May 1
2025
Prison nurses face choice between patients, abusive guards
- Share on
Illustration by Dion MBD for The Marshall Project.
When New York corrections officers attack prisoners in infirmaries — as has happened dozens of times in the past 15 years — it is nurses who must document and treat the resulting injuries. Their choices can save lives or cover up abuse.
A prisoner at Green Haven Correctional Facility, in the Hudson Valley, accused a nurse of medically clearing him to be sent to solitary confinement to cover up a beating by guards that left him with life-threatening injuries: a punctured lung, broken ribs and a fractured hand.
By contrast, at nearby Sing Sing, a man credited a nurse with saving his life by yelling at an officer to stop beating him.
How nurses handle instances of violence in infirmaries gained wider attention in December when state officials released body camera footage showing nurses peering into an exam room from a hallway while guards fatally beat and choked Robert Brooks at Marcy prison.
Such situations put nurses in a tough position. Those who witness abuse may stay silent about what they witnessed to avoid angering the officers who protect them. Yet ignoring or covering up assaults violates a nurse’s professional code of ethics, prison policy and the law.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit
In dozens of cases, nurses have been accused of helping to cover up beatings in New York prisons, according to a Marshall Project review of court settlements, disciplinary records and pending lawsuits. The Marshall Project reporters identified 61 allegations from 2010 through 2024 of medical staff concealing evidence of guards’ abuse, usually by forgoing examinations or not documenting injuries. During that period, the department fired just one nurse for neglecting these duties after a use of force, according to a review of state disciplinary data.
Medical staff’s propensity to cover up officers’ violence happens more frequently than these numbers reflect, experts say. Many prisoners do not file complaints because they fear retaliation or not being believed.
Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III has pledged to reform the culture in New York prisons. In a statement, he said he is working with people and organizations inside and outside the department to “make impactful change to end this violence.”
The violent culture puts nurses in a bind, experts say. The primary duty of nurses is to support the health and well-being of their patients, according to the New York nursing board. Yet prison nurses can also feel a dual loyalty to the guards who ensure their safety, several former corrections nurses and staffers said. In this way, the “blue wall” extends into the prison clinic.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomMedical staff go along with cover-ups all the time, said Kevin Ryan, a retired internal investigator in the state prison system.
“If they want to keep their jobs, they have to go along,” he said.
Employees who report wrongdoing are quickly labeled “rats” and can get threatening letters or find their tires slashed. Many prisons are in small towns with few other good jobs, Ryan said.
“They don’t want their husband to be harassed,” he said. “They don’t want their kids to be harassed.”
Prison culture tends to either force nurses out or numb them to the violence they witness and treat, said Stephanie Gangemi, a professor at University of Colorado Colorado Springs who researches health care delivery in prisons and jails.
“The system has ways of making their lives so miserable that they don’t stay,” Gangemi said. “The odds for them being complicit with bad reports or cover-ups is really, really high for their own safety and survival.”
The Marshall Project submitted questions and detailed findings to the New York officers’ and nurses’ unions.
The union for correctional officers and sergeants did not respond. Rob Merrill, a spokesperson for the nurses’ union, said in a brief statement: “The health and safety of [our] members working in dangerous institutional settings like [the department] is always a top union priority.”
Nurse Abedin Mehmedovic, who works for a private agency, stands outside an infirmary while corrections officers beat Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility in December. Image courtesy of New York State Attorney General’s Office.
In 2013, officers at Green Haven prison brought an incarcerated man experiencing psychosis to the medical unit to give him meds and draw blood. Video showed the handcuffed man talkative and standing normally, according to state records. Then the prisoner, strapped in a restraint chair, appeared to choke on water and pills and spit some out. Officers pushed his head down on his chest to put on a spit hood and severed his spinal cord, according to a report from the State Commission of Correction.
Video showed that his demeanor changed; he was no longer babbling but “in an almost listless state,” according to arbitration records.
Officers carried the man back to his cell. Video shows a nurse asking, “Are you hurting anywhere? Nothing hurts you? Oh, OK,” before leaving the cell, according to state records. The nurse didn’t do a physical examination or take vital signs.
State policy requires medical staff, usually nurses, to examine prisoners as soon as possible after a use of force, with the patient stripped down to underwear. Guards must take photos. Nurses must detail injuries in writing and depict points of pain or injury on sketches of a human body.
The man soon slid off his cot onto the floor and complained that his bones were killing him. He lay motionless and unattended for more than 24 hours before he was brought to a local hospital, according to state records. He died three weeks later.
The department fired the nurse for not examining the man and then telling investigators that he did. The state also fired a correction officer trainee who’d been observing the prisoner. The department did not attempt to discipline the officers or other medical staff involved. A prison spokesperson said the use of force “was deemed to be appropriate.”
The nurse later testified at an arbitration hearing that it was Green Haven policy to forgo physical exams and assess an incarcerated person’s injuries “by asking him if he’s not injured” and that’s “pretty much what we do.” Other witnesses also testified that those actions were the norm at Green Haven.
An arbitrator upheld the firing. But that case was the exception.
The department rarely fires nurses whom it accuses of not carrying out their duties after a use of force. A Marshall Project review of disciplinary records through 2024 found six nurses who were accused of misconduct after uses of force, including not examining the prisoner, not documenting injuries, and lying to investigators and in their reports. The Green Haven nurse was the only one fired (one nurse retired).
The department tried to fire a nurse for failing to document a prisoner’s injuries after a group of officers were accused of beating him in 2019 at the Willard Drug Treatment Campus in the Finger Lakes region. The nurse examined the officers involved but did not examine the prisoner, who suffered three broken ribs and a punctured lung that left him in the ICU and infirmary for two weeks. An arbitrator gave the nurse a one-month suspension without pay.
In 2023, officers at Greene prison, south of Albany, handcuffed a prisoner and kicked and beat him in a shower, according to a lawsuit. After the prisoner spat at an officer, guards put a hood over his head. They repeatedly slammed his head into the door of a van before driving him to the infirmary, his lawsuit alleges. A nurse noted bruises and cuts on his body but didn’t remove the hood to examine his head, according to medical records. Shortly after guards put him in solitary and removed the hood, he was rushed to Albany Medical Center, where doctors reconstructed a fractured eye socket and later implanted a metal plate.
The prison agency investigated the incident but didn’t discipline the employees. A prison spokesperson said the department deemed the force reasonable.
Former prison nurse Katherine Tara vividly remembers the advice from another nurse in her first week on the job at Attica: If you see guards using force on a prisoner, pretend you don’t see it. Duck into a hallway or room. And always do what officers want, because they are the only ones who will protect you from the prisoners, Tara recalled the nurse saying.
Months into Tara’s time on the job, a prisoner named George Williams arrived at the clinic, his head battered and swollen, and his white T-shirt soaked in blood.
The nurse asked Williams what happened, but he didn’t answer. A sergeant stood nearby and repeatedly called him the N-word, according to court records. As she started to treat his battered eyes, Tara later testified at trial, Williams began to cry. “I only had four months to go,” he said, according to her testimony.
Former prison nurse Katherine Tara. Image courtesy of Katherine Tara.
Tara asked guards to bring ice for the swelling, but the sergeant refused. Across the hall, another nurse was icing the fists of three officers who beat Williams, Tara later testified.
“It’s an unwritten rule that the guards get the treatment before the prisoner,” she testified.
The officers pressured her to send Williams to a solitary confinement cell, she testified in a deposition and trial. Instead, she called a doctor for authorization to send him to a hospital. She testified that the sergeant then called her “stupid” for wanting to send Williams to the hospital.
Williams spent months getting treatment for a shattered eye socket, two broken legs, a fractured shoulder and other injuries. Three officers involved pleaded guilty to misdemeanor misconduct and quit their jobs.
Because Tara stood up to the officers and sent Williams to the hospital instead of solitary, investigators told her she was no longer safe at Attica. “The state trooper said, ‘We have to get you out of here, we have to protect you,’” Tara recalled in an interview.
The prison tried to fire the sergeant for his racist remarks. But an arbitrator overturned the termination, ruling in part that Tara was not credible because she seemed excessively nervous.
The fear of speaking honestly about assaults is widespread. At Wende prison, a nurse who witnessed a guard beating a prisoner in a wheelchair told investigators that an officer told her to say she saw nothing. She refused to identify the officer. In another case, investigators interviewed a nurse at Franklin prison about an incident in which a guard broke a prisoner’s jaw in the infirmary. She later testified that she received a call at work from someone calling her a rat. When she appeared at an arbitration hearing, she explained she was not testifying voluntarily, but was being forced to by a subpoena.
Experts say guards push medical staff to compartmentalize their work by treating prisoners assaulted by staff but not judging how the assaults happened.
“They’ve written it off as, ‘This is a security function, and I fulfill a medical function, and security issues are outside of my purview,’” said Sumeet Sharma, a director at the Correctional Association of New York, an independent watchdog that routinely interviews prisoners and medical staff during oversight visits in prisons.
The fallout from the video of Brooks’ beating death in December resulted in 10 correctional officers facing a number of criminal charges, including second-degree murder. None of the nurses present were criminally charged, but the governor has ordered the department to fire them. One nurse resigned, and disciplinary charges against a second are pending. Our previous reporting showed that the department struggles to fire officers for abuse or cover-ups, failing in 90% of those cases.
The department has similarly often failed in its attempts to discipline nurses, according to a review of state disciplinary data. Prison officials tried to fire nurses in more than 220 cases between 2010 and 2022, but only 14 were ultimately fired; 50 nurses resigned or retired. Offenses included being drunk at work, sexual harassment, welfare fraud, absenteeism and burning a prisoner by applying cream before using an EKG.
Some studies have found that nurses in correctional settings can be influenced by a person’s criminal charge and sometimes adapt their nursing style to the prison’s culture. This can lead to a cynical approach toward their patients. And guards can put immense pressure on nurses to ignore their duty to patients.
Still, medical staff can play a crucial role in documenting uses of force. In some lawsuits in which prisoners won large damages from the state, the case relied heavily on proper documentation by nurses.
Their quick actions also save lives. The state paid $12,500 to a prisoner who alleged officers beat him in the infirmary, with one putting a medical glove over a brass knuckle and hitting him in the face, which took 10 stitches to close. A nurse was screaming at guards to stop, or he would die, according to the man’s lawsuit, and he believes that intervention helped save his life.
That type of nursing is essential, said Mary Muse, a correctional health care consultant and former director of nursing for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Nurses have a duty to act, speak up and fully assess every patient. “Just saying, ‘OK, there was a scuffle, and he seems fine,’ then I’m not meeting my moral obligations,” she said. “I’ve deviated from a standard of care.”
No one at the Marcy prison stepped in to save Brooks in December. The district attorney said he is not criminally charging the nurses because an officer demanded they stay out of the room. And they complied.
