the corrections department or have retired with their full pensions. At the trial, Sergeant Sweeney said he left the department last May after 33 years of service, and is now working as a rural mail carrier.

The civil case is not likely to be resolved any time soon. Unless the parties settle first, the judge is expected to take up to a year to render his decision.

At a hearing this month in Albany, Daniel O’Donnell, the chairman of the State Assembly prisons committee, called for the creation of an independent oversight agency to monitor the state prison system. The meeting was adjourned, until an unspecified date, because the corrections department declined to testify.

During the civil trial, Mr. Strickland’s mother, a former nursing home aide who is 70 years old, testified that she used to try to make the six-hour bus trip from Brooklyn to visit her son once a month, but since he died she had moved to Georgia.

She was asked how she learned of her son’s death. She said a prison chaplain had called a minister that he knew in Brooklyn, who came to her house. She said that the next day, she phoned a counselor at Clinton to ask if there was any information about how her son had died. The counselor, she said, told her “no, because it was under investigation.”

There was no funeral, Mrs. Strickland told the court. “I had lack of funds.”

According to the death certificate, her son was buried on Oct. 15, 2010, in the Clinton Correctional Cemetery, a mile outside the prison wall.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

By Tom Robbins

Speaking from a Brooklyn courtroom in 2010, a federal judge delivered a rebuke to New York State corrections officials. The state had just agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the case of a former inmate who said a guard at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, which has since been closed, had squeezed his testicles so hard while frisking him that he defecated on himself.

The judge, John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York, noted there were “red flags all over the employment history” of the guard, who had been the target of numerous other abuse claims brought by inmates, according to a transcript of his remarks. But the complaints, which were handwritten, were filed internally and “buried in the prison’s arcane filing system,” which organizes claims by inmate identification numbers, not the officers involved, Judge Gleeson said.

It was a startling observation — that prison officials had no way of tracking problems with guards. But lawyers and prisoners’ rights advocates have long complained about the issue throughout the state prison system.

After months of inquiries by The New York Times and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues, the state may be edging toward addressing the shortcoming.

A spokesman for the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision declined to elaborate on how the agency had handled internal grievances in the past, but said it had begun electronically logging the complaints to allow it to monitor accusations of misconduct by staff members and change bad practices. That project will be completed in 2016, the spokesman said.

State officials said there were currently about 4,000 open investigations into grievances filed by prisoners in New York’s system, which includes approximately 53,000 inmates across 54 facilities. A series of articles published over the past year by The Times and The Marshall Project examined brutality by corrections officers at prisons across the state and how they are rarely held accountable.

The union that represents prison guards, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, declined to comment on the change.

Grievances, however, are not the only way corrections officials have failed to identify and track problems with officers or facilities.

Each year, New York State inmates file hundreds of lawsuits, most of which are dismissed. But in many instances, the lawsuits could have functioned as another early-warning system, according to prisoners’ rights advocates and legal experts.

Since 2010, the state has paid out at least $8.8 million in settlements or jury awards in cases in which guards were accused of prisoner abuse or excessive force, according to court records assembled by The Times and The Marshall Project. Among those 207 cases, the names of some officers and prisons crop up repeatedly.

“If you are serious about identifying bad actors, then you should not only be tracking the grievances, you should be tracking the cases that have been filed against them, substantiated or not,” said Karen L. Murtagh, executive director of the nonprofit Prisoners ’ Legal Services of New York. “It is just one of the things to know.”

At least 30 state corrections officers were named in two or more abuse cases that ended in settlements or jury awards in favor of inmates, court records show. Of those, eight were cited in three or more lawsuits, including one officer at Southport Correctional Facility, a super-maximum security prison where all inmates are held in solitary confinement, who was named in nine cases.

Under state law, disciplinary actions against corrections officers are confidential, but 20 of the officers named in the cases are still working for the department, state records show. Nine of them have since retired and one, who was named in two brutality cases that settled, has resigned, according to the state comptroller’s office.

“I’ve never understood why these cases don’t lead to people losing their positions,” said Anthony Cecutti, a lawyer who has represented several inmates in brutality cases, including one that was settled this year for $80,000 in the middle of a trial.

In that case, which took seven years to be brought before a jury, a former inmate suffered a broken rib in an attack by guards at Attica Correctional Facility that was said to have been unprovoked. The state maintained that the inmate, who later underwent sex reassignment surgery, must have caused the injury herself. Two of the guards accused of having attacked her had been named in multiple lawsuits accusing the guards of brutality since 2010, four of which resulted in payments. State records show that one of the guards retired in October; the other remains on the job.

Scrutinizing the settlements and jury awards since 2010, Attica, a maximum-security prison in western New York that was the site of a deadly riot in 1971, stands out: It was cited in 28 lawsuits, the most of any state prison. It is followed by Southport, with 26, and then Clinton Correctional Facility, the site of the inmate breakout in June, with 10.

A recent investigation by The Times examined the death of an inmate at Clinton in 2010 in which no guards were punished. A lawsuit filed by the family of the prisoner, Leonard Strickland, went to trial in November but is still pending.

A spokesman for the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat, whose office defends prison employees in civil cases, declined to detail its approach to such lawsuits.

The attorney general’s office, however, announced last month that it was teaming up with the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, to reduce the “litigation risk” facing state agencies, beginning with the corrections department. Among the steps they pledged to take were improved procedures for administrative hearings and training.

The notion of using lawsuits as a road map to possible corrective action is not new. Several cities, including Denver and Los Angeles, use civil litigation filed against police officers to identify trends of misconduct and officers in need of monitoring or retraining. This year, the New York City Investigation Department issued a report urging police officials to take similar steps.

“It’s a deeply imperfect measure,” said Mark G. Peters, commissioner of the Investigation Department, who wrote the report with Philip K. Eure, inspector general of the Police Department. “Some wrongdoing never results in litigation, and many cases brought are frivolous. But a bunch of lawsuits against someone is an indicator that maybe you want to take a harder look.

“In a world where data is scarce, you don’t turn it away.”

Mr. Peters, who served as an assistant attorney general defending corrections department employees in the 1990s, said the same concept could be applied to prison officers, although he cautioned that a greater degree of skepticism was needed for lawsuits brought by inmates.

Institutional resistance to inquiries into brutality allegations is enormous, said Richard D. Emery, a civil rights lawyer who has brought numerous lawsuits on behalf of prisoners and who also serves as chairman of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates complaints against police officers. Still, he said, greater scrutiny was essential.

“In this day and age, you have to do it,” Mr. Emery said. “And if you don’t do it, it is almost as bad as if you did it and ignored your findings.”

This article is by Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.