My father spent twenty-five years working in New York's correctional system. He served as a correction officer and later as a lieutenant and supervisor before retiring in 2006. Throughout my childhood, there was one principle attached to that career that I heard repeatedly and came to understand long before I understood prison policy, collective bargaining, criminal procedure or the politics surrounding corrections: his service was to the people of the State of New York. Those words remain on the retirement badge he still has today. They were not supposed to be a slogan. They described whom a correction officer ultimately worked for. Not the governor. Not a political party. Not a union. Certainly not the inmates. The officer was entrusted with an ugly, difficult and necessary function of government on behalf of the citizens of this state.
Years after his retirement, I have occasionally asked my father a simple question: what would New York have to do to begin fixing its prison system? His answer has been remarkably consistent. Repeal the HALT Act.
I have heard essentially the same answer from other people connected to corrections. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act has become one of the most bitter dividing lines in New York correctional policy. Its defenders describe it as a humane restriction on prolonged isolation and an attempt to replace punishment with treatment and rehabilitation. Its critics, particularly correction officers and their advocates, argue that Albany removed one of the most important disciplinary tools available inside an inherently violent environment and replaced it with a system that often asks officers to control dangerous people without providing meaningful consequences for repeated misconduct.
That argument deserves considerably more scrutiny than it normally receives, because New York's prison system is no longer suffering from one isolated problem. It is suffering from several failures at once. Violence has risen dramatically. Staffing has collapsed. A statewide correction officer strike forced the governor to activate the National Guard. Thousands of officers were subsequently terminated. More than a year after that strike, approximately 2,600 Guard members remain inside New York prisons, and one state legislator's office estimates the continuing deployment is costing taxpayers approximately $50 million every month. Meanwhile, correction officers themselves have been prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for the deaths of incarcerated men, most notably Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility and Messiah Nantwi at neighboring Mid-State.
There is an intellectually lazy way to discuss all of this. One side can say correction officers are abusive, therefore the system needs to restrain them further. The other can say inmates are violent criminals, therefore officers should be given virtually unlimited latitude to control them. Neither position is sufficient. A functioning prison system must be capable of doing several things simultaneously. It must protect officers from incarcerated people who attack them. It must protect incarcerated people from other incarcerated people. It must give officers enough lawful authority to maintain order. It must maintain sufficient staffing to exercise that authority safely. It must protect people in state custody from unlawful abuse. Finally, it must punish anyone, officer or inmate, who crosses the criminal line. New York appears to be struggling with every one of those responsibilities.
What HALT Actually Changed
The HALT Act took effect on March 31, 2022. It did not simply eliminate every form of segregated confinement, as the political shorthand sometimes suggests, but it substantially changed when, how and for how long New York could isolate an incarcerated individual for disciplinary purposes. The law generally limits segregated confinement to fifteen consecutive days, creates restrictions on repeated confinement, establishes Residential Rehabilitation Units, requires substantial periods of out-of-cell activity and programming, and places additional restrictions on the use of segregation for designated populations.
There were legitimate reasons for reform. Long-term isolation can be psychologically destructive. A prison should not be able to place someone in a cell for months or years merely because isolation is administratively convenient. Discipline requires limits, review and due process, particularly when the state exercises almost complete physical control over another human being. The mistake is believing that recognizing those facts ends the discussion.
A maximum-security prison is not a college dormitory with stricter rules. New York's own August 2026 data show that roughly 87 percent of the men housed in maximum-security facilities are violent felony offenders. These institutions contain people convicted of murder, rape, robbery, serious assault and other violent crimes, along with people convicted of less serious offenses. Some incarcerated individuals will follow institutional rules. Some will participate seriously in rehabilitation. Some will eventually return to society and never commit another crime. Others remain extraordinarily dangerous. Government policy has to be designed for all of them, including the worst.
The question is therefore not whether prolonged solitary confinement can become abusive. It can. The question is whether Albany went too far in restricting disciplinary segregation without creating an equally effective mechanism for controlling violent and chronically disruptive people. The numbers make that question impossible to dismiss.
DOCCS reported 1,177 assaults on staff statewide in 2021. That increased to 1,473 in 2022, 1,672 in 2023 and 2,067 in 2024. The 2025 total was 1,783. Violence between incarcerated individuals followed an equally troubling trajectory, increasing from 1,107 assaults in 2021 to 1,489 in 2022, 2,113 in 2023 and 2,979 in 2024. DOCCS changed its reporting definitions beginning in 2026, separating harassment from assault, so the current year's figures cannot simply be added to the older series as though nothing changed. Through July 2026, however, the department had already recorded 927 assaults on staff and another 484 incidents categorized as harassment of staff.
Those statistics do not prove that HALT caused the increase. That distinction matters. Prison violence had not been perfectly stable before 2022, COVID disrupted correctional operations, the incarcerated population itself changed, contraband remains a serious problem and staffing conditions deteriorated substantially. Anyone claiming that every assault after March 2022 belongs at HALT's doorstep is making a causal claim the evidence does not establish. But anyone claiming that HALT can simply be removed from the discussion is being equally unserious.
The law fundamentally changed the disciplinary architecture of the state's prisons. Officers have repeatedly argued that they lost an effective deterrent against violent and repeat misconduct. After the 2025 strike, New York itself established a HALT Review Committee containing representatives from DOCCS, state government and correctional employee unions. That committee unanimously approved ten recommendations for changing the law. Those recommendations included expanding misconduct eligible for segregated confinement, addressing repeated violations, revising rules governing violent felony conduct, allowing short-term protective custody where safe alternatives are unavailable, and providing DOCCS greater operational flexibility.
That does not prove that HALT should be completely repealed. In fact, the committee recommended amendment rather than abolition. It does, however, destroy the argument that concerns about HALT amount to nothing more than correction officers complaining that they can no longer throw people into solitary confinement whenever they want. The state convened a formal review process, and that process itself concluded that substantial changes were necessary.
Senator Patrick Gallivan subsequently introduced S.9487 to place those ten recommendations into law. As of August 2026, the proposal remains active rather than enacted. New York is therefore still debating how much disciplinary authority its correctional system needs more than four years after HALT took effect. My father's answer remains more aggressive: repeal it.
Whether complete repeal is ultimately justified is a question I intend to examine further. But Albany should at minimum recognize what correction personnel have been saying for years. Rehabilitation cannot occur in an institution that is not first safe enough to function.
A Staffing Collapse That Cannot Be Ignored
HALT is only one part of the story because New York has also lost an extraordinary number of correctional security personnel. At the end of 2021, DOCCS reported 17,415 filled correction officer, sergeant and lieutenant positions. By the end of 2022, that number had dropped to 16,178. It fell to 15,143 in 2023, 14,095 in 2024 and only 11,278 at the end of 2025. By August 2026, New York reported only 11,139 filled uniformed security positions, including approximately 9,839 correction officers.
The prison population, meanwhile, has begun increasing again from its pandemic-era low. DOCCS reported 30,746 incarcerated individuals at the end of 2021. By August 2026, the population had reached 34,143. That combination matters. Fewer officers are being asked to supervise more incarcerated people than they were several years ago, and many of the remaining incarcerated population are serving sentences for violent felonies.
Numbers alone still fail to describe what staffing shortages actually mean inside a prison. Someone must staff housing units. Someone must supervise recreation. Someone must move incarcerated people to medical appointments. Someone must conduct searches. Someone must respond when a fight starts. Someone must supervise meals, programs, visits, showers and transportation. Someone must relieve the officer whose shift has ended. When there is nobody to provide that relief, the officer stays.
The June 2026 independent review commissioned by DOCCS described accounts of severe mandatory overtime, including repeated sixteen-hour shifts and, in some circumstances, shifts extending to twenty-four hours. Former officers interviewed for that review described eighty-hour workweeks, constant stress and employees leaving the profession because they were repeatedly forced to remain at work after their scheduled shifts had ended.
There is nothing mysterious about what happens to an institution when that becomes normal. Morale deteriorates. Judgment suffers. Experienced employees retire as soon as they can. Younger employees leave. Recruitment becomes more difficult because current employees are telling friends and family not to take the job. The remaining workforce becomes even more overextended, which makes the job less attractive, which causes additional departures. That is not a temporary vacancy problem. It is an institutional death spiral.
It also produces an important possibility that deserves more attention in the HALT debate. What if New York created a correctional model requiring more programming, supervision, movement and administrative management at exactly the time the workforce necessary to operate that model was disappearing? If that is what occurred, then HALT and staffing should not be treated as competing explanations. They may have reinforced one another.
Then the System Broke
On February 17, 2025, correction officers across New York began an unauthorized work stoppage. Two days later, Governor Kathy Hochul declared a statewide disaster emergency and activated the New York National Guard. The strike lasted twenty-two days. When it ended, roughly 10,000 DOCCS security personnel were working and approximately 6,000 National Guard personnel remained deployed. More than 2,000 correction officers who did not return to work were terminated.
I do not believe an illegal strike should be romanticized simply because the employees involved had legitimate grievances. Correction officers abandoned posts in institutions where the state has an absolute obligation to maintain custody and security. The consequences could have been catastrophic. But simply calling the strike illegal does not explain why thousands of correction officers were willing to risk their careers, pensions and livelihoods by participating in it. That is the question government has an obligation to answer. More than a year later, the emergency has not actually ended.
On August 18, 2026, WWNY reported that approximately 2,600 members of the New York National Guard were still serving inside state correctional facilities. More than 8,000 military personnel had been mobilized during the original crisis, with deployment peaking above 7,300. Assemblyman Scott Gray's office estimates that the continuing mission costs approximately $50 million per month. That figure should be independently audited before anyone treats it as an exact monthly expenditure, but even its approximate scale should stop New Yorkers cold.
The National Guard exists to respond when normal civilian institutions cannot adequately handle an emergency. It can respond to natural disasters, civil emergencies and extraordinary threats. It is not supposed to become a permanent substitute workforce because New York cannot hire and retain enough correction officers to operate its own prisons. At some point an emergency that lasts eighteen months stops being an emergency and becomes the system.
New York taxpayers are already paying for DOCCS. They are paying correction officers. They are paying overtime. They are paying for recruitment. They are paying for prison infrastructure. They are now also paying for thousands of soldiers to help keep those prisons functioning. The question should not simply be how much this costs. The question is why, after more than a year, the state still needs them.
Robert Brooks and the Other Side of Authority
This is also where anyone writing honestly about corrections has to confront Robert Brooks. Brooks died on December 10, 2024, after an encounter with correction officers at Marcy Correctional Facility. Body-worn-camera recordings made public by the Attorney General's Office documented what happened during the encounter. Criminal prosecutions followed.
The case has now moved well beyond allegations. Former correction officer David Kingsley was convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced in December 2025 to twenty-five years to life. Other former officers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received substantial prison sentences. Two officers tried alongside Kingsley were acquitted.
I will not manufacture sympathy I do not feel for someone simply because that person was incarcerated. Prison contains people who have done terrible things, and public discussions of corrections too often erase the victims whose suffering put many of them there in the first place. But sympathy is not the legal standard.
A person sentenced to prison has been sentenced to imprisonment. He has not been sentenced to an extrajudicial beating. He has not been sentenced to torture. He has not been sentenced to death at the hands of correction officers unless a court and the law have imposed such a punishment, and New York does not have a death penalty that correction officers are authorized to administer in an infirmary. That distinction is not softness. It is the rule of law.
If I demand consequences when an incarcerated individual attacks a correction officer, intellectual consistency requires me to demand consequences when a correction officer unlawfully attacks an incarcerated individual. The uniform cannot become immunity any more than incarceration can become immunity. Authority without accountability eventually becomes abuse. Accountability without authority eventually becomes paralysis. A functioning correctional system requires both.
Messiah Nantwi
The death of Messiah Nantwi at Mid-State Correctional Facility on March 1, 2025 makes it harder to dismiss Brooks as one horrific aberration. Nantwi died during the correction-officer strike. The Attorney General's Office recused itself and Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick was appointed special prosecutor. Former correction officer Jonah Levi was eventually convicted of first-degree manslaughter, gang assault and other charges. He was acquitted of murder but sentenced in May 2026 to twenty-five years in prison.
Again, I have no interest in turning an incarcerated man into a saint because he died in custody. That is not necessary to make the point. The state took custody of him.
Once the state does that, the state assumes responsibilities it cannot outsource to personal morality. Government cannot say that because someone committed crimes before entering prison, anything that happens to him afterward is acceptable. If that principle were accepted, prison would cease to be a correctional institution and become a place where punishment is determined informally by whoever possesses physical power at a particular moment. That is incompatible with law. It is also unfair to the thousands of correction officers who do difficult work without beating people to death.
The Brooks and Nantwi cases should not be used to smear every officer in New York. Most correction officers will never be accused of murder, let alone convicted of it. Treating an entire profession as criminal because of the conduct of particular employees is as intellectually dishonest as pretending those cases do not reveal serious failures in supervision, training, culture and accountability.
The June 2026 independent review of DOCCS found problems that deserve attention from anyone who actually cares about fixing the institution. Investigators reported that some current and former officers could not accurately explain important portions of the department's use-of-force policy, including the duty to intervene when another employee uses excessive force. The same review found that both correction staff and incarcerated people frequently reported feeling unsafe. That is an institution telling us something. We should listen.
Eleven Deaths During the Strike, and an Important Correction
There were eleven deaths in DOCCS facilities during the twenty-two-day strike. That number sounds horrifying, and it would be easy for anyone opposed to the strike to imply that those deaths prove the walkout killed incarcerated people. The evidence does not support that conclusion.
The Attorney General's Office of Special Investigation compared the same calendar period across previous years and found seven deaths in 2022, five in 2023, thirteen in 2024 and eleven in 2025. Eight of the eleven deaths during the 2025 strike period were classified as medical deaths, two as suicides and one, Nantwi's, as an alleged homicide at the time of the report. That matters.
If we are going to demand honesty from Albany, unions, correction officers and prison-reform advocates, then those of us writing about the issue have the same obligation. Eleven people died during the strike. The available evidence does not establish that the strike caused an unusual increase in deaths. Facts that complicate an argument do not weaken serious journalism. They distinguish journalism from propaganda.
The False Choice
Much of New York's corrections debate has been built around a false choice. We are told that if we support correction officers, we must ignore misconduct against incarcerated people. We are told that if we demand accountability for Brooks or Nantwi, we must accept policies that officers say have made prisons more dangerous. We are told that protecting incarcerated people and protecting correction officers sit on opposite sides of a political argument. They do not.
A correction officer who is punched, cut, stabbed, spit on, sexually harassed or covered in bodily fluids is not experiencing some abstract consequence of working in corrections. That employee is a New Yorker performing a public job and is entitled to a workplace in which government takes violence against him or her seriously.
An incarcerated person who is beaten unlawfully by the people responsible for his custody is also the victim of a governmental failure, regardless of what crime originally brought him into the institution. Both can be true at once.
There should be serious consequences for an incarcerated person who assaults an officer. There should be serious consequences for an officer who assaults an incarcerated person without lawful justification. There should be meaningful disciplinary tools capable of isolating people who present an immediate danger. There should be due process governing the use of those tools. There should be enough correction officers to operate prisons without routine sixteen-hour and twenty-four-hour shifts. There should be enough cameras and independent oversight to make it difficult for either staff misconduct or inmate violence to disappear into institutional darkness. This should not be controversial. It should be the minimum expectation of a functioning state.
Repeal HALT?
I began this investigation with my father's answer: repeal the HALT Act. I am not yet prepared to claim that HALT alone caused New York's prison crisis because the evidence does not support a conclusion that simple. Staffing was deteriorating. Violence has multiple causes. Contraband remains serious. Management failures are documented. Mental-health demands inside prisons are substantial. Facility culture matters. Training matters. But I am equally unwilling to pretend that HALT has nothing to do with what happened.
Assaults increased dramatically during the years following its implementation. Correction officers have repeatedly identified the law as a central operational problem. A committee established by the state following the 2025 strike unanimously concluded that ten amendments were needed. Legislation containing those recommendations is now pending. Even lawmakers who do not support complete repeal are effectively acknowledging that the law, as written, has problems.
My father goes further. After a quarter century in corrections, his answer is not amendment. It is repeal. That position deserves to be examined rather than dismissed. The next question is what should replace it.
Returning blindly to every policy that existed before 2022 would be no more intelligent than refusing to change HALT because acknowledging flaws would be politically inconvenient. New York should determine which disciplinary tools actually deter serious violence, which inmates require physical separation for the protection of others, what maximum duration is necessary, which mental-health safeguards should remain, how disciplinary decisions should be reviewed, and what protections are necessary to prevent segregation from becoming arbitrary punishment. Then Albany should write policy based on what works inside a prison rather than what sounds compassionate or tough at a press conference.
Service to the People
My father's retirement badge comes from another era of New York corrections. He retired twenty years ago. The system he knew was not perfect. No era of corrections was. There were violent inmates then. There were bad officers then. There were management failures then. Anyone looking backward for a mythical period when prisons worked flawlessly will not find one.
But the words on that badge still matter. Service to the people of the State of New York. Those words impose obligations. They impose an obligation on the correction officer to exercise authority lawfully. They impose an obligation on supervisors to control their officers. They impose an obligation on incarcerated individuals to obey legitimate institutional rules. They impose an obligation on DOCCS to protect its employees. They impose an obligation on Albany to pass laws that can actually function inside the institutions they regulate.
They impose an obligation on the governor to explain why thousands of members of the National Guard are still required to operate a civilian prison system more than a year after a labor crisis was supposedly resolved. They impose an obligation on taxpayers to ask where their money is going and why. Most importantly, they impose an obligation on New York to stop pretending that these problems can be separated from one another.
HALT, assaults, staffing, mandatory overtime, the 2025 strike, the National Guard, Robert Brooks, Messiah Nantwi, use-of-force failures, recruitment problems and officer morale are not ten unrelated controversies. They are pieces of the same institution. The prison system does not need unlimited punishment. It does not need unlimited leniency. It needs control.
It needs enough trained people to maintain that control. It needs disciplinary authority strong enough to matter. It needs oversight strong enough to prevent that authority from becoming abuse. It needs consequences for violent incarcerated individuals, consequences for criminal officers, competent supervision and lawmakers willing to admit when policy written in Albany does not survive contact with the reality behind prison walls.
New York currently has approximately 34,000 people incarcerated in state prisons and fewer than 10,000 correction officers. Thousands of National Guard personnel remain inside those facilities. Assault numbers remain extraordinarily high. The state is still debating changes to a disciplinary law enacted years ago.
That is not evidence of a correctional system that has solved its problems. It is evidence of a state still trying to figure out how to control them. My father left corrections in 2006. Twenty years later, I keep coming back to the same words engraved on that badge. Service to the people of the State of New York. It is time for New York's leaders to remember who the prison system is ultimately supposed to serve.