1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

According to recent articles from Hell Gate and New York Focus, the State of New York is choosing to fight tooth and nail against 1600 claims of abuse filed against state prison employees under the Adult Survivors Act. Letitia James and the state attorney’s office are trying to have 500 of these cases dismissed outright, citing rules that require initial claims in lawsuits against the state to include exact details of the alleged harm. This forces victims from sometimes decades-old cases of abuse to relive their trauma at the hands of New York State’s prison system — both the sexual abuse itself, and then the accusations by prison staff that they were lying. Even when women do give exacting details of their abuse, the state has requested their cases be dismissed; simply for typos, in one example cited, and in another, because the state said the victim did not have exact dates of her repeated abuse, and because they allowed a DOCCS human resources employee to claim that one of the named employees was never employed at the prison — a request which the state had to drop when a public database showed that he did. Available data indicates that sexual abuse in DOCCS facilities is a rampant problem: National surveys of incarcerated people have consistently ranked New York women’s prisons among the nation’s highest in reported staff sexual misconduct. Why are a woman governor and a woman AG choosing to fight against and re-traumatize these women, rather than fight against our prison’s sexual abuse problem by taking responsibility? I call on you to vocally oppose and do everything you can to stop the appalling mistreatment of these women, and take proactive steps to fight sexual abuse in the DOCCS.