By Alex Gault
Watertown Daily Times
NEW YORK — The union that represents the corrections officers and lieutenants who work in New York’s prisons knew a strike was fomenting among its membership before staff started walking off the job in February, and they say state officials did nothing when they were informed of the impending crisis.
In an 11-page analysis released to its members last week, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association argues that even though it must agree that the strike was illegal, unsanctioned and should not have happened, the underlying issues that caused thousands of its members to walk off the job in mid-February are real, serious and have still not been addressed months later.
“Although NYSCOPBA acknowledges and agrees that striking in the state of New York is illegal pursuant to the Taylor Law and that we must condemn the strike, the state’s strike report fails to provide critical context,” the union report reads.
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The report serves as a counter to the state’s own analysis, released in May, that found the strike had been instigated by employees, carried out in violation of the state’s civil service laws and initiated because of concerns over pay, retirement compensation, overtime hours and state policies restricting the use of solitary confinement and requiring rehabilitative programming for incarcerated people.
The state report, produced by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, states that the department is working with the state Office of Employee Relations to review individual employee actions and the actions of the union to determine if there were violations of the Taylor Law, which bars public employees from stopping work for a strike. That state report also details the efforts state officials undertook to end the strike, including agreements and memorandums of understanding, MOUs, as well as threats of termination, health insurance suspension and limited terminations, some of which have since been reversed.
The state is also still reviewing if NYSCOPBA, which negotiated alongside its members during the strike, broke state laws. NYSCOPBA has maintained that the strike was illegal and unsanctioned since the start, but also told its members it was negotiating for them and would seek to address their concerns before the strike was to end.
“Ultimately... the determination of whether NYSCOPBA as an employee organization violated the prohibitions of Section 210(1) of the Civil Service Law will be termined through proceedings held before the Public Employment Relations Board,” the state report reads.
In its own analysis shared last week, NYSCOPBA takes exception to the state analysis of the strike and seeks to clarify that it did not sanction the job action. Union officers who agree to sanction a strike can be penalized with jail time, heavy fines or termination of their union’s ability to represent state employees.
The union notes that leadership was intent on making clear it was not supportive of the strike, intent on avoiding the costly legal bills in defending an alleged violation of the Taylor Law as well as monetary and contempt penalties.
“NYSCOPBA believes that our members who decided to participate in the strike did so because they felt their backs up against the wall, they feared for their lives and they believed there was no other way,” the union report reads. “They chose to go against NYSCOPBA’s recommendations and violate the civil service law because they believed it was a choice between following the law and protecting themselves and their families.”
The union report acknowledges, for the first time publicly, that union officials were aware of a possible strike brewing among its members and warned state officials about their observations before Feb. 17, when the first walkouts happened.
“The state’s leaders ignored our warnings that an unsanctioned strike was likely,” the union report states.
The union takes exception to the state’s ultimate methodology for reviewing the strike. The state report starts on Feb. 17, when a group of officers in western New York went on strike, but union leaders say the real cause of the strike are the yearslong complaints that officers across the state have had.
| RELATED: N.Y. prison strike: What led to it, state response and what could come next
“An honest and thorough analysis of the circumstances surrounding commencement of the strike must begin far earlier, and it must account for the actions of state government that directly precipitated the crisis situation in our correctional facilities,” the union report reads.
Chief among those actions, the union is opposed to the implementation of the HALT Act, passed in 2021, which ended long-term solitary confinement, set time limits on the use of “special housing units” and ended the use of solitary for certain types of incarcerated people entirely.
The union and its members have been fervently opposed to the core aspects of HALT since it passed. They argued then and maintain now that the kind of solitary confinement lawmakers sought to curtail in passing the HALT Act didn’t actually exist in New York prisons, and that by restricting the use of solitary confinement and special housing units, it would be harder for security staff to maintain order and respect.
“It was always our position that if segregated housing as it actually existed was eliminated, a critical tool to separate bad actors from the rest of the prison population would be lost forever and as a result, violence would only increase,” the union report states.
Union officials point to a bill, pushed by the union and its backers in 2020 and 2021, that would have started a study of violence in prisons to provide a clear view of the situation behind the walls.
“We... pleaded with the legislature to pass it before implementing HALT, but the state’s elected leaders ignored the message,” the union report reads.
The union sought to stop HALT with a federal lawsuit in 2021, but the suit was tossed and the law took effect April 2, 2022. In less than a month, NYSCOPBA officials were warning that prison violence had substantially increased, and 2022 became a record year for violent incidents in the state prisons. 2023 and 2024 saw new records of prison violence. Incidents in facilities this year, while not as closely tracked because of the extended crisis caused by the strike, show a still-record high rate of violent incidents involving incarcerated people and prison staff.
NYSCOPBA argues this is the core of the entire problem its members have with their job and the prison environment, and they point to statistics that show 2022, when HALT went into effect, was the first year that the state started losing thousands of corrections officers and lieutenants.
Between 2011 and 2020, the state had a relatively stable, roughly 19,000-officer corps of prison security staff that dropped by just about 200 officers over that time period. But after 2022, when HALT went into effect and after two lost training academy sessions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the state had just about 16,000 officers. By the end of last year, just over 14,000 people worked as security staff in the state’s 42 prisons.
While prisoner populations have dropped since their peak in 1999 of more than 72,000 people, the downward trend has somewhat reversed in recent years and between 2021 and 2024, the state had added about 3,000 more incarcerated people to the system.
The result is a heavier reliance on officer overtime, and a change to shifts that sometimes keeps officers on location for up to 72 hours at a time. 24-hour shifts were common, and even after the strike, DOCCS still requires officers to do 12-hour shifts back-to-back.
Add on to that the closure of 10 state prisons since 2019, with up to five more set for this year. NYSCOPBA maintains that when facilities close and staff are reassigned to other facilities, the resulting disruption to their home and family life is another major issue that drives officers out of the job.
“If it ended here, the story of state leaders culpability in creating a dangerous powder keg in our correctional facilities would be bad enough. Sadly, it doesn’t end here,” the report reads.
Officials then point to the recent veto of a bill, passed by both houses of the state legislature, that would allow families to collect the retirement benefits of a family member who die while working past retirement age in the state prisons. This “death gamble” bill, as it was called, was pushed by NYSCOPBA, and has passed the state legislature four times.
Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul vetoed the bill in December, citing the increased costs it would present to the state. Her veto message suggested the bill should be addressed in the state budget because of its fiscal impact, but it was not included in the final spending agreement lawmakers struck in early May.
“The unsanctioned strike that began in February did not happen in a vacuum, nor did it materialize over nothing; the atmosphere of daily distress about the danger of our members confronted simply by going to work was directly caused by state elected leaders adopting poorly conceived laws, then stubbornly refusing to accept that their policy was bad policy,” the report states. “In short, we needed Albany’s help. Instead, we got their blatant disregard — over and over and over again.”
Since April, when the strike ended and long-term efforts to rebuild the system from its current 10,000 officer cohort began, union and state officials have been working to recruit and improve employee retention. The state agreed to boost pay for officers, providing a base salary class bump to correction officers and lieutenants as well as a boost to “location pay,” when an officer is assigned to work at a facility far from their home. Regional hiring efforts, a second annual training academy, out-of-state hiring, and lowering the minimum age for hiring to 18 have also been implemented.
NYSCOPBA thanked those in state service who have helped to rebuild the system and worked to make the job better for officers, and said there is more work to be done. The union identified upcoming contract negotiations, due before the end of March 2026, as a particularly important step.
“The stakes for all of us have never been higher,” their report concludes. “Our approach to these negotiations will reflect that.”
© 2025 Watertown Daily Times (Watertown, N.Y.). Visit www.watertowndailytimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
