Gov. Kathy Hochul plainly means to make it through November’s election without facing the crisis in the state prison system, but she’s taking a serious risk just to avoid a tricky political task.
A full year after she declared an end to the three-week correction officers’ strike, firing thousands of strikers, 4,600 jobs remain unfilled across the state’s 42 prisons.
Filling in are 3,000 National Guardsmen, patrolling the tiers at Sing Sing and so on in their military fatigues — a task they’re not trained for and certainly didn’t sign up to do.
Costs of the Guard deployment have reportedly topped $1 billion; the gov has $535 million more in her budget for the coming year.
Meanwhile, overtime costs for the actual guards run roughly another half-billion.
It’s all downhill results of the HALT Act’s 2021 passage, severely limiting use of solitary confinement.
That law’s authors didn’t bother to increase the budget for keeping the peace behind bars when they took away that traditional tool; as a result, the number of assaults on guards grew more than 76% in three years.
The Correctional Association of New York also reported 2,970 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in 2024 — a rise of 168% from the year before the law took effect.
Suspending HALT was one of the concessions Hochul made to end the strike, but judicial orders have brought much of it back — and she isn’t trying to repeal or rein in the law this year.
Her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, pledges to rehire officers unfairly fired for striking, hire new guards to reach full staffing levels and work to repeal HALT.
Hochul is simply holding the system together with risky interim measures, figuring she’d lose more votes by doing anything more than kick the can another year.
The certain cost: inmates, prison staff and the Guard stuck doing this duty all face higher daily violence. The big risk: a major riot or worse breaks out because the governor decided against doing her job.
