This week, an unsanctioned walkout of employees at over half of New York State’s prisons has thrown the correctional system into a lurch. WBFO’s Emyle Watkins was outside Collins Correctional on Wednesday as developments unfolded in a chaotic day for workers, incarcerated people and the state.
TRANSCRIPT
Emyle Watkins: Dozens of cars, trucks and four wheelers lined the intersection of Wheater Road and Route 62 in Collins, New York on Wednesday morning. Snow mobiles popped out of the woods. A massive group of camo-clad corrections workers and their families surrounded barrels burning wood pallets to starve off freezing temperatures. Cars honked as they blew by. All of this was to call to attention concerns over safety and staffing in state prisons, including Collins Correctional across the street.
Kenny Gold: Everybody feels like their back’s against the wall.
Emyle Watkins: Kenny Gold is the Western Region Vice President for NYS Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, or NYSCOPBA, which represents corrections workers. The union sits in an unusual place in all of this, as the state’s Taylor Law prevents public employees from striking. So they don’t condone the strike. But they do act as a mediator between the rogue workers who walked out - and the state that is trying to get them back to work.
Kenny Gold: I was just at Wende. I was at Attica last night, Five Points, Elmira the other day, Collins... everybody's saying the same thing. It's like a... it's a pronged thing: ‘working conditions: safe. I want to go home and see my family. I don't want to be mandated for more than 20, 16 hours... 24 hour shifts, 32 hour shifts is not feasible anymore.’ They want to see that. They want the HALT Act gone, suspended, and they want something to help with recruitment and retention.
Emyle Watkins: The HALT, or Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, was passed in 2021. The act established new rules and durations for solitary confinement, and prohibits solitary confinement for certain protected incarcerated groups - including young people, older adults, pregnant or disabled people. The workers, according to Gold, believe it would make prisons safer. But not everyone agrees.
Courtni Starheart Hale: It's mind boggling that they would want to repeal that. I mean to me, that just points to the institutional hatred from the guards to the prisoners.
Emyle Watkins: Courtni Starheart Hale’s son is incarcerated in a Western New York prison currently under lockdown. Her son was prosecuted as a youthful offender, which seals his case, so we are not using his name.
Courtni Starheart Hale: I've been absolutely terrified the entire time he's been incarcerated.
Emyle Watkins: She says she worries about his safety not at the hands of other inmates, but at the hands of officers - especially after the death of Robert Brooks.
Video footage showed Brooks being beaten to death by corrections officers in December at Marcy Correctional. Criminal indictments against those officers are expected Thursday.
Courtni Starheart Hale: When I go there and I visit him and I talk to people, it's consistent across the board, the inmates tell me how brutal the guards have been until the body cams were put on them.
Emyle Watkins: Hale wants a safer environment for her son, and currently, as someone under the age of 21, HALT protects Hale’s son from being placed under solitary confinement.
Hale wants people to remember her son is a person who is in there to serve his time and come out on the other side. Her son loves making art and music, and plans to pursue a sales career when his sentence is over and he can have a fresh start.
Courtni Starheart Hale: They're in there to serve their time, to pay their debt to society for the wrongs they've done and presumably to be reformed.
Emyle Watkins: But right now, Hale feels the system takes people like her son and puts them at risk rather than at a chance of rehabilitation.
Courtni Starheart Hale: We throw away the people from society who we've already wronged with economic and social injustice. This is where we throw them away. And I hate it.
Emyle Watkins: At the end of the day Wednesday, a lot of peoples’ backs appeared to be against a wall, so to speak.
The Governor has a staffing issue which has led her to deploy the National Guard to relieve officers who have been in the prisons for days. A temporary restraining order filed by an Erie County judge Wednesday afternoon now prohibits any corrections officer from striking, stopping or slowing work, or doing similar actions, per the Taylor Law. And that same order will force NYSCOPBA to tell their workers to stop the unsanctioned walkout.
Both Hochul and the union say they’ve been in talks to try to reach a resolution.
This is a developing situation, and you can continue to read the latest on WBFO dot org.
From Collins, New York, I’m Emyle Watkins, WBFO News.
