Community members joined the family of Robert Brooks at a town hall in Ithaca on Saturday to demand justice and push for changes within the state prison system.

Body camera footage released by the New York attorney general’s office shows correctional officers hitting Brooks, 43, while he was restrained at Marcy Correctional Facility on Dec. 9. He died the next day at a hospital in Utica. Brooks was serving a 12-year sentence for stabbing his girlfriend in 2016.

An autopsy report issued by the county medical examiner’s office in January concluded that Brooks’ death was caused by compression of the neck and multiple blunt impact injuries and that the manner of death was determined to be a homicide, according to Brooks' family attorneys. 

Six prison workers have been charged with murder in that case.

Those in Ithaca Saturday also spoke about the death of Messiah Nantwi earlier this month. Nantwi, 22, was an inmate at the nearby Mid-State Correctional Facility.

Fifteen people are on leave in connection with that case, which remains under investigation.

"We are going to fight," said Jerome Wright, co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign and the New York State Jails Justice Network. "Justice is going to thrive in 2025. We're not going to go back to isolation, torture, racism - all those things that brought us to this moment. We're going to progress from there. We're not going back like they want us to."

Wright is an advocate of the HALT Act, which aims to limit solitary confinement in state prisons.

It's one of the things that correction officers across New York have been striking against for the last three weeks, saying that it reduces disciplinary options.

Under the most recent agreement, parts of the act are temporarily paused for 90 days. A committee focused on safety dealing directly with the effects of the HALT Act will also be established.