EXCLUSIVE — A New York lawmaker is calling on the state to repeal the HALT Act, a controversial law at the center of the recent prison guard strike, which ended this week after Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) fired 2,000 correctional officers and banned them from holding state jobs.
Hochul deployed the National Guard as she has weighed transferring prisoners out of state to address the Empire State’s mounting prison guard shortage. She also closed two prisons last year and asked the legislature to give her the ability to close up to five over the next year.
State Rep. David DiPietro slammed Hochul’s handling of the situation and told the Washington Examiner that the “easiest” way for New York to address its prison guard shortage is to repeal the HALT Act. There is a bill in the Assembly that would repeal the law, but DiPietro said Democrats are “blocking [it] from reaching the floor for a vote.”
What is the HALT Act? How it led to the prison strike
The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act was enacted in 2021 and limits a number of disciplinary measures that prison guards used to keep violent criminals in check.
The law puts limits on solitary confinement, prohibits correctional officers from using “special diets” as punishment for bad behavior, and creates a preference for nondisciplinary interventions, among other policies, to prevent negative psychological, physical, developmental, and social effects of solitary confinement on prisoners.
According to Bridgette, a former correctional officer whose husband has been a prison guard for 17 years, “There has not been anything remotely resembling ‘solitary confinement’ in New York in many years. There does exist in most facilities what is known as a segregated housing unit, which is essentially a smaller separate prison dorm. There is less free time but there is contact.”
Bridgette, who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of retaliation, added that inmates “do not necessarily hate” being placed in the segregated housing unit, otherwise known as protective custody, “but in many instances want and even desperately need” to be placed there.
DiPietro said the law “has given dangerous criminals the freedom to terrorize prison staff and other inmates with little to no consequences. Assaults on prison staff have risen dramatically as a result.”
Critics of the HALT Act, including the prison guards who went on strike, argue that the removal of consequences for violent inmates puts staff at greater risk of being attacked. This has contributed to the inability to staff prisons at full capacity.
“There were 1,760 attacks [on staff] in 2024 alone,” DiPietro added. “Inmate-on-inmate assaults [are] up 169%, and inmate-on-staff assaults [are] up 76% since the implementation of HALT.”
According to New York State Corrections and Community Supervision data, assaults on staff and prisoners skyrocketed following the passage of the HALT Act. From 2019 to 2021, there were between 1,043 and 1,117 assaults on staff and between 1,107 and 1,267 assaults on prisoners. In 2022, attacks on staff shot up to 1,473, and in 2023, it climbed higher to 1,671. Attacks on prisoners rose by an even wider margin, to 1,488 in 2022 and 2,107 in 2023.
The rate of prison assaults has risen exponentially faster than the prison population, according to data from the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association.
“Even inmates themselves have admitted in letters that the system is out of control,” DiPietro said. “The warning signs have been evident for years, yet nothing has been done to protect our correctional officers.”
One particular attack on a correctional officer was a major catalyst for the strike. In February, a female officer was choked, punched, and kicked in the face and body by an inmate with a face covering. Upon review, it turned out that the inmate was misclassified and should have been at a more secure facility.
This resulted in a vote of no confidence for DCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III, who then sent out a controversial memo alerting superintendents to cuts to staffing expectations. Many prison guards felt the memo was sent in retaliation for the no-confidence vote.
Days after the memo was sent, an uprising at Collins Correctional Facility injured three officers as inmates took control of several dorms. The prison guard strike began less than a week later.
‘70% … is the new 100%’: Prisons suffer from staffing woes
New York capitulated in its efforts to provide adequate staffing at its prisons. A February memo from Martuscello, titled Security Staffing Review, obtained by the Washington Examiner admitted, “We continue to have critical vacancies” despite their “ongoing recruitment and retention efforts.”
Many prison guards were furious after Martuscello, with the backing of Hochul, said in the memo that “70% of our original staffing model is the new 100%.”
According to Colleen, the wife of a New York correctional officer who was involved in the strike but returned to work to avoid being fired, the circulation of this memo was one of the final straws in provoking the strike. She also asked to be referred to by her first name only.
Colleen told the Washington Examiner that after the 2,000 guards were fired, staffing has been at 59% of the original model.
DiPietro said, “The governor says 70% staffing is sufficient but she is dead wrong. They are left defenseless by Albany’s reckless pro-criminal agenda.”
As a result of the staffing shortage, many New York prison guards have to work 12-, 16-, or even 24-hour shifts, several days in a row. Colleen said that her husband, who has been a correctional officer for 18 years, only had to work overtime once in his first 13 years on the job.
Salary data reviewed by the Washington Examiner shows that numerous staffers who were slated to make roughly $80,000 were paid between $280,000 and $390,000 due to the large amount of overtime they had to work.
“Now that the officers have gone back, they are forced to work 12-hour shifts for 13 days straight [with] one day off. They are not acknowledging regular days off or vacation time,” Bridgette said. “This is leading to more mass resignations.”
With prison guards understaffed and overworked, both inmates and staffers are left more vulnerable to attacks, the data show. Just last week, four more correctional officers were injured in an attack at the famed Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Hochul’s pressure campaign to end the strike
The state argued that the prison guard strike was illegal in light of the Taylor Law, which states that New York public employees are not allowed to go on strike and may face a wide range of disciplinary actions for doing so.
Before firing 2,000 striking correctional officers and banning them from holding state jobs in the future, Hochul issued a number of threats in an attempt to end the strike. She threatened to terminate health benefits and terminate striking officers. She followed through on both threats, first terminating the health benefits of those involved in the strike and then terminating those who did not return to work by March 10.
Colleen said the state “harassed and intimidated the strikers over serious labor/safety issues,” and her family received emails and text messages, reviewed by the Washington Examiner, threatening termination, arrest, and other consequences. Her husband’s health benefits were terminated before he returned to work.
She told the story of how state officials woke up her 4-year-old daughter before 7 a.m. by “pound[ing] on the door so hard that my daughter’s magnets fell and bells we have hanging on the door.”
“My daughter was terrified, they screamed. She was clutching her stuffed animal, wide-eyed and whimpering, trying to hide,” Colleen said. “When they left, she retold it and was so traumatized that she urinated as she recalled what happened.”
In addition, an email from Deputy Commissioner for Administrative Services Darren Ayotte, obtained by the Washington Examiner, revealed that employees on medical leave were called back into work “for participating in the job action.” Those who “refuse[d] the order” were “made AWOL.”
DiPietro called it “incredibly vindictive” for Hochul to ban the striking prison guards from future state employment. “Who does that?”
KATHY HOCHUL FACES A FIGHT FROM REPUBLICANS AND, POSSIBLY, FELLOW DEMOCRATS
“Closing more prisons is the wrong answer and terminating a few thousand COs displays a complete lack of empathy towards the safety concerns raised by them,” DiPietro said. “Keep in mind they have been warning us for years. They walked out because they felt they were out of options. Now they can never work for the state again.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Hochul’s office for comment.
