They Wanted to Have Fewer Prisons. Instead, They Got a Prisoner’s Worst Nightmare.

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Robert Lee Denis, 34, recently returned from his trip to Bronx Supreme Court back to Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison located in Napanoch, New York. We both reside in a cell block called East Wing. They call it “baby Brooklyn,” because it’s heavy with Brooklyn cats, which gives the place that gritty Kings County vibe. I stood off to the side in East Wing’s lobby, waited for the welcome-back daps ’n’ hugs to end before I approached Denis to give him my own.

Denis smiled half-heartedly through his beard. He wore the haggard shell-shocked expression everyone wears after leaving transit.

“I know,” I said. “It’s all in your eyes: Green Haven.”

He shivered. “They ignore you,” he said. “Unless you start a fire.”

In 2007 Denis was convicted of manslaughter, and he has served 18 years in prison. Some of that time he has spent in the Special Housing Unit, designated for prisoners found guilty of serious misconduct, where you’re confined to a windowless cell for 23 hours a day, away from the general population. But the 10 days he spent inside Green Haven H block, he told me, were by far the worst he’s experienced during his incarceration. His is just one story about a facility that is notorious among the people incarcerated in New York’s prison system.

After Downstate Correctional Facility closed in 2022, the massive job of holding and transporting hundreds of incarcerated people to prisons across the state was crammed into a single roach-and-rat-infested cell block in Green Haven, a maximum-security prison located in a rural town called Stormville. While investigating this story, I learned of the place’s dark history.

In December 2024, Denis went back to court for a hearing to challenge his conviction. In a few months, the judge will make a ruling that will potentially set Denis free. After coming to prison at age 16 with a 10^th grade education, he’d leave with an associate degree from Bard College. Unfortunately, in order to return to court he has to return to the bowels of Roach Haven.

East Wing’s lobby brightens by the afternoon. While Denis and I wait for the guard to call us to lunch, prisoners gossip and talk shit about last night’s dice game. We sit on one of the benches against the wall. Guys leer at us suspiciously as I pull out my composition notebook to interview Denis about his latest experience in Green Haven, but they keep their distance.

“It looked like there was a fire in there,” he said. “Dead roaches on the walls, spit, what looked like blood, more dead roaches on the gate. Live roaches everywhere. The mattress was burnt, with holes in it. No toothpaste. No toilet tissue. The whole bed frame was roach infested.”

In transit, bedsheets, scraps of paper, even Bibles are lit on fire and used to burn out roaches crawling through cracks and hiding in the crevices. Smoke sets off the alarm, which forces officers to stop during their rounds. Otherwise, most walk right past you.

The cell block was freezing, he told me, and the constant fear of roaches crawling inside his ears caused him not only to keep his clothes and boots on but also to keep his lights on. For the first three days, sleep was impossible.

“The conditions were so horrible guys got frustrated and started throwing food, juice, even piss,” he told me.

Denis’ horror story mirrors my own, and that of many others. Last September, before being bused to Eastern prison, I spent five days inside H Block. It was the worst five days of my 15 years in prison. I experienced everything Denis experienced. Then something broke inside me.

When the correctional officer wheeled the chow cart past my cell on a Thursday morning, without placing a bagged breakfast on my food slot, I knew that it meant I had to stay for the weekend while the guys I had arrived there with transferred out—at this, I shouted a bone-chilling “Noooo!” It felt as if I had lost the grip of a friend and were watching him free fall into the abyss.

I knelt on my bed, burying my tears into my jacket until I started to growl. To summon the strength to endure these diabolical conditions, I invoked images of my ancestors chained together in the leaky hulls of vermin-infested slave ships, saying to myself that if they could survive the transatlantic Middle Passage, then I could survive New York state’s carceral middle passage.

In the 1800s, Stormville, named after brothers Jacob and Rupert Storm, was known as slave-holding territory. It sits in walking distance from the Storm Family Cemetery, which, according to the Dutchess County Historical Society, contains not only the graves of the Storm family but also the graves of over 100 slaves.

The third time a steady officer walked in on my company, I begged her for a bottle of germicide to clean my cell. She made me promise that if she gave it to me I wouldn’t drink it, like the last guy had. I told her she didn’t have to worry about me. Still, I understood why he drank it—anything to get taken out of this roach motel, even if only a temporary visit to the infirmary.

Why are prisoners being held under such deplorable living conditions, even when they are going to court? Or simply being transferred to another prison?

Transit wasn’t always a horror story. The decision to close the Downstate facility previously used for transfers was because of the declining prison population, down more than 54 percent from the state’s high in 1999 and staff shortages. But Downstate was run how a transit facility is supposed to run. When you’d arrive, they’d unload your property bags off the bus, gave you a decent mattress, bedsheets, and a pillow case, and porters inside the cell block would bring you cleaning supplies. If you were there for court, you were given your court bag, which contained your legal documents. Before a court hearing, you want to be in a clean cell, where you can collect your thoughts and prepare your legal offensive.

A clean cell, a mattress, and his court bag were all 35-year-old Christopher Harrell was hoping for when he arrived in H block to await his day in court. Instead, it was “so many people screaming, screaming to talk to each other. Screaming for assistance: ‘Yo, C.O., my toilet flooded. Yo, C.O., I need linen. Yo, C.O., I don’t feel good.’ It continued all night.”

Harrell told me he drank water from the sink and felt sick. When he requested medical assistance, instead of a nurse coming to check on him, a sergeant pulled up in front of his cell with a “beat-up squad” of about eight corrections officers and asked him , “Why are you making problems?”

He decided to soldier through stomach pain, but at his first court appearance, Harrell asked the judge to order that he be housed in a facility closer to the court. Unfortunately, his request was denied. When he finally arrived back at Eastern, he reached out to New York Sen. Julia Salazar, the chair of the Corrections and Community Supervision Committee. So did I. DOCCS transit policy is circumventing the HALT Act, which requires that prisoners be out of their cells for at least seven hours a day. But those in transit are confined to their cells for 23 hours, without property, without being under disciplinary sanction.

“For decades, New York state prisons have subjected incarcerated people to abuse, torture, and brutal environments,” said Salazar. “There is little to no oversight, and it’s extremely rare for correction officers or facilities to be held accountable. I will continue to fight for increased transparency, accountability, and oversight, and today I am calling on Green Haven Correctional Facility to immediately address the inhumane conditions it is forcing incarcerated people to live in.”

Part of the problem is that instead of being bused from one facility directly to the next or from a facility straight to court, guys are being held over in Green Haven for days, weeks, and sometimes months, for no reason.

This was the case for Dameon Bodie, a college student transferring to a facility that was only 45 minutes away, but was stuck there for seven days, where he watched a bat terrorize the tier before another prisoner tossed a bar of soap and knocked it out of the air. Bodie’s mother was shocked when she called DOCCS headquarters, in Albany. “We have no idea why he’s still there,” someone told her. Bodie was shipped out the next day.

With the murder of Robert Brooks in Marcy Correctional Facility, and the recent 22-day illegal prison guard strike, living conditions of inmates have come under intense scrutiny. Some may argue that it’s a prison, not the Hyatt, failing to take into account our basic humanity or that our living conditions are also a corrections officer’s work environment.

Sliding through the metal detectors, I overheard a sergeant explain how he put down his lunch, turned to grab a spoon, and, as he lifted the lid of his bowl, roaches squirmed underneath.

How would you care for those under your charge if you worked in such inhumane conditions?

Although not for the same reason, prisoners and correctional officers alike say the same thing: Downstate never should have closed. For criminal justice reformers and their more passionate counterparts, abolitionists, prison closures are a sign that the movement against mass incarceration is winning, however incrementally. What these well-intentioned activists didn’t know in this case was how disruptive and downright traumatic it would be for the hundreds of prisoners affected.

Recently, I saw Denis in the mess hall and asked him one last question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind. “You couldn’t sleep, so how did you occupy your time?”

“I stayed up, countin’ roaches. One roach, two roach, white roach, brown roach.”