Understaffed units. Apathetic leadership. Anguished kids locked alone in rooms for hours at a time. For some workers at Industry Residential Center, a youth prison complex near Rochester, a job they thought would offer a way to help troubled kids has turned into a nightmare.

Under state regulations, boys incarcerated at the 130-bed complex are supposed to spend their days in class, participate in vocational programs, and socialize with peers in their housing unit. Instead, they've been locked in cells, sometimes for upwards of 23 hours a day, for days or weeks on end, according to a lawsuit filed last month against the state agency that runs the facility. Most of the cells lack bathrooms, leaving the youth to urinate into bottles when they can’t hold it, and some lack air conditioning, staff said. Kids in one building spend summer days sleeping on the floor without clothes.

Crisis is the status quo at Industry, as it has been across much of New York’s youth prison system. For years, pervasive dysfunction has flown under the radar. Staff and advocates for youth hope to change that.

State lawmakers want gas companies to give New Yorkers more notice when they’re planning to dig up a gas line — and a chance to consider cheaper or cleaner alternatives.

New York’s eight largest gas utilities together spend close to $1 billion a year replacing old pipes, and charge the expense to New Yorkers’ monthly bills. It’s become the largest driver of rising gas bills in New York. The state’s largest gas utility, National Grid, alone plans to spend roughly $500 million on the work just this year in New York City and Long Island — its single biggest construction expense. 

The work is laborious, often involving months of jackhammering and repaving streets and going building by building to swap out gas connections. And it’s often done with little warning.

As Washington has tightened its grip on social services, New York officials have said little about how they plan to adapt the state’s safety net amid a growing affordability crisis.

That may change during Thursday’s budget hearing in Albany, which will provide a rare opportunity for officials at the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and the Office of Children and Family Services to lay out a vision for addressing historic federal cuts while also supporting the state’s most vulnerable New Yorkers.

Here are five questions we’d pose to the state’s human services leaders.

A major Manhattan landlord that could stand to benefit from the reconstruction of Penn Station has a stake in one of the three proposals being considered by President Donald Trump’s administration to remake the rail hub.