Title: New York Corrections Officers' Illegal Strike

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. There's news this morning of a possible settlement in the illegal strike by workers at several New York state prisons. This after two people incarcerated at Sing Sing Prison in Westchester have died during the strike. WNYC New York State politics reporter Jimmy Vielkind has been covering the strike and the underlying issues, and he joins us now. Hi, Jimmy. Welcome back to the show.

Jimmy Vielkind: Good morning, Brian. Pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: For people who haven't been following this, who's been on strike and where?

Jimmy Vielkind: Well, thousands of corrections officers at prisons around the state walked off the job starting on President's Day, Monday, February 17th. It started at two facilities and quickly spread like wildfire throughout the state prison system. The striking officers say that they're concerned about safety. They say that understaffing in their facilities has led to an increase in both on incarcerated assaults and insults by incarcerated people on corrections officers over time. The statistics do bear that out.

It's been quite a problem. We've heard from incarcerated people that conditions inside prisons have deteriorated. We've heard emotional pleas from corrections officers about how they feel disrespected. In particular, they point to a 2021 law, the HALT Solitary Confinement act, that they say has limited their ability to use solitary confinement as a tool of discipline and has made it more difficult to maintain order in the prison system.

Brian Lehrer: Are there rising rates of incarcerated people violence? Has the reduction in solitary confinement added to actual danger for or attacks on officers? Is there any of that that's verified as true or false?

Jimmy Vielkind: It's impossible or very difficult to have a causal relationship. According to the most recent report from the state's prison system released in December, there were 1,938 reported prisoner assaults on staff in the first 11 months of last year, and that's up about 65% compared to 2021, which is when the last full year before the HALT Law took effect. Then reported assaults among the incarcerated population has increased from about 1,100 in 2021 to nearly 2,700 in 2024. There is a documented increase according to DOCCS's own reports.

The only caveat I would put on that, Brian, is that when you speak with advocates for incarcerated people, some of whom are incarcerated people themselves, they accuse prison officials of cooking the books and cooking those numbers and making action by corrections officers against incarcerated people look like an assault between incarcerated people, so it's difficult to verify those individual statistics. On a global scale, there does seem to be merit to the guard's argument, though we can't necessarily say that it's been a causal relationship with the whole law.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, is anyone out there right now connected to this in any way? Anyone listening inside a New York State prison where corrections officers have been on strike? We get calls from behind bars sometimes. 212-433-WNYC. Or, any corrections officers currently on strike or any family members of incarcerated people or corrections officers, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or, anyone else with a question or comment about the strike and the reasons for the strike or its effects, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. For our reporter Jimmy Vielkind. We have a call coming in already. Let's talk to Colleen in Elmira, New York. Colleen, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Colleen: Thank you so much for having me. I am a spouse of a corrections officer in Elmira, New York, where this all began. It began as an organic outcry, and they call it a wildcat strike. It's driven by exhaustion, fear of safety, and a pressure cooker environment created by Kathy Hochul's administration, that has been ignored for three years. Officers are routinely working 16 to 24-hour shifts, some officers being mandated beyond 24 hours. Think about that for a second. Imagine going into work, being mandated 24 hours, and then all of a sudden you're told you got to stay and maybe you have to transport an incarcerated individual to the hospital and you're driving. There's no sleep.

Brian Lehrer: Doesn't sound safe for any of the parties involved when you put it like that. What does your husband--

Colleen: Yes, it's not safe for people on the road.

Brian Lehrer: What do your husband and his colleagues want? Can you put it in concrete terms? Are you that close to it?

Colleen: Absolutely. They want to be able to see their families. They want the shifts to be deemed reasonable. In New York State, if any company were to mandate people to the types of hours that these people are working, they would be fined. Overseas, we call it-- we would say that people who work in sweatshops these kind of hours, it's inhumane. Keep in mind these officers are working in dangerous, stressful conditions with no sleep. It's a very bad situation.

Brian Lehrer: Colleen, we appreciate you calling in. Thank you very much. What are you thinking, Jimmy, as you hear that call? Is that representative of what the officers, and in this case the spouse of an officer is saying, and is there a particular staffing shift, number of hours per day that people can work or staffing levels? We saw staffing levels as the core issue in the recent nurses' strike and doctors' strikes in some hospitals. Maybe if corrections officers aren't as immediately a sympathetic population for some people, maybe the issue is similar. What are you thinking as you're listening to Colleen?

Jimmy Vielkind: I believe that Colleen and I met when she was at the New York State Capitol earlier this week with a number of other spouses and relatives of correctional officers. Her sentiments are very representative of the people that I spoke with. It's no secret that there's been a shortage and a reduction in force across public safety professions, basically, since the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. As Colleen said, being a corrections officer is a very, very tough and stressful job. Officers feel as though they have been disrespected. Now because fewer people are going into the profession, they're starting to feel overworked.

I don't have statistics in front of me as to the number of hours worked on average, but anecdotally, what Colleen said is certainly what we have heard and what our public media colleagues around the state have heard from people walking the picket lines. We've also seen over time a reduction in the number of incarcerated people across New York, and indeed, the state is closing prison facilities in order to reflect that declining population. Last year, Governor Hochul closed two facilities, one in Washington County, which is on the Vermont border, and one in Sullivan County, northwest of New York City.

In addition to what Colleen described, some officers have said that they now have to drive perhaps an hour or more to the facility where they are required to work if they are not in a position where they want to move their family and uproot route from an area where they had previously been working. It's a very complicated issue in that you have fewer people who are being incarcerated in prisons. There's therefore the need in the short term for fewer prison beds, and there's some consolidation going on.

The other element I've heard from striking workers and from their allies is that when you consolidate people into singular facilities, you create a more dangerous mix, and that you have people who would have previously been in a higher security population into a general population, and that that too may be a contributing factor to that increase in violence that I was describing earlier.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Andrea in Mamaroneck, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I am a longtime listener and great admirer. I represent people who are in prison, prisoners. I got two calls last night, but one of them was from a prisoner who told me that the sharp increase in recorded assaults from prisoners on officers is false, that it reflects that the guards often feign assaults. They'll say to a prisoner, stop resisting, when he's not doing anything. They put it on their radios, they put it on whatever other recording devices they have. They say to other officers--

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Andrea: I'm not there. I can't say. Then they beat the guy up and they give him a ticket, and the guy gets the ticket for assaulting the officers when the officers assaulted the prisoner. That was his report. They say, "Assume the position," which means, put your hands against the wall, spread your legs. Then they say to the officer next to them, "Look at him. He's taking his hands off the wall," when the guy isn't moving. That there's not an understaffing issue with his point of view, that five or six guards will be sitting with their feet up on the desk laughing, and that it's false.

What my client also pointed out was that there's been a sharp increase in respect for prisoners now with the National Guard there. These people actually come in, they say, good morning iIn the morning. They're very, very respectful, unlike the corrections officers.

Brian Lehrer: Because the governor called out the National Guard to cover for the strikers, right?

Andrea: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: For you, representing this incarcerated person, are there any common ground solutions to the issues that the officers say they're raising here? One could argue that if corrections officers feel safe and well treated and not overworked, they're less likely to abuse those they're guarding.

Andrea: I can't speak to that, but I certainly noted, I think it was in the Focus or City or Gothamist, somebody noted that this strike took place just after the Marcy killing and that it's really camouflage for the officers' own actions and the violence that takes place in prisons that goes unrecorded and unacknowledged by officers on inmates. I'm not sure that the problem is the problem that they're claiming rather than an attempt to cover up the other problem, which they don't want the public to see.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Andrea, thank you very much. I'm glad she brought up the Robert Brooks story, which many listeners may know about, many other listeners may not know about. As you reported it, Jimmy, another issue for the union is increased scrutiny on the guards since the death of Robert Brooks, a man incarcerated at Marcy Prison Upstate. You report Brooks was fatally beaten in December.

To people hearing this, and I think the way Andrea is framing it, what's happening now might seem backwards. An incarcerated person dies after being beaten, and it's the correction officers who go on strike for not being treated fairly as they argue it. What relationship can your reporting establish that there is between that beating and that death and the strike?

Jimmy Vielkind: Andrea is not alone in holding the sentiment and connecting those two events. I said that the strike started on February 17, which was President's Day. That week, 10 people were charged by a special prosecutor in connection with Robert Brooks's death at Marcy. Six individuals who were employees of Marcy were charged with murder in connection with Brooks's death, and they have pleaded not guilty. This was an incredibly jarring moment for people in public life, for prison officials, and for state lawmakers. The beating death of Brooks was documented on multiple body cameras.

The public has been able to watch, really, what many have described as torture of this man who was handcuffed as he was strangled, punched, and kicked by several uniformed officers in the infirmary, and then died subsequently of his injuries at a nearby hospital. There was already talk at the State Capitol of changes to the prison system about increased oversight, more independent oversight, as well as talk of closing the Marcy prison. This strike has certainly created a counternarrative that has arguably swallowed up the previous momentum of prison reform in the State Capitol and in the minds of state lawmakers and Governor Hochul.

Brian Lehrer: Besides covering for the workers with National Guard troops, what has the governor been doing to enforce the law here? This is an illegal strike. The New York State Taylor Law prohibits it among state employees. I don't know if it's all state employees or in certain categories, but when government air traffic controllers, considered core public safety workers, staged an illegal strike in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan fired them all. Not that that was necessarily a good thing, but what is Hochul doing about this illegal strike? Back then people could just not fly. In this case, the incarcerated people can't just not be protected.

Jimmy Vielkind: It's been a difficult road for the governor to walk. She's done a few things. As you pointed out, she appointed 3,500 National Guard personnel who are throughout the prison system to help maintain order. She also appointed a mediator, Marty Scheinman, who led talks between state corrections officials and NYSCOPBA, which is the union that represents the prison guards and correction officers. Now, we should be very clear, this is a wildcat strike. This is not something that is being coordinated officially by the union. It is something that, as Colleen, the caller, earlier pointed out, happened organically and spread to prisons throughout the state.

Brian Lehrer: The union would be hit with big fines if they officially did it illegally.

Jimmy Vielkind: That's right. Just like the Transit Workers Union in 2005 when subway workers went on strike and severely hobbled the mass transit system. That puts everyone in a weird spot because the union and the state are negotiating potential solution. Late last night, they released a memorandum outlining their agreement, but it's unclear whether that is going to persuade these workers who are individually engaging in this walkout from getting back to their posts.

Brian Lehrer: That's the new development now that we'll end on. Do you have details of what's in a tentative settlement, if that's the right term for it, and how much it would address what the officers have said, as we've heard in this segment, they're for?

Jimmy Vielkind: The tentative settlement would suspend certain aspects of the HALT Law. That is the law that restricts the use of solitary confinement. It would extend for another 30 days the amount paid for overtime. It would also take steps to reduce mandated overtime and essentially force individual prisons to come up with a staffing plan where the goal is to avoid corrections officers from being mandated to work 24 hours in a row. It would also keep National Guard personnel in the state prisons to help with staffing, and it would also allow the state to temporarily hire retired corrections officers to help out in transportation.

Now, the big question is how this is going to go over. We've seen some Republican politicians who have stood in solidarity with the striking officers issue statements saying that they think this might be a potential path forward. The union's spokesman told me that the union is urging its members to return to work, that they believe this is a good deal, but it's really going to remain to be seen in the next approximately 20 hours how effective this is or whether this situation will continue.

If people don't go back on the job, they will start to face arrest because in addition to the talks, Governor Hochul has sought court orders against striking workers. More than 300 of those orders have been served, according to the governor's office, and the next step will be to potentially start making arrests.

Brian Lehrer: WNYC state politics reporter Jimmy Vielkind reporting on the strike of corrections officers at New York State prisons. Thank you very much for joining us, Jimmy.

Jimmy Vielkind: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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