Understaffed or Overpopulated?: Looking Inside New York’s Prisons Post-Strike

Back in February, New York’s prison system was completely upended when correctional officers across the state went on an unsanctioned strike for three weeks in protest of staffing shortages, dangerous conditions and the solitary confinement reform law HALT. Spending up to 23 hours a day in cells became the everyday reality for many inmates and their families during the strike as facilities went into limbo — from stopping visitation and recreation to cancelling mental health treatment and educational and vocational programs.

Despite it now being six months since the strike — Melanie Bishop, a social studies teacher in Livingston County and the mother of a son who has been incarcerated at Five Points Correctional Facility for five years now, said conditions remain largely unchanged.

“There’s frequent lockdown types of days, so there are days when they do not leave their cells in the maximum [secure] facilities except for that one hour a day of [recreation],” Bishop explained. “So they’re not going down to the mess hall to eat, they’re not leaving for medical or mental health appointments, there’s no jobs or programs running […] no religious services.”

Following the strike, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has cited staffing shortages as the main reason for the pause on programs, and New York State continues to spend about $100 million a month on filling vacancies with National Guard soldiers. But this stalling has proven hazardous, especially amid the summer heat.

Bishop, who has become actively involved in campaigns for prison reform with the decarceration nonprofit Center for Community Alternatives (CCA), said her son had nearly died during the actual strike after being unable to access antibiotics for a mouth infection and had entered the system due to his issues with addiction — meaning ready access to medical and mental health treatment is critical now more than ever.

“We were told that he is on a call out list because he needs some pretty significant emergency dental work. We’ve been told he has been on that for a while, even prior to the strike,” Bishop said. “When we wrote a follow up probably about two weeks ago on a visit to medical just kind of asking, ‘where does it stand,’ he was a sent a message that basically said there’s no dentist on staff anymore at Five Points, and if he has an issue to put in a sick call. The honest answer is we hope that in the event of an emergency, he would be able to get access to medical treatment, but the confidence in the system itself right now is very low.”

And the summer heat has raised its own set of issues. Bishop described that, besides a $23 fan that is 1) often out of stock and 2) too expensive for many inmates, incarcerated folks like her son don’t have many ways to escape the heat as they sit in their cells for most of the day.

Upstate facilities like Five Points remain slower in reinstating programs compared to more downstate facilities. Max Kenner is the Executive Director of Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), an in-prison college program that has been able to grant over 900 college degrees to inmates in New York since it was founded in 1999 and see a nearly 0% rate of recidivism for their graduates. He explained that of the seven correctional facilities the Initiative operates in, they are close to being back to regular schedule in some prisons but they remain almost completely absent in others as they were during the strike and back during the COVID-19 pandemic when these staffing shortages first began.

“And for us in New York, it’s a special tragedy because we in New York should be proud of the fact that […] We did more than anyone else over the last 25 years to restore college in prison after it was destroyed in the middle 1990s, to make education, once again, a central part of what we do in America’s prisons and build a system of college in prison that was the best in the country,” Kenner said. “Those were things we did in New York over a period of 25 years, and the tragic irony is that after we were successful in changing federal and state policy to restore college to the prisons across the country and here in New York, we have a more depleted system of college prison that’s in desperate need of repair because of the staffing crisis, the strikes and the COVID shutdowns.”

Alongside programs like BPI, visitation has become a particular point of concern for Bishop and other loved ones of incarcerated individuals because it largely remains limited to the weekends — meaning earlier commutes for her and other visitors to offset the longer lines. Driving to Five Points at 7:30 a.m. has turned into 6: 30 a.m. as lines have grown from less than 40 people to about 88 people when Bishop visited two weeks ago.

I visit my son every week,” Bishop said. “My son used to get a visit one day a week on Wednesdays from his grandfather who is aging and that has been basically non-existent or he is only been able to go once or twice since the strike ended because a lot of our elderly people and young children have a really hard time standing in the much longer lines to get into these facilities, um, to see their loved ones. So we’re definitely seeing people who used to visit once a week on a Monday or a Tuesday because they’re older or [have] limited movement are maybe going once a month.”

Although free phone calls have helped in alleviating the lack of human contact, these barriers to visitation have still raised challenges to incarcerated individuals, Melanie explained.

“I would say that frequently I hear from my son that he tries to sleep the day, like there’s nothing to do. He has voiced concerns about whether he can do another six years just like this,” Bishop described. “And he is not alone. Like there are so many family members who I feel like we’re waiting for that bad call. And it doesn’t even have to do with necessarily like somebody who already has mental health issues. Again, it’s like across the board if you don’t get to see your loved ones that you usually see, if you don’t get to see your parents or aging grandparents and you don’t get that hug and that physical contact.”

Thomas Gant, an organizer for CCA who was formerly incarcerated for 25 years and had first become involved in the nonprofit while serving time, referred to current conditions as a humanitarian crisis. Before the strike, CCA had been able to meet with hundreds of incarcerated members across the state in-person to offer support, and now those visits have completely stopped. What he deems dangerous is not just the conditions themselves but the culture of hopelessness they are increasingly creating for inmates, which he warned will bring latent consequences that the system is not prepared for.

“One of the worst things that you can ever do to a human is take away their hope, so […] not being able to participate in programs productively, get those skills takes away hope because you want to get into these programs to get skills to learn about yourself and gain something so you can give back to your community when you get out,” Gant explained. “One of the things that DOCCS is supposed to be providing is the opportunity to not only work on yourself but to become more socialized, to become better so that when you are released, you can give back to your community. That’s not happening. DOCCS is not actually training or helping folks to become better. Instead what you’re doing is building a powder keg of hopelessness, anger and frustration.”

In a way, Gant explained that incarcerated folks feel punished, having to deal with the brunt of the consequences of the strike, especially as the murder of inmate Robert Brooks in Marcy Correctional Facility by correctional officers had immediately preceded the strike.

“They feel like ‘this wasn’t our fault’ when you have staff who’s trying to elude accountability and want to continue to move with impunity, they want to continue to kill and harm humans on the inside,” Gant argued. “And so the rehabilitation that’s supposed to be happening is kind of backwards now. It’s like you’re gonna be punished for being on top of the sentence the judge gave you. We’re gonna even take away and roll back some of these things that’s supposed to help you.”

In response to staffing shortages, DOCCS has been aggressively recruiting for correctional officers throughout the state. From offering $3,000 sign-on bonuses for new recruits to lowering the minimum age to become an officer from 21 to 18, the department has taken the route of recruitment to respond to current conditions, according to New York Focus. But, Gant, alongside Bishop, see the strike as exposing ongoing issues with prisons — it’s not understaffing but instead overpopulation that’s the issue.

“The problem is that 32,000 folks incarcerated is too many, and so the governor right now, at a swipe of a pen, just a swipe of a pen, could alleviate some of this problem by using her executive powers and authority,” Gant said. “Because I’ll tell you right now. There’s thousands of folks sitting in prison right now that could come out and be meaningful contributors to our community. How do I know that? Well, they’ve already exemplified that during their incarceration. So far within the last 10, 15, 20 years, she has thousands of applications on her desk — people who have been vetted and shown that I have not only the community support, but I have the record, I have the experience to say that I’m going to be in that group of people who are not going to recidivate but also come out and be productive people who have better resumes than me.”

CCA has been championing sentencing reform legislation, such as the Second Look Act and the Earned Time Act, as means of incentivizing good behavior by giving inmates the opportunity to reduce their sentences. The Second Look Act would allow currently incarcerated individuals to have their sentences relooked and possibly reduced, while the Earned Time Act expands their “good-time” and “merit-time” credits. For her son, who had applied for a drug/alcohol treatment program in prison only to be denied because he was seen as too early into his sentence, Bishop questioned simply investing in recruitment over expanding the continuously small number of treatment services available in prisons for inmates to recover and leave prison.

“One of the main reasons I got involved in [CCA’s] Communities Not Cages campaign for earned time was because that would incentivize facilities to offer those programs,” Bishop explained. “When people enter the facilities, it’s really hard to hear about staffing shortages or HALT issues or safety concerns when it comes to contraband when there is not access to programs to address addiction the way addiction needs to be addressed. We have to begin to treat addiction like the medical issue that it is and the mental health concern that it is, and until the facilities are willing and ready to do that, we’re not gonna see a big change in the people who are using that as a way to cope.”

Gant argued that these two pieces of legislation, alongside the proper implementation of the HALT Act, would work to not only alleviate the current crisis but also genuinely improve conditions inside prisons starting from the root. The incentivization of good behavior and the emphasis on connecting inmates to opportunities to grow work to transform “the culture,” Gant explained — the very culture that had precipitated the strike in the first place, which he said was born out of a combination of abusive staff and a lack of hope given to inmates. But Gant said the lack of political courage by elected officials, especially Governor Kathy Hochul, to use her clemency powers and strongly advocate for reform has kept the status quo intact at the cost of incarcerated folks and their loved ones.

“The environments that we have in prison today, whether you wanna call them violent or hopeless, have been created because of the system of Department of Corrections and the lack of creativity and willingness of folks on the inside who work there to want to create a better environment right?” Gant said. “You should do everything you can to want to keep a person connected to their family and loved ones. Being a part of your family, being a part of the community is what creates safety. When a person feels like they are part of something bigger than themselves, that’s what creates real safety.”

Image: Correctional officers in Sullivan County protesting unsafe working conditions and the solitary confinement reform law HALT on February 18, 2025 during the unsanctioned wildcat strike. (Photo credit: Patricio Robayo/WJFF Radio Catskill)