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New York state's prison system is reeling after a three-week unsanctioned strike by corrections officers. That ended about a week ago, and on Monday, Governor Kathy Hochul fired 2,000 prison guards for not returning to work. As NPR's Martin Kaste reports, that leaves the system even more short-staffed and increases worries about safety.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: The wildcat strike started in mid-February, and one of the guards' main complaints was a state law passed in 2021 known as the HALT Act. It restricts the use of solitary confinement. But at a press conference by guards' spouses during the strike, Bernadette Singer said that law was making it harder to isolate dangerous inmates.
BERNADETTE SINGER: Officers do not want to treat people badly. They understand that the point of prison is for rehabilitation. That is not the choice that they have anymore.
KASTE: To end the strike, the state agreed to suspend HALT for 90 days. That's angered activists such as Anisah Sabur who experienced a month of solitary when she was in prison.
ANISAH SABUR: I call it a box. It's not even as big as an elevator. Lock yourself in your bathroom for 23 hours with no contact. Somebody opens a slide in your door, shove a tray in it, and that's it.
KASTE: Sabur and the HALT solitary campaign called the wildcat strike a, quote, "smoke screen" to distract attention from the fatal beating in December of an inmate named Robert Brooks. That incident was caught on video, and 10 guards were indicted in February, around the time the strike started.
JENNIFER SCAIFE: There's a - absolutely a systematic abuse of power and contempt toward incarcerated people, exhibited not by all staff but by too many.
KASTE: Jennifer Scaife is executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a state-sanctioned prison watchdog group. She says it's true that many officers are under a lot of pressure with long shifts and mandatory overtime - something that's not helped by the firing of the 2,000 officers. She says most prisons still are not allowing visits even though the wildcat strike has been over for a week.
SCAIFE: Even though they're back, they're not necessarily happy to be back. They didn't get fully what they wanted. The system is going to be experiencing pain for quite some time.
KASTE: The governor is proposing to improve conditions by closing more prisons. The state's inmate population has dropped a lot since the '90s, and consolidation would make it easier to deploy the remaining 10,000 guards more efficiently. But closures are controversial, especially in more rural areas where prisons are major employers. Martin Kaste, NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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