When Jerome Wright hears from people incarcerated in New York prisons, they describe a system in crisis.

“I can tell you, unequivocally, from people in maximum, medium, every type of security they have in there, that the system has devolved into basically a lockdown,” said Wright, co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, who spent more than seven years in solitary confinement in New York prisons. “It’s almost like the entire system is in solitary confinement … People are losing their minds, literally. Some people are committing suicide. But most of all, nobody is getting any of the help they were sent to prison for.”

This should not be the case in New York, where lawmakers in 2021 passed the HALT Act, designed to limit which infractions can be punished with solitary confinement, cap stints in solitary to 15 days (after which people can be moved to special, non-isolation units), and ban certain vulnerable populations from solitary altogether. Yet as lawsuits, a series of investigations in New York Focus, and reports by the Offices of the Inspector General, independent oversight bodies, legislators, and criminal justice reform groups have outlined, New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) has failed to implement the law properly, and people incarcerated across the state continue to be isolated and abused.

This was most recently backed up by a damning independent report, commissioned by DOCCS and released quietly on July 3. The report outlined “systemic shortcomings in oversight, accountability, and culture” in New York prisons, as well as racial bias and an entrenched “us versus them mentality” among correctional staff.

Yet correctional unions have responded by demanding that the state eliminate the law they are failing to follow. The state correctional officers’ union (NYSCOPBA) and Republican politicians have asked for repeal or weakening of the HALT Act, and their talking points have gained a foothold across New York media, appearing in newspapers and radio stations in Albany, Plattsburgh, Elizabethtown, Watertown, and Malone.

Over the past two decades, as the movement to end or limit the use of solitary confinement has grown throughout the country, correctional officials and unions often double down on claims that long-term solitary confinement is a necessary tool to isolate dangerous people and deter violence. Such arguments have been used to block reforms in other states, including legislation modeled on the HALT Act.

But studies repeatedly find no evidence that solitary actually makes prisons safer. In fact, prisons that have piloted alternative units that separate people from general population without isolating them have seen decreased rule infractions for violence. That was the path the state legislature and HALT supporters hoped New York would take after the HALT Act’s implementation in 2022. But as Wright’s descriptions and the recent DOCCS-commissioned report make clear, the brutal and punitive environment within New York prisons leads to a dependence on harsh tactics like solitary confinement.

Undermining the HALT Act

According to government and media investigations, DOCCS has failed over the past four years to properly document its use of solitary confinement. It has also been found to hold some people in solitary beyond 15 days, and illegally place some people with disabilities in solitary. The law has substantially reduced the number of people in SHU, the official name of solitary units. But as Wright explained, even general-population units are often locked down for most of the day.

“Corrections officers have been against HALT since before it was passed by the legislature … have continued to be resistant to implementing HALT, and have also continued to scapegoat HALT for any violence or the conditions in general inside the prison system,” said Bernadette Rabuy, a senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

NYSCOPBA unsuccessfully sued to block HALT before it went into effect, claiming the law evinced “a deliberate and callous indifference” to lives and safety. Then-union president Michael B. Powers warned state legislators that “the violent predators that lurk inside our prison facilities can’t wait for HALT to be implemented.” In the ensuing years, the union has consistently lobbied the legislature to repeal HALT.

Correctional officers (often called COs) took their most drastic step in early 2025, when around 10,000 walked off the job in an illegal work stoppage, demanding HALT rollbacks. The timing was suspicious: Officers declared the wildcat strike just hours after a special prosecutor announced the arrests of six officers for beating Robert Brooks, a 43-year-old Black man, to death in December 2024, in a brutal attack caught on video.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) called the National Guard into the understaffed prisons, and incarcerated people were locked down, without access to programming, visitation, or recreation. At least eight incarcerated people died during the 22-day work stoppage, including by suicide or delayed medical attention. During the strike, officers turned off their body cameras and beat Messiah Nantwi, age 22, to death, while he was shackled. An officer planted a knife in Nantwi’s cell in an attempt to cover up the murder.

Ultimately, the deal forged between Gov. Hochul and NYSCOPBA to end the strike suspended parts of HALT for 90 days. It also created a committee tasked with proposing HALT rollbacks. Although the committee—made up entirely of union and correctional representatives—has no power to amend legislation, its existence gives COs and their supporters something official-sounding to point to, and inspired Senate Republicans to introduce HALT rollback legislation in March.

State prisons have still not recovered from the strike. “Things seem to be paralyzed following the illegal job action strike more than a year ago,” said Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, an independent prison watchdog established by state law. Staffing has not returned to pre-strike levels, which already had many vacant posts, leaving overworked staff in a “morale crisis.” Meanwhile, “incarcerated people aren’t getting access to the services, programming, and out-of-cell time they once did. So people are just spending huge amounts of time idle,” Scaife said. “That contributes to the frustration, anxiety, and tension.” These dire conditions are particularly damaging for the large portion of the population with mental illness.

“It feels like I’m in SHU,” wrote Ronald Alston about conditions in general population, in a late-2025 legal affirmation. “I don’t get to socialize. I have no human contact; we’re yelling at one another all day. I feel frustrated. I feel taxed and tired—really tired.”

Solitary Confinement Does Not Reduce Violence

At the heart of opponents of the HALT Act’s claims is the argument that solitary confinement is necessary to curtail violence in prisons. That is not what the evidence shows.

In keeping with earlier findings, a 2025 meta-analysis concluded that punitive solitary confinement does not appear to improve institutional safety, and “may even have a criminogenic effect on subsequent offending.” Solitary may even make communities less safe. Time spent in solitary—which causes well-documented psychological and physical harm—is correlated with a higher likelihood of being rearrested after release.

In 2024, 12 former correctional officials, including a former DOCCS commissioner, wrote a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, disputing “the myth that solitary is necessary for safety.” Five former correctional leaders expressed similar concerns in a 2021 amicus brief, writing: “Rather than reducing violence in prisons, the available evidence has proved the opposite is true: letting prisoners out of solitary confinement has resulted in a dramatic decrease in prison violence.”

When Colorado significantly reduced its use of solitary confinement, assaults on staff decreased. After North Dakota decreased solitary by 74 percent between 2016 and 2020, incarcerated people and staff members alike reported improved health and well-being, enhanced interactions, and less exposure to violence. And when Oregon launched special teams in two facilities, tasked with engaging with people in solitary and helping them transition back to general population, the prisons experienced a decrease in both disciplinary infractions for violence and use-of-force incidents.

Some facilities have eased their reliance on solitary confinement through the creation of social, program-based alternative units. From 1977 to 2013, New York operated the Merle Cooper Program, a unit designated for people considered high-risk, which provided intensive programming, peer-led initiatives, and the ability to earn more responsibilities.

“You were treated like a human being, and you earned the right to be treated like that,” said Wright, who spent years in the program. “The staff was there because they wanted to be there.” Wright said officers told him posts in the unit were considered safe and desirable, despite holding the people considered the highest risk.

The HALT Act established new Residential Rehabilitation Units (RRUs), intended to hold people who commit serious infractions and need additional time away from general population beyond the 15-day limit in the law. “They’re getting programming, they’re getting counseling,” explained Wright. “It doesn’t say you’ve got to let them out, that they go back to population.” Yet that is exactly what some union officials have implied: In 2025 testimony, one representative suggested that HALT allows incarcerated individuals to “rape” and “stab” staff “with no consequences.”

Violence Against Incarcerated People

While blaming violence on solitary reforms, NYSCOPBA points to DOCCS data, which report increasing attacks on staff each year since 2012. But HALT supporters dispute this characterization. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to conclude that violence and dangerous conditions are the result of a law that is being neither followed nor implemented in full,” wrote state Sen. Julia Salazar, a HALT sponsor, in a January 2026 report analyzing testimony before a joint committee.

While any staff injuries are concerning, DOCCS reported just 12 serious and one severe injury stemming from its reported 2,647 incidents of assault or harassment against staff in the first half of 2026. The Correctional Association analyzed DOCCS’s own data, finding that while the number of assaults on staff did reportedly rise in the two years following the implementation of HALT, the number of reported staff injuries actually decreased.

Meanwhile, reported incidents of staff using force on incarcerated people have more than tripled over the past decade—from around 6,000 in 2016 to around 22,000 in 2025—even as the overall prison population dropped significantly. A 2025 New York Times investigation documented many cases of officers brutally beating people who, like Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, were in restraints. Wright pointed out that while many incarcerated people have died at the hands of staff in New York prisons, the opposite has not occurred in more than four decades.

In the recent DOCCS-commissioned report, around half of incarcerated respondents in Mid-State and Marcy Correctional Facilities reported experiencing force at the hands of staff, with more frequency and harsher violence used on Black people, fitting with a long history of racial disparities in discipline in New York prisons. People also described staff assaulting people off camera in blind spots, the infirmary, or in transport vans. Nearly all former correctional officers interviewed admitted the existence of “Goon Squads,” informal groups of officers who use excessive force.

Among the current and former officers interviewed, just one former officer said they would have intervened to stop the fatal beatings of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi. Instead, “all others referenced cultural norms against intervening to stop fellow officers.” A 2023 investigation revealed that COs in New York prisons protect each other behind a “blue wall,” including by falsifying incident reports.

A 2023 analysis of more than 290 attempts by DOCCS to fire staff for abusing people or covering up mistreatment found that just 28 were ultimately fired. In fact, at least three of the officers involved in killing Robert Brooks had previously been accused of assault in federal lawsuits.

“It’s a lot harder to make the transition [away from reliance on solitary] than people realize,” said Eldon Vail, who helped reduce solitary confinement while running Washington state’s prison system, and has since consulted in multiple prison systems. “The culture is so tough to penetrate.”

What Should Prisons Do?

Solitary reforms in other states, like California, have been derailed by a similar alliance between COs and Republican supporters. But repealing an existing reform would set a new precedent, and advocates and politicians have been paying close attention to HALT since it went into effect. “Everyone’s watching what happens in New York,” Jessica Sandoval, director of Unlock the Box, a national solitary confinement advocacy campaign, told The Nation in 2023.

The legislature appears committed to the law. But Rabuy noted that New York has a history of trying to roll back criminal justice reforms through the budget process, citing the repeated weakening of New York’s 2019 bail reform legislation, as well as 2025 rollbacks to its 2019 criminal discovery reform, and ongoing pressure to walk back New York’s 2017 “Raise the Age” bill, which prevents 16- and 17-year-olds from being prosecuted as adults. And Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor, has made HALT a campaign issue, calling Hochul the “most pro-criminal governor in the United States of America” in August.

The DOCCS-commissioned report presented a bigger picture of what is wrong in New York prisons.

For instance, officials often blame understaffing—a problem that exists across prison systems, largely due to the traumatic and mentally damaging nature of the job, and which was exacerbated in New York after the strike. HALT opponents argue that, because the law mandates programming in the RRUs, this leaves even fewer staff in general population, contributing to lockdowns and lack of services.

But understaffing can equally be understood as overincarceration. In 2025, the Justice Policy Institute outlined specific steps the governor, DOCCS, and the legislature could take to decrease prison populations. “There are plenty of people inside who are ready to come home,” said Rabuy, noting several pieces of unpassed legislation that would increase opportunities for release.

DOCCS, which actually has a higher ratio of staff to incarcerated people than most other prison systems, recently hired an outside consulting firm to do a staffing analysis, and says it is currently reorganizing operations to use existing staff more efficiently.

Amend, a program that aims to reduce the debilitating health effects of prisons, was hired this year by DOCCS to offer suggestions for engaging staff and improving prisons. Among other suggestions, Amend recommended creating a panel of around 30 senior staff members and incarcerated leaders to make suggestions for improving implementation of HALT.

Scaife agrees this type of cooperative panel would be more effective than the “HALT committee” established by Gov. Hochul following the strike, which was composed entirely of correctional and union members. “I do think that having an iterative stakeholder process, whereby people go through these intense discussions and working groups and come up with solutions—I think that’s what it would take to come up with changes that everybody can buy into,” she said.

In addition, experts emphasize that solitary and other problems trace back to the adversarial culture in prisons. As Vincent Schiraldi, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, told Columbia Magazine, “When you have public policy based on the kind of anger and punitive sentiment that we had with mass incarceration, it’s not surprising that our facilities got meaner.”

Vail noted that, when a prison system commits to reducing long-term solitary, the data “will show if you’re doing this right, that violence goes down.” If one-off incidents occur, “you continue to try to learn from things that go wrong, but you don’t abandon the principle and say, ‘Well, this didn’t work because one incident happened.’”