Upstate Correctional Facility is a maximum security state prison for men in Franklin County, New York, US. The prison, in the Town of Malone,[1] was the first New York State prison built as a supermax.[2]
Upstate C.F. was established in 1998 to house special prisoners with a history of assaultive behavior. Programs available to the prisoners are based on the acceptance of the established rules and other behavior indicating a degree of social conformity. Approximately 350 corrections officers, aided by more than 1000 remote cameras, supervise about 1300 prisoners.
Upstate is also a cadre facility. Cadre is the name of the program in which inmates are brought in to work around the prison grounds. The Cadre program holds approximately 300 inmates. The other 1000 inmates are in the SHU, special housing unit. The SHU is more commonly known as the box.[citation needed]
History
Upstate, the 70th state prison to open in New York State, had a cost of $180 million (equivalent to $329 million in 2023). Prisoners were scheduled to arrive in July 1988. It was scheduled to open to have 370 prison guards and 1,500 prisoners, with two prisoners per cell.[2]
Locals in Malone, New York originally had a positive reception to the prison as it had the possibility of bringing jobs to the local economy; the prison was scheduled to have 510 jobs, and the town's previous agricultural and factory sectors had faced enormous declines. The prison was scheduled to house a number of inmates making up about 33% of the town's population.[2]
Jennifer Gonnerman of The Village Voice wrote that double celling prisoners together in solitary confinement had the potential to lead to prisoners killing one another.[2] Prisoners who double cell lived in very close proximity to one another for almost all of the time. On May 12, 2000, 35-year old prisoner Donnell Brunson killed 42-year old Jose Quintana, a Panamanian man who was his cellmate.[3]
Facility
The prison, two stories tall, was initially designed with having two prisoners in one cell. The prison cells were pre-fabricated and brought to the prison construction site for assembly into the building. The prison was to have 800 security cameras.[2]
The prison cells are by 8.5 feet (2,600 mm) by 14 feet (4,300 mm) and have plexiglas windows. The cells are larger than others in the New York state prison system.[3]
