NY State Senator has long called to repeal the Humane Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act
A weekly COLUMN from NYS Senator Tom O’Mara,
It began under former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who pursued a misguided, politically driven penchant for rapidly closing state prisons, which led to overcrowding and set in motion a steady unraveling of New York’s correctional system.
Ever since, New York’s approach to a rising tide of unrest and violence within the state’s prisons has been rife with questionable strategies, shortcomings, and outright failures that led to the breaking point and resulted in correctional officers striking earlier this year.
The correctional officers’ pleas for safe working conditions went unheeded by Governor Hochul and her administration. They took the extreme action of a strike, in violation of the state’s Taylor Law which prohibits public employees from striking, not for more money or better benefits, they went on strike for safe working conditions.
New York State has now become notorious for extreme, far-left ideology overriding reality, ideology overruling common sense, and, ultimately, ideology overturning the common good. That’s been true on immigration, climate, fiscal practices, criminal justice, and other public policies which have become dominated by one-party, predominantly far-left, highly politicized control of government.
The prison crisis has been a prime example. Earlier this year, with the strike ongoing, our Senate Republican conference met with spouses and other family members of these same correctional officers while the Hochul administration continued to move to fire officers, terminate their families’ health insurance, and threaten fines and even imprisonment. Their message to the governor and the Democrat leadership of the state Legislature was clear: Your pro-criminal ideology is wrong. It can’t work. It discards any semblance of law and order within our facilities, which have become violent, dangerous, and life-threatening.
The consequences of the strike remain ongoing, and the system remains in a state of uncertainty, at best. Thousands of National Guard members remain working in our prisons, in the unsafe conditions exacerbated by Governor Hochul’s termination of thousands of correctional officers who, to this day, remain off the job and barred from any state employment. It will take years now to restore it. What can no longer be ignored in any eventual outcome, however, is the need to admit that this Albany Democrat policy in particular has failed, as predicted from the outset by many of us.
Specifically, the “Humane Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act,” better known as the HALT Act, was approved in 2021 by the Legislature’s Democrat-led majorities and signed into law by then-Governor Cuomo to fundamentally restrict the ability of prison officials to discipline the state’s most violent inmates by separating them from the general population. It is important to note that at that time the Legislature’s Democrat super-majorities had Cuomo over a barrel as he flailed around trying to curry favor with them to save his own hide while the sexual harassment allegations against him were coming to light. That didn’t work out either.
New York’s correctional officers and the Legislature’s Republican minority conferences were already warning that moving forward with HALT would put officers and the entire correctional system at significant risk. The New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) began holding rallies across New York in early 2022 calling for the law’s repeal. I joined officers at many of these rallies, as did many of my legislative colleagues.
NYSCOPBA President Michael Powers said at that time: “As we have said for years, the HALT Act would only do one thing, make our correctional facilities more dangerous. The New York State Legislature, the people who created this poorly thought-out legislation are directly responsible for the skyrocketing violence we’re experiencing in our prisons today. They ignored our warnings, our pleas to educate themselves properly before passing HALT, and now they’ve put the lives of everyone who resides or works in a correctional setting at risk.”
Albany Democrats ignored our warnings, our pleas to educate themselves properly before passing HALT, and they put the lives of everyone who resides or works in a correctional setting at risk. Three years later, inmate assaults on staff had doubled and inmate-on-inmate assaults nearly tripled, highlighting an escalating trend of rising violence inside prison walls while ongoing prison closures, staffing shortages, and unreasonable and unrealistic mandatory overtime demands have forced officers to work in conditions far beyond any semblance of balance and fairness for them and their families and loved ones. The vast majority of correctional officers and staff within the Elmira Correctional Facility and Five Points Correctional Facility, both of which I represent, and at facilities throughout the state, kept going to work mandatory regular day off shift upon mandatory overtime shift, often 24-hour-plus tours, day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year, to undertake the duties and responsibilities they’re charged with diligently, professionally, and respectfully in an increasingly unsafe environment.
Now, however, there is at least some recognition coming out of the Hochul administration that HALT needs to be turned back. An advisory panel of state officials and NYSCOBPA representatives convened in the wake of the corrections strike put forth last week 10 recommendations to amend HALT and begin restoring the use of segregated confinement to discipline violent inmates.
From the Buffalo News, “The committee found that the state’s Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act or the HALT law, which took effect in 2022 in a move to reduce isolation of inmates, too greatly restricted the ability of prisons to punish inmates who rioted, tried to escape, engaged in sexual harassment and gang-related extortion, lewd conduct and “unhygienic acts” such as throwing feces and urine on staff. Under the panel’s proposed changes to state law…New York prisons would reduce the subjectivity of standards to allow segregated confinement – a form of isolating punishment traditionally known as solitary confinement – for all of those offenses.”
According to state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Daniel Martuscello, “The goal of the HALT committee is to provide the Legislature with recommendations to enhance safety for both our staff and the incarcerated…We believe we have achieved this goal in a way that will ultimately lead to better outcomes and safer facilities. It is my hope that the Legislature considers these changes as an important evolution of the HALT Act.”
NYSCOPBA President Chris Summers said, “NYSCOPBA members have made it clear that safety is our biggest concern and priority…We urge the State Legislature in the strongest possible terms to accept our recommendations. They are a good start toward making our members safer, as well as all others who live and work inside our correctional facilities. The State Legislature must make these changes a priority as early as possible in their next legislative session.”
By all accounts, these recommendations do mark a welcome change in thinking and would be a good starting point for repairing a correctional system in crisis. Will Albany Democrats make it a top priority and act on it? Up to now, they have kept their sense of reality buried beneath their ideology.
They need to immediately act to make these changes to HALT.
