Chris Gelardi

2 weeks ago | yahoo.com | Chris Gelardi

ALBANY — “I hate coming here,” Robert Ricks said. Ricks sat at the focal point of a hearing room in the New York state legislative office building. He’d traveled to Albany last Wednesday to testify for a second time about his son, Robert Brooks, whom prison guards beat to death in December at the Central New York prison where he was incarcerated. Video of the gruesome killing sparked nationwide outcry and calls to reform New York’s state prison system.

2 weeks ago | nysfocus.com | Chris Gelardi

BEFORE YOU GO, consider: If not for the article you just read, would the information in it be public? Or would it remain hidden — buried within the confines of New York’s sprawling criminal-legal apparatus? I started working at New York Focus in 2022, not long after the outlet launched.

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Julia Rock |Chris Gelardi

— This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Thousands of New Yorkers around the state are sitting on waitlists for two state-funded mental health treatment and support programs, according to data obtained by the Legal Aid Society and reviewed by New York Focus. Some applicants wait years for voluntary long-term mental health support, even as the state has increased funding for such programs in recent years, the records show.

1 month ago | thecity.nyc | Chris Gelardi

This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, an independent, investigative news site covering New York state and city politics. Sign up for their newsletter here. As President Donald Trump’s administration rounds up hundreds of immigrants it claims are gang members and expels them to a notorious Salvadoran prison, New York state is quietly feeding federal authorities gang intelligence that could fuel the administration’s rapidly expanding, extrajudicial deportation machine.

1 month ago | northcountrypublicradio.org | Chris Gelardi

The New York state prison system is abusing “emergency” authority to gut solitary confinement reforms indefinitely, a new class action lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit, filed by the Legal Aid Society on Thursday, asks a state court to overturn the prison agency’s suspension of the reforms, details of which attorneys only recently uncovered. At issue is the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, known as HALT, which went into effect in 2022.