By Chris Gelardi
The Press-Republican
PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — In February, thousands of New York state prison guards walked off their jobs. With no officers to watch over daily operations, officials locked incarcerated people in their cells for days at a time. Governor Kathy Hochul deployed 6,000 National Guard troops, who assisted skeleton crews in trying to keep more than 30,000 prisoners fed and showered. At least seven incarcerated people died amid the chaos.
The wildcat strike ended after three weeks. Yet four months later, thousands of officer positions remain unfilled, and the state prison agency has struggled to resume normal operations, recent court records show.
Dozens of New York’s 42 state prisons aren’t holding weekend visitation. They’ve canceled summer school, sports leagues, religious study classes, and other programs. They’ve paused work release and counseling sessions and are cutting daily outdoor recreation time short. Some have extended officers’ shifts from eight hours to 12 and kept incarcerated people in their cells for upwards of 20 hours a day.
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“The functionality of the New York prison system is being held on by a thread,” Cody Horrocks, who’s been in the system for seven years and is currently incarcerated at Eastern Correctional Facility, wrote in a letter to New York Focus. The situation is “dire,” he said.
Staffing issues are driving the problems, according to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. When the strike ended, about 2,000 officers, or roughly 15 percent of the security force, didn’t return to work after DOCCS issued its final offer and ultimatum in negotiations — and were promptly fired. Hundreds of others resigned or retired early. DOCCS’s security ranks are now 4,700 corrections officers and sergeants below what the department has calculated it needs to run every program and housing area effectively, according to a declaration the agency filed last week in a class action lawsuit against it.
The declaration offered security staff vacancy numbers for 35 of DOCCS’s 42 facilities. On average, those prisons are operating with 32 percent of guard posts unfilled, with one, the medium-security Orleans Correctional Facility, operating with 48 percent of security jobs vacant.
The new job vacancies are exacerbating a longer-term staffing issue: officers not showing up for work. In 2023, the state Offices of the Inspector General released a report alleging “egregious workers’ compensation abuse” among DOCCS staff. The recent court declaration suggests that the issue hasn’t been resolved. At Sing Sing Correctional Facility, for example, 102 staff are out on workers’ comp and 28 are out on long-term sick leave — more than one in five security positions.
DOCCS’s court filing offered numbers on long-term leave — which includes workers’ comp and long-term sick leave, as well as parental and military leave — for 28 prisons. Adding them to the vacancy statistics, those facilities are operating at an average staffing level of 56 percent of what DOCCS says they need. Seven are operating at less than half capacity. Mid-State Correctional Facility, where guards allegedly beat a 23-year-old incarcerated man to death during the strike, is operating at 40 percent capacity.
Even those numbers don’t reveal the full picture of the staffing crisis. Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in the lower Hudson Valley, is dealing with a mass sick-out. Over 100 of its 592 security employees are calling out every day amid the continued crisis, according to the court declaration, which didn’t offer numbers on daily call-outs for other facilities.
All told, Sing Sing is operating with less than half the security staff DOCCS has calculated that it needs.
The New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, the union representing prison guards, did not respond to requests for comment.
To mitigate the security staffing crisis, the state has kept roughly 1,800 National Guard service members assigned to prisons, according to numbers offered in the court declaration. Sing Sing, for example, has 101 National Guard troops available to help alleviate the burden of its more than 300 vacant security jobs, long-term leave-takers, and daily sick-outs.
The troops have kept prisons afloat, according to both DOCCS and incarcerated people. In June, all of the 34 service members assigned to Eastern Correctional Facility had to temporarily abandon their prison posts for National Guard training exercises, according to Horrocks. “Everything was shut down,” he said. “They had to use non-CO staff to help do processing for visits.”
The National Guard isn’t a long-term solution, however. For one, it’s expensive: The governor’s office has said that the continued deployment costs the state roughly $100 million a month. Soldiers are also less effective than trained corrections officers.
“They do not escort incarcerated individuals alone, cannot respond to incarcerated violence and cannot be used to cover a housing unit alone, as they require security staff to be present,” the court filing explained.
Horrocks recalled a time last month when someone suffered a drug overdose during outdoor recreation. “A couple National Guardsmen just stood there!” he wrote. “They aren’t COs, and they can’t perform the duties required of such.”
DOCCS’s staffing issues have trickled down to local jails, which hold people who’ve been sentenced to state prison time but are awaiting placement. Elmira Correctional Facility, DOCCS’s main reception center, paused new intakes during the strike and for two months after, and has only recently resumed at a pace approaching pre-strike levels.
The intake pause has led to overcrowding in New York City’s embattled Rikers Island jail complex. As of July 1, there were roughly 1,000 people on Rikers waiting for transfer to state prisons, a more than 500 percent increase over the same time last year, according to a letter city lawmakers sent to Hochul earlier this month.
To deal with the overflow, the city reopened a decommissioned jail at Rikers and started housing men at a women’s facility. That has complicated logistics at the women’s jail, leading to delayed family and legal visits and court appearances, the letter said.
“For decades, the conditions at Rikers Island have been extremely dangerous for both people in custody and staff,” wrote New York City Council corrections committee chair Sandy Nurse and oversight committee chair Gale Brewer. “To ensure safety for all, it is critical for New York State to increase the frequency and number of people transferred to prison facilities until this backlog is alleviated.”
In a reply, DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello wrote that the prison agency is chipping away at the backlog, taking in roughly 300 new male admissions a week. “DOCCS recognizes the impact [the strike] has had on Rikers Island and appreciates their patience and partnership as we continue to recover, recruit, and rebuild,” he wrote.
To boost staffing levels in the long run, Martuscello said that DOCCS has launched “aggressive” recruitment initiatives. The department has come to an agreement with the corrections officers’ union to launch a statewide campaign and is turning to areas where it has neglected recruiting, like urban centers and towns across the state border. DOCCS has offered new $3,000 sign-on bonuses for recruits, as well as referral bonuses and retention bonuses for current staff who stay as the prison system tries to recover. The department is also turning to teenagers: This year, the state lowered the minimum age to become a corrections officer from 21 to 18.
“We are really studying what’s going on across the country and what’s worked well and should we deploy it here in New York,” Martuscello said recently.
As a result of recruitment efforts, DOCCS saw a 129 percent increase in people taking the corrections officer civil service exam during the first five months of this year compared to the same time last year, the department said.
The agency filed the recent court declaration outlining the staffing crisis in response to a lawsuit from the Legal Aid Society, which has argued that DOCCS hasn’t adequately justified its suspension of certain programming and out-of-cell time requirements put in place by a recent solitary confinement reform law, the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. Fourteen prisons have restored HALT-required programming for people in isolation, the declaration said. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege that they’ve been confined to their cells for 23 to 24 hours a day.
The filing “confirms DOCCS has no concrete timeline for coming into compliance with HALT at any of its facilities,” said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Prisoners’ Rights Project.
DOCCS is coming into compliance with the law, including its requirement that every incarcerated person get at least seven hours of daily out-of-cell time, as quickly as it can, the agency argued in the filing. It anticipated that it’ll get up to speed by “early fall.” That’s not good enough, Legal Aid is arguing.
“We secured a preliminary injunction to protect thousands of incarcerated New Yorkers from the life-threatening harms of prolonged solitary confinement,” said Gemmell. “We remain committed to holding DOCCS accountable and ensuring it cannot evade HALT.”
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