The working conditions of New York corrections officers burst into public view last month, as COs at most of the state’s 42 prisons walked off the job. The stoppage, New York’s worst in two decades, was epitomized by images of COs and supporters gathered around burn barrels at prison entrances. Copies of a memo from the state’s corrections commissioner, offering concessions and amnesty from discipline if the officers went back to work, were dropped into the flames.
Though illegal under state law, the strike was years in the making. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) has grappled with a mismatch between the number of inmates (down by half from its 1999 peak), the number of facilities it operates, and shrinking labor forces in many rural areas around prisons. Officials closed several prisons and slowed hiring: DOCCS went from adding at least 1,400 CO trainees yearly between 2017 and 2019 to bringing on fewer than 800 per year since 2021. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, that number fell to just 543.
New York state agencies are notoriously bad at measuring performance, but signs of distress at DOCCS were unmistakable. Average employee overtime nearly doubled from its pre-Covid level, fueled in part by COs working mandatory double shifts. Turnover surged, with COs quitting or retiring at twice the rate in 2022 (11 percent) as they did in 2011 (5.5 percent). The work-injury rate for COs ballooned, from 24 percent in the years before Covid to 43 percent last year.
The declining prison population has coincided with a change in the profile of inmates. In 2015, 65 percent were violent felons; today, it’s 73 percent. Inmate-on-inmate assaults have almost tripled since 2021, reaching nearly 3,000 last year. DOCCS also reported more than 2,000 attacks on staff, almost double the 2021 figure.
Strikers have repeatedly pointed to policies that worsened conditions “behind the wall.” Chief among them: the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, a law Governor Andrew Cuomo signed in 2021 that strictly limits how long and how often inmates can be held away from others. DOCCS has also struggled to keep street drugs from entering prisons, COs allege.
The situation at DOCCS was unsustainable. But HALT had been in force for almost three years, and some signs suggest an organized effort brought the crisis to a head.
In December, the department released shocking footage of COs at a Utica-area prison fatally beating a handcuffed inmate. Governor Kathy Hochul ordered the firings of the 14 employees involved in the incident and named a special prosecutor. The strike began two days before prosecutors charged several COs with second-degree murder—and just days after some union officials had advocated for a work stoppage, the Times Union reports.
Whatever triggered the strike, the Hochul administration has bungled its efforts to end it. The strike was initially limited to a handful of prisons, but the governor waited two days before asking a judge to order COs back to work (an order granted in minutes). By then, roughly nine of ten COs were on strike.
The governor has been negotiating with the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, though the union maintains that it didn’t sanction the strike and therefore has limited ability to persuade COs to end it. A NYSCOPBA-picked mediator helped craft a deal that not only gave COs amnesty from discipline but also opened the door to raises. It also called for suspending HALT Act provisions and improving DOCCS’s mail-screening practices. But the terms required COs to return to work by Saturday, March 1—a deadline that has passed. Hochul has subsequently threatened to suspend strikers’ health insurance.
Hochul needs a new playbook. Instead of treating NYSCOPBA as a partner or intermediary, she needs to put heat on the union to end the walkout. She should start, if she hasn’t already, by cancelling the “release time” that lets NYSCOPBA brass perform union business on taxpayer time. If the union opposes the strike, it should lead by example and get its senior personnel back to work.
As a gesture of good faith, Hochul should prevent the further release of strikers’ names and home addresses. So far, about two dozen COs have been outed this way in court filings, a presumably unintended consequence of their labor action.
Hochul must also confront the breakdowns in both employee and inmate discipline. Inmates shouldn’t be getting killed, and COs shouldn’t be afraid to go to work. State lawmakers have dropped the ball. Progressives defended the HALT Act, while Republicans reflexively stuck up for COs and prison jobs generally; neither side assessed the big picture.
The governor should hold both sides to account. She needs a handshake deal with lawmakers to restore some of the discretion that prison superintendents previously wielded to impose solitary confinement in the most extreme cases. Such an agreement can be codified in the forthcoming state budget. In return, state law should require every DOCCS employee to wear a body camera whenever in the presence of an inmate and give the department more latitude in curbing the arrival of drugs and contraband.
Finally, Hochul needs to identify and terminate the strike’s instigators. Any capitulation, real or perceived, will tempt other public employees to instigate their own illegal strikes—though some of damage in this regard has already been done.
Top Photo by Will Waldron/Albany Times Union via Getty Images