DOCCS committee recommends weakening law against solitary confinement

The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act Committee released recommendations to amend the law to make it easier to make use of solitary confinement in an attempt to increase the safety of corrections officers and incarcerated people.

Corrections officers undertook a wildcat strike this spring, driven by staffing issues and their concerns over the HALT Act, which they argued had compounded safety concerns by making it more difficult to place them in solitary confinement. When the strike ended, DOCCS created a committee to take a second look at the law and propose changes that could address some of those concerns.

On Friday, the committee released its list of recommended changes to the law, many of which would make it easier for corrections officers to temporarily place people in segregated confinement.

The committee recommended clarifying that the law allows incarcerated people to be sent to segregated confinement for behaviors including sexual harassment, extortion and lewd conduct, and It also recommended more objective standards for sending people to segregated confinement in response to riots, escapes and participation in attempted escapes. In addition, it recommended creating a new offense – unhygienic acts involving bodily fluids or excrement as part of aggravated harassment of employees – that would be punishable by segregated confinement.

Corrections officers have complained that the HALT Act makes it too difficult to put dangerous people in solitary confinement. In response, the committee recommended that the law be changed to allow someone to be placed in Segregated Housing Units or Residential Rehabilitation Units for up to three days when there is an unreasonable risk to safety and no other alternatives available in a facility, provided that they are given access to seven hours of out-of-cell time each day. 

The committee also recommended that those who repeatedly commit minor acts of misconduct, not just those who commit serious offenses, be eligible for placement in solitary confinement for up to 15 days. And although anyone placed in solitary must be given some out-of-cell time, the committee recommended that corrections officers have the option of requiring those who commit repeated offenses while in solitary confinement to take their out-of-cell time in a setting where they cannot disrupt others.

Beyond just widening the offenses eligible for solitary confinement, the committee also recommended new incentives for inmates that prevent the possibility of incurring offenses in the first place. 

The New York State Corrections Officers Police Benevolent Association, which has called for the repeal of the HALT Act, applauded the DOCCS committee’s recommendations as a good start. 

“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,” NYSCOPBA President Chris Summers said in a statement. “The State Legislature must make these changes a priority as early as possible in their next legislative session.”

But criminal justice reform advocates and many of the lawmakers who supported the HALT Act are hesitant to support any rollbacks to the law, particularly in the wake of high-profile killings of incarcerated people at the hands of corrections officers. Instead, advocates and lawmakers have argued that more reforms are necessary to ensure that incarcerated individuals are placed in safe environments.

“After brutally murdering Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, it is beyond credulity for DOCCS and the corrections unions to be trying to roll back basic protections of the rights of incarcerated people, or ‘pause the law,’” Jerome Wright, co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, said in a statement. “We will not go back to the era of perpetual punishment.”

State Sen. Julia Salazar, chair of the Senate Corrections Committee, pointed out that the HALT Act had wide support when it originally passed the state Legislature in 2022. Rather than try to weaken the law, she said, DOCCS needs to follow it properly.

“New York will never return to the practice of torturing people through the use of solitary confinement. The safety of staff and incarcerated individuals in jails and prisons are inextricably linked,” Salazar said in a statement. “A supermajority of the legislature knows this, and that's why we passed the HALT Act. Yet the law has still never been fully implemented by DOCCS, and the courts have ruled that DOCCS has no legal basis or factual reasoning for not implementing it. We need the law to finally be properly implemented and followed for prisons and jails to become safer and more humane.”