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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”