‘Losing my mind’: New York prisons are holding people in rooms with no running water

Brown says he spent the next eight days in the room, giving officers stool after stool. None had any foreign objects in them, but he says the guards told him the stool was always an “insufficient amount” and thus didn’t prove his innocence. They gave him cups of water, but it was barely enough to drink and clean himself. “You can’t shower, I got defecation all over my body,” he told The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and New York Focus. As the days passed, the room’s overhead lights never turned off.

“I was literally losing my mind in there,” Brown said.

Corrections officers keep incarcerated people in similar rooms across New York’s state prison system. According to a prison agency directive, officers can confine someone in one of the rooms if they have “probable cause” to believe they’ve swallowed contraband or inserted it into their rectal cavity. Officially called “special watch” or “contraband watch” rooms, they’re meant to facilitate the safe recovery of drugs, weapons, or other prohibited items that prisoners have hidden in their bodies.

Incarcerated people call them by a different name — “shit rooms” — and say they’re ripe for abuse.

“It is part and parcel of the torture, brutality, and abuse endemic to New York’s prisons,” said Jerome Wright, the formerly incarcerated co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, a New York-based advocacy group.

The rooms stirred up limited controversy in 2019, when a formerly incarcerated man sued Elmira Correctional Facility for holding him in a “defecation room” for 61 days. Officers claimed that X-rays showed a “razor-type weapon” in his rectum, but they never recovered one. Federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, asserting that the prison was maintaining “security.”

Since then, the rooms have eluded public scrutiny, though prisoners have continued to allege mistreatment within them. In 2021, another man sued the state for keeping him in a watch room in Elmira for over two months without recovering any contraband; a court ruled in his favor, awarding him $6,390 for wrongful confinement. Yet another man claimed that officers at the now-closed Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in northeastern New York, locked him in a special watch room for five days with no food or water. He was hospitalized for dehydration, he alleged in a lawsuit, and then locked back in the room for another week. Officers said they later found drugs in the Great Meadow watch room; the man claimed they planted them. The prison agency denied the allegations in the lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds.

In a statement, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state prison system, said that “special watch is a security measure designed to prevent the introduction of dangerous contraband into correctional facilities and to protect incarcerated individuals, staff, and visitors.” It said that prisoners on special watch are given hygiene items and a basin of water to wash themselves, and that “lighting is maintained throughout the watch to facilitate continuous observation and ensure the safety and security of the individual and staff.”

Critics argue that the rooms are cruel overkill.

“It’s a completely inhumane practice,” said state Senator Julia Salazar, who heads her chamber’s corrections committee. While drugs remain a particularly serious safety issue in prisons, she said, the rooms are a misguided way of intercepting them.

“The response is crazy and no longer about mitigating harm,” Salazar said. “They’ve really lost the thread.”

In 2023, Jayquan Griffin was in a recreation yard at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, in the Catskills, when a fellow prisoner punched him, breaking his jaw.

Officers took him to a hospital, where a CT scan revealed a metallic object in his “rectal area.” He later told medical providers that he had accidentally swallowed a razor blade that he had wrapped in plastic and stowed in his mouth. Prison records indicate that DOCCS staff were convinced that he had inserted the weapon into his rectum.

Whatever the case, guards then transported Griffin, still with a broken jaw and a razor in his body, to nearby Eastern Correctional Facility, and placed him in a special watch room, according to two lawsuits he filed against DOCCS and the state.

Griffin tried to pass the weapon, but couldn’t. He told guards that the razor wouldn’t come out, but they insisted that he defecate it. After a day, officers took him to another outside hospital for X-rays, which showed that the blade was still inside him, but left without getting him treatment and took him back to the defecation room.

Hours passed, then days. As with Brown, Griffin wore a hospital gown in the room and couldn’t leave. There was no running water, and the lights stayed on at night. He was caught in a cycle of misery.

“I’m shitting, I’m giving it to them. My jaw is broke, I can’t eat. I’m in pain, I’m crying,” he told New York Focus. With the razor still in his intestines, he began to panic.

“I got something in me that could potentially take my life,” he said.

Griffin says he began complaining about everything he could think of, like chest pains, hoping officers would take him back to the hospital. After six nights under contraband watch at Eastern, they finally took him to Albany Medical Center, where doctors performed a colonoscopy to remove the blade and inserted titanium plates in his face. He remained hospitalized for nine days.

DOCCS said that it “does not comment on the specific circumstances of an individual case.”

During his ordeal, officers filed disciplinary tickets against Griffin for fighting, “violent conduct,” smuggling, and other infractions. He fought the charges and eventually got them reversed — but only after he’d spent most of the three months after his hospital stay serving out an isolation sentence, according to the lawsuits.

To Griffin, the experience illustrates a broader pattern of inhumane practices across the prison system.

“You can’t just treat people like animals,” he said.

According to DOCCS’s directive, prisons should generally release people from contraband watch within 48 hours, unless they fail to submit two “negative defecations” — though it doesn’t define that term nor limit how long staff can extend the watch period. If staff are relying on an X-ray or other radiological scan to accuse someone of holding contraband, the directive allows them to keep prisoners in watch rooms for up to seven days.

In practice, the convoluted parameters offer prisons wide discretion in determining how long to keep prisoners on watch. In response to the 2019 lawsuit against Elmira prison, a federal judge determined that DOCCS staff were allowed to repeatedly restart the special watch process each time they discovered “new evidence” that the incarcerated man was holding a razor in his rectum, resulting in his 61-day stint in the defecation room that ended with no contraband recovered.

In the years after that lawsuit, New York overhauled the laws governing isolation in prisons and jails. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, which went into effect in 2022, strictly limits the scenarios in which facilities can keep incarcerated people locked in a room for more than 17 hours a day. Under HALT, that severe form of isolation can’t last longer than 15 days, and it must include at least four hours of daily out-of-cell time. Prisons also can’t hold incarcerated people in those strict conditions unless they’ve scheduled a prompt hearing to determine whether the person violated a rule that makes them eligible for punitive isolation.

Extended contraband watch violates those requirements, according to both Salazar, who sponsored the HALT bill, and the HALT Solitary Campaign, which led the movement to pass it. It’s one of many instances over the past four years in which DOCCS either ignored the law or sought to carve out exceptions to it, the advocates allege.

In its statement, DOCCS said that “contraband watch is a security and safety measure, not a disciplinary action.”

“The procedures are separate from the disciplinary confinement process addressed by HALT,” the agency said.

That’s not a distinction that exists in the law, advocates argue. While HALT carves out exceptions for medical care and facility-wide emergencies, its limits on isolation apply to “any form of cell confinement,” according to the text of the law.

Brown’s first trip to the Green Haven defecation room came after a visit with his wife, Megan Murtagh.

In 2025, DOCCS enacted a policy requiring most visitors to pass through advanced imaging body scanners before seeing their incarcerated loved ones. Countless visitors — particularly women — have alleged that DOCCS staff misread their scans, banning them from facilities after mistaking tampons, contraceptive devices, piercings, scars, and other bodily anomalies as hidden contraband, as New York Focus reported last December.

If they want to avoid a strip search, incarcerated people must also go through the body scanners after visits. On May 27, when Brown passed through a scanner after a visit with Murtagh, he says guards claimed to see something. Throughout his eight days in the defecation room, he says he asked the guards to scan him again, but they refused.

A week after he was released from contraband watch, Murtagh returned to Green Haven. No longer trusting the body scanners, Brown chose to end the visit with a strip frisk. This time, an officer who searched him reported that he “suspected” that Brown was “hiding contraband in his rectum area,” according to a memo the officer wrote. When guards told Brown they were taking him back to contraband watch, he got upset and pulled away, at which point seven officers shoved him against the wall and forced him to the ground, according to a use-of-force report.

Brown says he then spent another week in the defecation room. Again, prison staff didn’t say what the alleged contraband was and never recovered anything. They charged Brown with assaulting staff and refusing an order, among other violations, and released him from contraband watch directly to solitary confinement. Jeffrey Parks, a paralegal from Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, represented Brown in his disciplinary proceedings and was later able to get most of those charges overturned.

Separately, Murtagh received a letter from DOCCS in mid-June stating that the agency was indefinitely suspending her visitation privileges because her husband had allegedly “failed to clear the body scanner and was later found to be in possession of contraband,” then was “again found to be in possession of contraband.” Murtagh is appealing the suspension. She and Brown both deny possessing or hiding any contraband, and Parks said that the prison never substantiated any of its claims that Brown was attempting to smuggle banned items.

Asked about the lack of evidence, DOCCS alleged that a woman who visited Brown at a different facility in 2024 was caught with 22 grams of marijuana. It didn’t comment on the allegations from May and June.

“I have never once seen any articulation of what the contraband was supposed to have been,” Parks wrote in an email, “probably because it never existed.”

Co-published by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and New York Focus with support from Solitary Watch.

This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and New York Focus with support from Solitary Watch reviewed and distributed by Stacker.