Roughly 75% of corrections officers have returned to their posts, effectively ending a three-week wildcat strike that prompted lockdowns at facilities around the state, the head of the New York state prison system said.
New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Dan Martuscello said about 10,000 officers and sergeants had returned to work — including more than 1,200 on Monday. There were around 13,500 officers and sergeants working in the prison system before officers first walked off the job on Feb. 17.
“It is time to turn the page,” Martuscello said Monday evening. “We'll start with a high-energy recruitment campaign moving forward with a clear focus on stabilizing and resuming operations while ensuring safety and security in our facilities.”
Public employee strikes are illegal, and the state is firing more than 2,000 employees who refused to return to work, he said. Thousands of National Guard personnel will remain in prisons to support corrections staff, Martuscello said.
That will allow corrections officers to work 12-hour shifts rather than 24-hour shifts and let facilities “get back to a new normal,” he said.
A spokesperson for the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents officers, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The union didn’t back the wildcat strike and has encouraged its members to return to work.
The state offered new concessions late last week, including overtime pay at 2.5 times the hourly rate for the next 30 days and a promise that returning workers wouldn’t face departmental discipline. The state also promised to convene a commission with union officials that would examine the 2021 HALT law, which restricted the use of solitary confinement in prisons.
Corrections officers said they went on strike because of dangerous conditions in prisons, which they said were exacerbated by the HALT law. The statute limits how long people can be segregated into solitary confinement and requires a hearing before someone is placed in it.
Parts of the law requiring out-of-cell programming for prisoners will remain suspended for 90 days, Martuscello said.
The strike prompted the prison system to suspend visitation and forced some facilities into lockdown, which deprived incarcerated people of hot meals and phone access. At least seven prisoners died over the course of the strike, according to the Correctional Association of New York State, a watchdog organization.
State officials are investigating several of those fatalities, including the March 1 death of Messiah Nantwi at Midstate Correctional Facility near Utica, officials said. Fifteen corrections officers were placed on leave in connection with Nantwi’s death, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.
Advocates for incarcerated people have said the Hochul administration was wrong to partly suspend the HALT law. They accused corrections officers of striking to distract attention from the alleged murder of Robert Brooks, who prosecutors said was beaten to death last year by employees at the Marcy Correctional Facility.
Six employees were charged with murder in connection with Brooks’s death. They have pleaded not guilty.
“Those officers just got a new contract,” said Jerome Wright, the co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign. “They waited until they heard the Legislature was going to announce a bunch of reforms in the wake of the lynching of Robert Brooks, and they decided at that moment to change the narrative from his life to their safety, which is a lie.”
Ralph Lorigo, a Buffalo-based lawyer representing around 300 striking corrections officers, said at least some of them weren’t satisfied, adding that the state had not gone far enough. He pointed to rising violence in New York state prisons.
According to a DOCCS report from December, reported assaults by prisoners on staff have increased, as have assaults among prisoners. About 33,000 people are incarcerated in the state’s 43 prisons, according to records.
“People need to understand the conditions that these officers have dealt with for now over three years,” Lorigo said. “They acknowledge and admit that they're 70% staffed, which means that they have made people work 24 to 48 hours in a row.”
Martuscello said he was hopeful that the state could recruit more officers and lean on the National Guard to improve conditions for both corrections officers and incarcerated people.
“ We'll work to ensure the new department will be safer and more effective for everyone involved,” he said.