Syracuse, N.Y. — Nyatwa Bullock is a Syracuse school board member and landlord, but she’s also lobbying and working to change New York state’s sentencing laws.
The 29-year-old Syracuse woman is speaking at rallies and encouraging elected officials to vote for three bills to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing, require reviews of long sentences and give people in prison more rehabilitative opportunities.
Bullock has a personal connection that makes her want to push for change: She has a nephew serving a long sentence for a Syracuse murder. His lawyer argued he didn’t do the crime, he wasn’t the shooter and his family believes he’s innocent. Her nephew, Deyontay Smith, is now serving 25 years to life in the fatal shooting of Jay Ford in 2017.
Bullock is a part of Communities Not Cages, a grassroots campaign launched in 2021 advocating for three sentencing reform bills. She and others recently held a rally outside City Hall in Syracuse. The bills they hope to get passed are:
- Eliminate Mandatory Minimums Act: It calls for the removal of mandatory minimum sentencing to let judges make individualized decisions and consider mitigating circumstances in a case.
- Second Look Act: It provides those sentenced to lengthy prison time, who have served a decade or more, to apply for a re-sentencing hearing and have their case be reviewed and reconsidered by a judge.
- Earned Time Act: It would expand “good time” and “merit time” laws to encourage personal transformation in prison, advocates said.
Bullock, who also works for the Center for Community Alternatives as a statewide organizer, said there are a number of reasons to make the bills law including the disproportionate impact on minority communities and the cost of prisons.
Almost 30,000, about 75 percent, of incarcerated people are Black or Latino and those advocating point out that 98 percent of convictions in the state are the result of plea deals.
“Prosecutors use a threat of outrageous mandatory minimums to stop due process and extract guilty pleas,” Bullock said. “This undermines the fundamental fairness of our basic constitutional rights.”
Bullock says it costs nearly $70,000 per year to house a person in New York State prison, resulting in $3 billion total for all incarcerated people.
“New York cannot afford its addiction to mass incarceration,” Bullock said. “That money could be, instead, spent on education, housing, healthcare, and community based programs that create real community safety.”
Getting the legislation passed and signed into law will not be easy.
Republican candidates campaigned and many won this year on crime and public safety, said Grant Reeher a political science professor and director of the Maxwell School’s Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University.
He said the bills sound like they make sense and they could not only help lower some of the expensive costs of incarceration, but also help with some social issues.
“But politically, the timing of these things couldn’t be worse,” Reeher said.
Republicans flipped four Democratic Congressional seats in New York state this year, an accomplishment that helped them take control of the House of Representatives.
“Republicans made a lot of gains and you had a governor’s race that on paper shouldn’t have been nearly as close as it was,” Reeher said. “One of the main reasons was because [Republican candidate Lee Zeldin] early on, emphasized crime and public safety and I can’t imagine that the governor is going to be too keen in the wake of that, turning around and doubling down on the kinds of things that she was being hit on, effectively, by the opposition.”
Jared Trujillo, a policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, agreed this could be a difficult time for passing anything related to criminal, legal system reforms, but he believes the bills have the needed support to move forward.
The legislative package has 16 Senate sponsors and over 150 organizations have signed on to support them. Trujillo said that the political education of these bills is there and that these are “common sense solutions when people are looking into improving or looking at responses to public safety.”
Two Central New York advocates with their own experience in prison recently spoke at a rally in Syracuse for the legislative package.
Marcelle Smith, a 42-year-old native of Syracuse, said he was in and out of juvenile detention centers since the age of 10. He would later serve 24 and half years for a homicide he committed in 1997. Smith was released from prison in May of this year.
Throughout his time in prison, Smith said he participated in and helped create programs focused on rehabilitating incarcerated people.
He was given six months off of his 25 year sentence for completing programs in prison and being enrolled in Mercy College.
He believes the Second Look Act would have changed the amount of time he spent in prison, allowing his accomplishments to be taken into consideration for a shorter sentence.
“It didn’t take 25 years to realize that I made a mistake or a bad decision, it didn’t take 25 years to rehabilitate myself,” Smith said.
In 1997, Smith and Jamie Rolfe, 43, robbed and beat a man, causing his death. He was just 17-years-old when he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Smith now works with Syracuse youth as a mentor with Peace Inc. and the Center for Community Alternatives to help guide young community members from making similar mistakes in the future.
Aaron Chancey, who also spoke at the rally, said he is a two-time felon, and a former inmate who only finished the 10th grade. He was sentenced to five years for robbing a bank in 1999 when he was 17-years-old. He was released in 2001.
Chancey is now a pastor at Mount Carmel Seventh-day Adventist Church in Syracuse. He received his GED while he was incarcerated and currently holds a bachelor’s in theology, a master’s of divinity, and is working toward his doctorate degree.
His message: People can change and prison needs to be about reform and not long sentencing in the name of justice.
“Criminal activity is not to be condoned and victims are not to be forgotten but there should also be aggressive plans in place at every prison in order to reform a person physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, and spiritually, so each individual will be much better fitted for life,” Chancey said.
Marcelle Smith (left) and Aaron Chancey (right) are advocates for Communities Not Cages. Both men spoke of their experiences being incarcerated and how legislation needs to take action in sentencing reform. (Darian Stevenson | dstevenson@syracuse.com)
Staff writer Darian Stevenson covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? You can reach her at dstevenson@syracuse.com