Court Temporarily Reverses Prison Agency’s Suspension of Solitary Confinement Law

DOCCS stopped following parts of the law, which placed strict restrictions on prisons’ and jails’ use of isolation, after thousands of corrections officers and sergeants launched a wildcat strike in February. The officers said they staged the action over workplace safety and understaffing issues, specifically calling for the repeal of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, or HALT, which they allege has led to increased violence.

As part of its negotiations with the officers, DOCCS suspended its compliance with HALT — which it has never fully implemented — for 90 days, using a provision that allows for leeway in the case of “facility-wide emergencies.” The department kept the suspension in place past the 90 days, promising that it would restore HALT requirements on a “facility-by-facility” basis as post-strike staffing levels improved.

In April, roughly a month after the end of the strike, the Legal Aid Society filed a class action lawsuit in state court arguing that DOCCS was abusing its emergency authority to permanently gut HALT. Whereas HALT mandates a minimum of seven hours of out-of-cell time, incarcerated people across the prison system had been languishing in their cells for between 21 and 24 hours a day, the lawsuit alleged. It asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction overturning the suspension. The court heard oral arguments last week and granted the injunction on Tuesday.

Judge Daniel Lynch wrote that DOCCS has abused the leeway HALT gave the department to deal with emergencies. The law allows the prison commissioner to suspend aspects of HALT on a facility-by-facility basis, but he blew past that limit and suspended the law in all of DOCCS’s facilities, and for an indefinite period — “essentially permitting the exception to swallow the rule,” Lynch wrote.

DOCCS issued its suspension order “without any specific findings of fact related to the conditions in each facility,” the judge explained.

Lynch will not overturn the HALT suspension until July 11. At that point, DOCCS can only suspend the law at certain facilities if it submits new, legally compliant emergency declarations with explanations of why solitary confinement regulations would exacerbate the emergencies. DOCCS must file those emergency declarations publicly with the court, the judge ordered. For the next week, the suspension can remain in place.