Perspectives Criminal Justice New York State

How New York’s Maximum-Security Women’s Prison Has Failed to HALT Solitary Confinement

A landmark reform law was meant to overhaul carceral punishment in New York. Getting prisons to follow it has been an uphill battle.

Sara G. Kielly · September 25, 2024

Since its passage, DOCCS has systematically violated nearly every facet of HALT. | Photo: StephanHoerold / Illustration: Chris Gelardi

This article is part of a series of investigations into New York’s implementation of solitary confinement reforms.

This article was supported by a grant from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.

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This article was supported by a grant from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.

This is a reported opinion article. Sara Kielly is an investigative journalist, poet, and jailhouse lawyer currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

In early 2022, Sam, a woman incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, stood accused of possessing drug contraband and was placed in solitary confinement prior to a disciplinary hearing. At the hearing, officials wouldn’t produce photos of the alleged contraband, she said. Still, a hearing officer found her guilty, sentenced her to 90 days in solitary, and took away her visitation privileges.

An appeals committee eventually reversed the guilty verdict. But in the approximately 30 days it took to come to that decision, Sam missed out on a planned visit with family from Arizona.

“It broke my heart. My family does not have the money to throw away on plane tickets and vacation time to come see me from across the country,” she told me, in tears.

“I was denied the ability to defend myself at the hearing and to present evidence of my innocence,” Sam said. “I had no chance.”

A few weeks after Sam’s ordeal, New York overhauled how it handles solitary confinement cases like hers. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act went into effect at the end of March 2022, and was meant to be a game-changer for carceral punishment in New York.

State Prisons Are Routinely Violating New York’s Landmark Solitary Confinement Law

Chris Gelardi and Emily Brown

The law limited the types of infractions that can land someone in isolation and barred New York state prisons and local jails from sending the youngest incarcerated people, the elderly, and those diagnosed with mental illnesses or disabilities to solitary. It also prohibited them from holding anyone in typical “segregated confinement” — which involves being locked in a cell, alone, for up to 17 hours a day — for longer than 15 consecutive days (or 20 days within a two-month period). For those with longer isolation sentences, which can last weeks or months, HALT created special units to provide a less punitive, “rehabilitative” environment, with guaranteed access to recreation and programming.

The law also included a relatively novel and crucial provision that granted people facing the possibility of solitary the right to representation at disciplinary hearings “by any attorney or law student, or by any paralegal or incarcerated person,” with limited exceptions. This aspect of HALT is critical in shielding incarcerated people from erroneous solitary sentences — as evidenced by Sam’s story, as well as the prison system’s well established history of improperly using segregation for retaliation or as punishment for minor offenses.

But at Bedford Hills, New York’s only maximum-security prison for women, implementing HALT has been an uphill battle. My own experience as a prisoners’ rights advocate and jailhouse lawyer currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills, together with accounts by other women and a former employee, illustrate how the prison, as well as the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) administration, have circumvented both the spirit and the letter of the law.

The halt Solitary Confinement Act was passed after years of activism on both sides of prison walls. The text of the law reflects the widespread use of solitary in New York prisons prior to its passage: “On any given day, there are 3,000 people, disproportionately people of color, in state prisons in Special Housing Units (SHU)” — where people serve traditional segregated confinement sentences — “and thousands more in other forms of isolation.”

The law also points out that, despite claims from DOCCS authorities that they only used solitary to respond to serious violence, “five out of six disciplinary infractions that result in SHU time in New York prisons are for non-violent conduct.”

Bedford Hills and DOCCS administration have circumvented both the spirit and the letter of the law.

Before HALT, segregated confinement sometimes lasted “months, years, and even decades in New York,” the law notes. The United Nations’ Mandela Rules for the treatment of prisoners, which HALT is meant to reflect, state that solitary confinement beyond 15 days amounts to torture and should be banned.

Since its passage, DOCCS has systematically violated nearly every facet of HALT. In April, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit charging that the department continued to subject New Yorkers to “unlawfully prolonged periods of segregation.” A report last year from the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit prison oversight body, also documented “numerous departures” from the law, like holding incarcerated people in solitary for “upwards of six times the legal limit,” failing to provide access to required group out-of-cell time and programs, shackling people participating in those programs, and more. The violations disproportionately affect people of color: The department’s own monthly reports show that, as of September 1, nearly two-thirds of the people in SHU were Black, despite Black people making up less than half of the state’s prison population.

Incarcerated people have decried the violations. So have some prison staff. A former employee at Bedford Hills told me they were so disturbed by the disregard for HALT that they and other staff held closed-door meetings with the prison’s superintendent, Eileen Gonzalez-Russell, about it. The former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, asserted that Gonzalez-Russell, her administration, and the corrections officers union have made concerted efforts to undermine the implementation of HALT in Bedford Hills and throughout the state prison system. The meetings didn’t sway the superintendent, and the employee left Bedford Hills in 2023, in part due to the prison’s solitary confinement practices.

Prisons Are Illegally Throwing People With Disabilities Into Solitary Confinement

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Even with the prison system’s disregard for the law, however, the long fight for HALT has not been in vain. The number of people held in New York’s prison SHUs has dropped dramatically, from roughly 3,000 at any given time before the law went into effect to 263 as of September 1. But these numbers don’t include the more than 2,000 people held long-term in the “rehabilitative” alternative isolation units. And there’s an unknown number of people in “Residential Mental Health Units” (as they’re called in men’s prisons) and “Therapeutic Behavioral Units” (in women’s prisons), where prisons isolate people diagnosed with “serious” mental illnesses. These units are simply SHU by another name.

This lack of transparency is cause for concern. “Mentally ill individuals at Bedford are being constructively isolated, causing more mental illness, trauma, and cyclical behavior patterns,” the former employee said.

At Bedford, I represent people in disciplinary hearings, most of whom are Black or Latina. These individuals are accused of various top-tier infractions, including assault, attempted assault, and possession of drug contraband. But they haven’t always been able to get the representation that HALT guarantees them.

In June 2022 — more than two months after HALT went into effect — Wy, a Black woman in her thirties diagnosed with a serious mental illness and intellectual capacity issues, was accused of multiple disciplinary infractions, including assault on staff, refusing a direct order, and “unsanitary acts.” “The disciplinary officer denied me the right to have a lawyer at my hearing and only permitted me to have another inmate represent me,” she said.

In August of that year, facility staff told me that I could only represent people if they were being held in solitary before their hearing — prison discipline’s version of pretrial incarceration. I filed a grievance with Bedford Hills administration stating that DOCCS was violating HALT and requesting that all incarcerated people be granted disciplinary representation upon their request, regardless of confinement status, in compliance with the law. Weeks passed, then months, and I didn’t hear back.

Four months later, DOCCS issued regulations that enshrined, among other HALT-violating measures, the illegal pre-hearing confinement requirement for representation. (The following week, Bedford Hills finally replied to my grievance, denying it. I immediately filed an appeal, but never got a response.)

Nearly two-thirds of the people in SHU are Black, despite Black people making up less than half of the state’s prison population.

The DOCCS regulations met fierce pushback. New York’s #HALTSolitary campaign, which played a critical role in passing the law, filed a public comment denouncing them. And in February 2023, 52 state legislators sent a letter to DOCCS demanding that it reverse the rules.

That spring, with no explanation given to the incarcerated population at Bedford Hills, staff once again began permitting representation for all people accused of eligible infractions. And in July 2023, DOCCS finally issued official regulations codifying the right to representation for all incarcerated people.

But damage was already done. At that point, many incarcerated people had been unjustly denied disciplinary representation, and those found guilty were sanctioned to varying ranges of isolation.

Even in cases where I’ve been allowed to represent accused people, DOCCS staff have prevented us from getting a fair hearing.

Earlier this year, while representing a transgender woman accused of setting a fire in her cell, a disciplinary staff member claimed that I was being “aggressively argumentative” and threatened to write me up for zealously advocating on behalf of my client. The staff member openly instructed the hearing officer to find my client guilty — and, when I objected, threatened to have me removed from the proceedings.

Similar instances took place throughout 2023 and 2024. In one case, a hearing officer refused to let me view surveillance camera footage that had been introduced as evidence of my client’s infraction. In another case, an officer delayed proceedings multiple times, ostensibly to allow staff to retrieve evidence. But they never produced the evidence, and the officer still found my client guilty.

After I appealed these and other violations, DOCCS’s central office reversed four hearings and expunged the charges from the incarcerated people’s records. Each time, however, the reversal came too late: The defendants had already served most or all of their unlawful solitary confinement sanctions.

“We know that violations are occurring.”

—state Senator Julia Salazar

I wasn’t the only one experiencing these continued violations. In December 2022, Sam was again accused of having drug contraband on her person. This time, HALT was in full effect, which should have given her a chance to defend herself. But staff ignored the law at seemingly every turn. They denied her a representative, she said. And the hearing officer took over seven days to start her hearing and extended the process numerous times without her consent — both HALT violations.

“Everything about my hearing violated the HALT law, even though I cited HALT numerous times to disciplinary staff and the hearing officer,” Sam said.

“I am alarmed that New York State continues to violate the HALT Solitary Confinement Law,” state Senator Julia Salazar, HALT’s main Senate sponsor, said in a statement. “We know, based on the firsthand accounts my office receives from numerous incarcerated people throughout the state, including from Bedford Hills, and by the Department’s own published data, that violations are occurring.”

In response to my request for a comment for this article, a DOCCS spokesperson asserted that “Bedford Hills Correctional Facility has been in compliance with the HALT law since it was enacted.”

The spokesperson also accused me of professional malpractice. “These outrageous, year-and-a-half old allegations are untrue and to report them as fact would be a journalistic blunder,” they wrote in an email.

This response is unsurprising, given that the department regularly deploys gaslighting rhetoric to hide its violations of the law. When legislators have accused DOCCS of violating HALT, for example, the agency has repeatedly responded by telling the law’s authors that they’ve been misinterpreting the legislation they wrote.

The department also plays games with semantics to hide its violations. In response to inquiries for this article, DOCCS claimed that, as of October 26, 2023, “no incarcerated individual has been sent to the Bedford Hills Special Housing Unit in the past two months.” At that time, the SHU at Bedford Hills was closed for renovations and the administration was not permitted to house anyone there. Yet solitary confinement continued all the same through the use of the “rehabilitative” and mental health isolation units.

Lesser Infractions Aren’t Supposed to Land You in Solitary Confinement. They Do Anyway.

Chris Gelardi

Prison Department Writes Its Way Out of Following Solitary Confinement Law — Again

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To be clear, this problem is not only about Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. It is a statewide issue affecting all incarcerated New Yorkers and their families, particularly those of color. According to DOCCS’s latest report, people of color occupied more than six times as many segregation cells — not including mental health units — as their white peers.

Many DOCCS corrections officers have argued that HALT is dangerous, as it limits their ability to discourage disorder. Some people incarcerated at Bedford Hills who are seeking to rehabilitate themselves, following the rules and orders given to them, are amenable to that argument. While there are still consequences for misconduct, there is a sentiment among some incarcerated people that they are being disproportionately affected by a lack of effective punishment for disciplinary infractions by other people.

“I do feel there is a need for some form of order post-HALT,” said Natalie, an incarcerated woman at Bedford Hills. “A cooling off period after a fight is needed for preventative purposes and to act as a deterrent to this behavior.”

There is no question that New York state has a long journey ahead of it in protecting its incarcerated population from the harms of solitary confinement and ensuring a safe, secure, and productive environment for them. Other states and countries are developing alternatives that offer models for how DOCCS can move forward in a time when solitary confinement is no longer an acceptable punishment for misbehavior.

In the meantime, simply enforcing the law remains a challenge.