A New York Times investigation has revealed that brutal attacks by corrections officers against prisoners are “common occurrences” at Rikers Island jail in New York City. A secret internal study conducted by the city’s health department and obtained by the Times found that over an 11-month period last year, 129 prisoners at Rikers suffered “serious injuries” at the hands of corrections staff. In 77 percent of cases, the prisoner had a mental illness. In one case, corrections officers intervened when a prisoner tried to hang himself, then forced the prisoner to lie face down on the floor and pummeled him so hard he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery. Another prisoner, Andre Lane, told the Times he was beaten so badly he nearly died.

Andre Lane: “One officer took a knuckle brace and put it on his hand, and he just started hitting me — boom, boom. And that’s when I started getting dizzy and dizzy and dizzy.”

None of the guards involved in any of the 129 cases documented has ever been prosecuted. Rikers now houses roughly the same number of mentally ill people as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York state combined. Watch our recent interview with Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan on conditions at Rikers during the two months she was jailed there.