State Budget Gives Prisons Half-Billion-Dollar Boost While Threatening Oversight Programs

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here .

CRIMINAL JUSTICE · May 28, 2026

It’s unclear whether the Correctional Association of New York will have to scale back its nascent reform initiatives.

By Chris Gelardi , New York Focus

This year’s final New York state budget includes a pot of money meant for “stabilizing the correctional system,” an effort to address the ongoing fallout from a three-week corrections officer strike last year.

The amount is hefty: $535 million on top of the prison agency’s roughly $4 billion annual budget. While much of the money will likely go to the National Guard, whose troops have been covering unstaffed prison posts for over a year, the budget legislation allows the state to spend the funds on any number of initiatives. The prison commissioner needs to submit a plan for the money and ask the state budget director to sign off on it.

The fate of a much smaller pot of money — intended for prison oversight — is far less certain. The strike and its aftermath coincided with blowback after prison guards killed two incarcerated people, and new revelations have since emerged about prison deaths and guards’ increased use of force. As part of a push for accountability last year, the state added $3 million to fund the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit prison oversight organization, which used it to visit more prisons, closely monitor problem facilities, and establish metrics for improvement. The association launched its initiatives with the understanding that the funding — equivalent to half a percent of the “stabilizing” pot — was permanent. Governor Kathy Hochul, however, proposed rescinding it this year.

Legislators sought to add other prison reform measures to the state budget but largely failed. The Senate wanted to establish a bill of rights for pregnant incarcerated people, while the Assembly proposed ordering the State Commission of Correction, another oversight body, to hire a chief medical examiner to conduct independent investigations into jail and prison deaths. Neither proposal made it into the final budget legislation.

Criminal justice reform advocates are seeking to pass those and other measures — including bills that would release elderly prisoners, let incarcerated people earn time off their sentences, or make it easier for the parole board to grant parole — through the regular legislative process. That’s an uphill battle: Albany is passing the budget eight weeks late, leaving only six scheduled days left in the annual legislative session.