When he took the witness stand in federal court on March 17 in Albany, Michael McCallion was nervous. He had waited three years for this moment, for a chance to hold accountable the men he said brutally assaulted him, hoping to bring to light the prevalence of abuse in prison.

He told the jury that in 2020, a group of corrections officers had beaten him in a New York state prison near the Canadian border, breaking four of his ribs. After McCallion filed a complaint about the assault, he said two other officers beat him further and ruptured an eardrum.

Across the courtroom, seven guards impassively watched McCallion’s testimony. Each later testified that he and his colleagues did nothing of the sort: No one assaulted the formerly incarcerated man.

For four days, eight jurors sat in a historic high-ceilinged art deco courtroom and weighed the two irreconcilable stories.

McCallion’s attorney offered several facts supporting his version of events. But the plaintiff lacked one critical thing: video evidence. The guards at Gouverneur Correctional Facility did not have body-worn cameras. The sites of the alleged beatings lacked fixed security cameras. This may soon change. The New York Legislature’s recently passed budget allocates $418 million for body and fixed cameras, and requires that prison employees wear and activate body cameras in every interaction with incarcerated people.

Those changes can’t help McCallion and other prisoners who accused guards of abusing them. A recent investigation by The Marshall Project found at least 46 cases in which prisoners in New York alleged guards abused them in an infirmary. Advocates say that officers have intentionally taken prisoners to infirmaries to beat them because the medical wings lacked cameras.

The corrections department has begun putting more cameras in prisons following the December beating death of Robert Brooks, during which several body cameras were, unbeknownst to the officers, recording. The video shocked the public and led to criminal charges against 10 officers. But most abuse cases don’t have video, The Marshall Project found.

Without video, advocates and attorneys say, it’s difficult for New York prisoners to prove their allegations of abuse in prison.

Read the full article about proving prison abuse without video by Joseph Neff at The Marshall Project.