The Legal Aid Society filed an open records lawsuit against the New York State Department of Correction and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to force the Department to disclose facility-level statistics showing the extent of COVID-19’s spread among facility staff, reports the Times Union.

The lawsuit seeks records reflecting the number of DOCCS employees, by facility, who have been tested for COVID-19 and the number who have tested positive since the pandemic began. Legal Aid initially sought to obtain this information via a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, which DOCCS denied, purportedly for security reasons. However, DOCCS failed to explain why these statistics, which would reveal no identifying information or details of prison operations, would pose a risk if disclosed.

At least 28 states, but not New York, proactively publish facility-level data about their prison staff’s COVID-19 infections, and many of them have created COVID-19 “dashboards” or other robust online resources providing detailed, facility-specific, up-to-date, and viewable-over-time data on testing and rates of infection (including active infections) among correctional staff. These states have not reported any difficulties since making this information available to the public. On December 14, 2020, Legal Aid called upon Governor Andrew Cuomo and DOCCS Acting Commissioner Anthony J. Annucci to begin regularly reporting facility-specific, viewable-over-time data, based on public health metrics such as testing frequency and population density.