Jade Venegas/U.S. Marine Corps
Since corrections officers went on strike throughout New York last month, seven prisoners have died. Others have missed court dates, been unable to meet with their lawyers and families, and gone without hot food, showers, medicine, and health care.
Correctional officers have been on an unauthorized strike since February 17, demanding higher pay, increased searches of prison visitors, limits on mandatory overtime, and the reversal of recent prison reforms that limit solitary confinement. Since then, 90 percent of corrections officers and sergeants at forty prisons across the state participated in the strike, according to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who called in the New York State National Guard to run her understaffed and dysfunctional prison system. Though the state reached a deal last week with leaders of the corrections officers’ union, thousands remain on strike.
As a prisoner of thirty years in the New York state prison system, I have observed a number of issues coming together to result in this strike. Chiefly, fewer and fewer people want to work as officers for the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, reflecting a dire staffing shortage in prisons and jails around the country.
The oppression of mass incarceration has outgrown its application to just prisoners. A punishing job market has shackled the prison guard to prison along with me, with many officers at my facility working multiple twelve- and twenty-four-hour shifts with little to no sleep in between.
While prison understaffing around the country was an issue before the pandemic, the spread of COVID-19 cracked the corruption of the carceral state wide open. Overcrowding and a lack of care heightened COVID-related deaths nationwide among prisoners, while social and material deprivation increased as a result of restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus. Death became the ultimate equalizer for prisoners and prison guards alike. I was the Inmate Liaison Committee Chairman at Fishkill Correctional Facility for two terms during this crisis. I personally saw the corpses of those left to those policies, and the cruelty that led to their deaths.
As for the correctional officers who didn’t die or quit during the height of the pandemic, I observed a number of them misusing, or outright abusing, worker’s compensation to get out of coming to work. The most preferred method was to involve themselves in a “use of force” incident against a prisoner. I’ve observed officers quickly escalate a minor conflict into a very violent one. In the majority of these altercations, the officers attack prisoners first. In the reports they subsequently file, known as unusual incident reports, the officers allege the reverse occurred, and claim an injury as a result of being attacked by a prisoner. Others simply faked a fall.
From 2019 to 2022, the number of workers in state correctional systems declined by 10 percent, according to reporting by The Marshall Project and USA Today. Since 2020, the total correctional workforce of state prisons has shrunk by 11 percent—a number that’s expected to continue growing, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Understaffing, partnered with a rise in state prison populations and overcrowding, result in an unsustainable prison system that is not contributing to public safety, but worsening it. State prisons across the country have extended lockdowns—which usually last a few hours or days—for weeks to months because of understaffing and overcrowding, increasing tensions among staff and incarcerated people.
I’ve also witnessed firsthand the effects of Hochul’s prison closures. New York now has only forty-two prisons, down from a high of seventy-one, and during Hochul’s term, the state has moved to close a total of eight. Now, the governor is seeking to shut down an additional five correctional facilities with just ninety days’ notice.
Sweeping prison closures—a result of the “staffing crisis,” according to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision—have exacerbated the issue instead of alleviating it. For example, the governor shut down Downstate Correctional Facility, a prison close to New York City, where many prisoners are from. It was later revealed that the Downstate property was sold to a real estate group for development. That decision displaced prisoners and staff further away from their homes in the city. It demoralized everyone, and here, that often means that security staff take it out on the vulnerable population of prisoners.
That dynamic was made painfully clear in December, when the public learned that five correctional officers at Marcy Correctional Facility had beaten Robert Brooks to death. The strike in February came soon after the governor announced that nine officers were indicted on various charges related to Brooks’s murder.
At Otisville Correctional Facility, where I’m now incarcerated, administrators have known the facility was dangerously understaffed since the beginning of the year and have done nothing about it.
“We’re short of staff,” is what the then-deputy superintendent of administration told me when I asked him why we weren’t receiving the services we prisoners are entitled to. Recreation time in the prison yard was the first thing to go. Then, packages sent to prisoners were left to pile up, soil, and rot. Rehabilitation programming, like college classes, went next. Even getting to these programs when they were available became problematic, because the prison didn’t have enough security staff to work the post. Other services—like receiving toilet tissue, envelopes, and other stationary supplies—suffered for the same reasons. These were the tell tale signs of the smoke that was coming a year before the strike began.
The governor has tried to do more with less, redistributing officers from the prisons she closed to the prisoners suffering from a shortage of staff. Otisville received thirteen officers from the now-closed Sullivan Correctional Facility. But less than a month after their arrival, many of them left to work at other prisons and others were out on worker’s compensation.
Now, they’ve been replaced by bewildered National Guard soldiers. There are a total of six soldiers guarding my housing dorm alone. They work in groups of three for twelve hours at a time. They sleep in the visiting room when they aren’t working in the dorm. Their work day consists of sitting in various states of sleep or wishing they were someplace else. None of them are more than thirty-five years old.
We prisoners are on modified lockdown: No visits, recreation, or programs. It took seventy-two hours before we were given ten minutes of fresh air in front of the housing dorm. Chow is brought to us. We can smoke in the bathroom to relieve our stress. We still have access to medical services and the law library—more access than the maximum facility prisons that have been on total lockdown.
I overheard some of the correctional officers who are still working talk about how they also got shafted. There would be no more eight-hour shifts or shift-swapping privileges. All officers would have to work twelve-hour shifts, with four hours of overtime whenever mandated.
The normal narrative of prisoners resisting the carceral state has changed. In today’s revolution, humanity has found a place where both prison guards and prisoners can agree on a few points: We are all human beings and deserving of decent care. And we all want to go home sooner rather than later.
We both deserve better than Hochul and her battalion of National Guard members. I’d like to imagine she can come up with better solutions than putting boots on the ground. She could start by asking the people who live and work here what works best for us.
The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not respond to a request for comment by press time.