On Feb. 17, an illegal wildcat strike was initiated by corrections officers with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). One of their primary demands is to repeal the Humane Alternatives to Long Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act. Though New York State has pursued mediation to reverse this work stoppage, including offering to temporarily suspend elements of the HALT Act, the majority of striking officers have yet to return to their posts, leaving the incarcerated population, including myself, locked down and surrounded by chaos. At least seven people have died behind bars since this began. According to eyewitness testimony, at least one of these deaths—that of 22 year old Messiah Nantwi—was caused by a brutal beating at the hands of corrections officers. Other deaths are reportedly due to medical neglect. It is also worth noting that the strike was initiated only three days before the much anticipated announcement of murder charges brought against a group of corrections officers from Marcy Correctional Facility over the death of Robert Brooks.
As its name suggests, the HALT Act was designed to ensure incarcerated individuals were treated in more humane ways. Choosing to focus on rehabilitating prisoners rather than continuously and excessively penalizing us, this act prioritizes both the physical and mental health of incarcerated individuals by increasing the amount of time we are permitted social interaction with each other and with our families, while also retaining access to productive programming, such as education and job training.
Opponents of the HALT Act have repeatedly claimed that prison violence has increased as a result of its policies, and argued that its repeal is necessary to ensure the safety of prisoners and corrections officers alike. As a prisoner myself, I find this argument unconvincing. So does the The New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (NY-CAIC), which submitted testimony to the New York State Assembly in January 2024 that questioned the validity of the increased violence statistics that are so often cited against the HALT Act.
As someone who has, cumulatively, spent approximately seven years in solitary confinement, I am all too aware of its torturous effects. Incarcerated individuals such as myself, along with our advocates, applauded the passing of the HALT Act and found hope in its promise of more humane treatment for a population that has been oppressed and overlooked for far too long. However, as those of us who are incarcerated have directly observed, corrections officers responded to its passing by sulking and stewing, rejecting the very premise that prisoners were worthy of more humane treatment.
The HALT Act is part of a broader and popularly supported movement to improve the living conditions of those imprisoned. Several other changes were implemented around the same time, including the disbursement of tablets through which we speak to our loved ones, the widespread installation of cameras in maximum security facilities, and a mandate for corrections officers to wear body cameras. All of these changes—each designed to ensure better treatment of prisoners in its own way—posed a threat to the correctional core culture of disconnecting incarcerated individuals from their family and exacting violence upon us without fear of being caught.
With this threat to carceral culture taking shape, correctional employees, desperate to maintain the status quo, began retaliating in both subtle and overt ways.
One of the most notable of these changes that I have witnessed is the reduced use of involuntary protective custody (IPC) and protective custody (PC). Prior to the passing of the HALT Act, any prisoner thought to be at risk was moved to an isolated area of the prison to ensure their safety. HALT mandates that those placed in IPC or PC are still afforded out-of-cell time and access to programming, and that their situation cannot be used as an excuse to implement solitary confinement. However, in the past two years I have repeatedly witnessed prisoners returned to general population after informing officers they are at risk or, in some cases, even after they have already been attacked.
The NY-CAIC also raised this issue in its testimony to the Assembly last year: “We have received numerous complaints about people in protective custody not receiving the out-of-cell time, programming, and other requirements of the RRUs, as well as complaints that DOCCS denies people the ability to be in protective custody, despite real safety issues.” Such was the case of Daniel Hyers, who died at Elmira Correctional Facility in January while in the process of suing DOCCS for their failure to protect him. His death, which was confirmed to Defector by his attorney, is currently being investigated.
This practice of withholding protection from the prisoners that need it the most has effectively forced prisoners to either find alternative, unsanctioned means of ensuring their own protection, or accept their fates. While correctional officers are citing an increase in violence since the passing of the HALT Act as a justification for their illegal work stoppage, they are failing to admit to their own roles in exacerbating this violence through malicious compliance. They are also failing to acknowledge their own culture of vengeance and reprisals, which the NY-CAIC also detailed in its testimony.
Both the employees participating in this illegal work stoppage—and those silently supporting it while they continue to work—want people to believe that the HALT Act has empowered prisoners with the ability to behave violently without concern for consequences. This is simply not the truth. Incarcerated individuals are still subject to strict and sometimes devastating punishments for breaking institutional rules. These punishments include: recommended loss of good time, which functions to keep the incarcerated individuals imprisoned for longer periods; loss of commissary, packages, phones, and visits, which forces the incarcerated to rely on state-supplied food and prohibits the incarcerated from speaking to and/or seeing their family; and time in a Special Housing Unit, which, despite appearing to afford incarcerated individuals the opportunity to earn more freedoms and participate in programs, still ultimately functions the same as solitary confinement. The Special Housing Unit (also known as Solitary Confinement) has been renamed and revamped, although not altogether abolished, as "the Residential Rehabilitation Unit" under the HALT Act.
Passing legislation that ensures prisoners are afforded more access to family and meaningful programming, while also hindering corrections officers from casually and clandestinely causing harm to incarcerated individuals, will change prison drastically, and not in the ways corrections officers and other DOCCS employees want the world to believe. If these changes are enacted and enforced, prisoners—and the staff who work with us—are made safer. We will have higher probabilities of creating and maintaining family ties. We will obtain skills that are transferable to the free world—both formal skills acquired through education, as well as informal social skills honed through increased interactions with other people. Collectively, these changes will better prepare incarcerated individuals for reentry into the population. It would seem, however, that rehabilitating the imprisoned is not a priority for many corrections officers.
As New York State prisons begin implementing positive changes, corrections officers perceive the changes to the carceral system as antithetical to their identity. After years of working for DOCCS, many employees have assimilated to the carceral culture of mistreating the incarcerated. Being forced to treat prisoners humanely, or even witnessing prisoners being treated humanely, does not align with the carceral way of life. Therefore, rather than adhere to the recent changes, they are choosing to disobey the laws they are sworn to uphold. They are refusing to come to work with the hope that their absence will force the state to return the carceral space to the place it once was. A place where we lose our families completely, a place where we are stripped of our rights and treated like animals, a place where correctional employees can act uninhibited by the oversights or opinions of those who wish to see us treated like human beings.
During this strike, this is the place we have been returned to. All of the rights we have been guaranteed have been taken away, and each day that passes, our desperation builds. Most of us have been denied any opportunity to call our families, and all of us are being denied the opportunity to see them. There are reports of people going without vital medications. We aren't permitted any recreation or access to our educational programs, and we are barely afforded food and showers. We are locked down all day, indefinitely.
However, in spite of these current conditions, we still see hope. We hope that the officers actively opposing the humane treatment of the incarcerated will never return to work; we hope that the officers silently opposing the humane treatment of the incarcerated will accept these new changes; and we hope the people who support us in the world will continue to be our voice and advocate for our humane treatment.
Thank you.
