The Legal Aid Society, Appellate Advocates, Office of the Appellate Defender, The Center for Appellate Litigation, the Parole Preparation Project, the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, the Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Correctional Association of New York, in a recently issued letter, called on Governor Cuomo and the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to share meaningful data about the scope of the COVID-19 crisis in State prisons and to adopt decarceration measures to significantly reduce prison populations, as reported by the New York Daily News.

What little data DOCCS does disclose reveals severe under-testing and dangerous conditions, corroborating these client accounts. Archiving for months the daily data reports that disappear each day from the Department’s website, The Legal Aid Society analyzed the scant testing and infection data posted online since April and compiled its findings in a recently released interactive report, Pandemic in Prison.

Among other troubling findings, the analysis revealed that:

• seven months after the Governor declared a state of emergency, a majority of incarcerated people had never been tested;
• that while 97 percent of cases come from high-occupancy facilities DOCCS has reduced its total capacity by only 11 percent;
• 83 percent of outbreaks were not followed by increased testing on new people – in fact New York has often decreased testing new people following outbreaks.

“We have been asking for information about the department’s response, and for better data reporting. This isn’t the first time we’ve asked for it,” said Sophie Gebreselassie, Staff Attorney with The Legal Aid Society Prisoners’ Rights Project. “But we wanted to hammer that point home again.”