The New York state prison system is teetering on disaster as guards have staged an unsanctioned wildcat strike at almost all of its 42 facilities. Governor Kathy Hochul has deployed the National Guard and, on Wednesday, obtained a court order mandating that corrections officers return to work.
While striking officers have been mostly mum to the press, Assemblymember Scott Gray, who visited picket lines outside three northern New York prisons and went inside two this week, told New York Focus that they’re determined to wrest concessions from the state and from their employer, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
“The members seem to be resolved in their determination to hang tight until some sort of corrective action is taken,” he said. To facilitate negotiations, the picketers are working on paring down their original list of 13 demands, Gray said.
The guards will likely stick to their guns on pay and staffing issues. They also appear resolute on one of their most ambitious demands: repealing a four-year-old solitary confinement reform law. That would likely require action by the slow-moving and relatively progressive state legislature, though both Gray and the union’s executive vice president have told New York Focus that officers are asking the governor to explore what authority she has to chip away at the law.
New York’s prison guards have railed against the solitary confinement law, the 2021 Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, since its infancy. The lengthy legislation overhauled the rules surrounding carceral isolation in New York: Among other provisions, it restricted the types of people prisons and jails could send to traditional solitary confinement; limited it to 15 consecutive days (the point at which international human rights bodies deem it torture); and enumerated higher treatment standards for people whom facilities wanted to isolate for longer.
While the guards haven’t been able to overturn it — their union unsuccessfully sued to stop HALT before it even went into effect — DOCCS administration has crafted legal interpretations to ignore aspects of the law. The agency has flouted prohibitions on sending disabled people to solitary, sending people to solitary for minor infractions, prolonged denial of social interaction, and others, as New York Focus and lawsuits have documented.
One underappreciated aspect of the law is that it gave
incarcerated people viable ways to contest unjust punishment. It
mandates timely disciplinary hearings before sending someone to solitary
and gives prisoners the right to representation at those hearings.
In this way, HALT not only moved the needle on humanitarian
conditions in New York prisons and jails — it also altered the balance
of power. Since its enactment, activist-minded incarcerated people have
taken up roles as “jailhouse lawyers”
representing their blockmates. They build cases, introduce camera
footage and other evidence, and force officers to justify the sanctions
they hand down — a novel dynamic in a setting unused to procedural
justice.
Incarcerated men at Green Haven Correctional Facility experienced
both the power and limits of that dynamic after a lockdown in October
2023. According to a lawsuit,
guards went cell-by-cell conducting searches, then attacked
incarcerated people, punching and kicking dozens in what they describe
as an unprovoked, eight-day, systematic beatdown. Guards proceeded to
write up alleged victims for assault and violence — a common tactic to
cover up abuse, incarcerated people have long asserted. But many
reported that they were cleared of the charges after disciplinary
hearing officers reviewed video of the beatings. While they experienced
injury, they avoided the added insult.
“It’s going to come down to safety and staffing.”
—Assemblymember Scott Gray
Of course, the clearing of the Green Haven men’s charges
did nothing to hold the allegedly violent guards accountable. Abusive
New York prison guards have long enjoyed impunity, made possible by
their union’s arbitration agreement with DOCCS, a culture of silence, and the prison system’s lackluster internal investigations apparatus.
Those many layers of impunity cracked in December, when
guards unwittingly recorded themselves beating a handcuffed Robert
Brooks to death at Marcy Correctional Facility. The state attorney
general released the footage, prompting national outrage and quick
attempts by the state and DOCCS administration to prove that they took
the violence seriously. While Brooks has faded from the national
headlines, the issue is still hot in Albany, where just last week
horrified legislators grilled the prison commissioner for three hours
about officer abuse.
“It made me question everything,” the commissioner, Daniel Martuscello, said at the hearing. Brooks’s father testified just a few hours later. He scolded the commissioner, garnering yet more headlines about officer abuse.
With the strike, state prison guards have retaken the narrative. They haven’t mentioned Robert Brooks — but HALT, by their telling, puts them in danger. Union officials complain that the restrictions on whom they can send to solitary and how quickly they can send them there eliminates the fear they used to keep them in line.
Other officers have complained that HALT actually makes isolation appealing. “People don’t understand: The special house units” — where people serve solitary confinement sentences — “you actually have a higher degree of access to mental health, medical services, you name it,” a retired corrections officer told New York Focus last year.
As of February 1, 79 percent of people in isolation needed substance abuse treatment and 37 percent were on the mental health caseload. DOCCS is experiencing an even greater staffing crisis for support and health workers than corrections officers: One in four health services positions and nearly one in five support service positions, like social workers, are vacant.
Said Gray of the strike: “It’s going to come down to safety and staffing.”