The New York state prison system is teetering on disaster as guards have staged an unsanctioned wildcat strike at almost all of its 42 facilities. Governor Kathy Hochul has deployed the National Guard and, on Wednesday, obtained a court order mandating that corrections officers return to work.

The guards will likely stick to their guns on pay and staffing issues. They also appear resolute on one of their most ambitious demands: repealing a four-year-old solitary confinement reform law. That would likely require action by the slow-moving and relatively progressive state legislature, though both Gray and the union’s executive vice president have told New York Focus that officers are asking the governor to explore what authority she has to chip away at the law.

New York’s prison guards have railed against the solitary confinement law, the 2021 Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, since its infancy. The lengthy legislation overhauled the rules surrounding carceral isolation in New York: Among other provisions, it restricted the types of people prisons and jails could send to traditional solitary confinement; limited it to 15 consecutive days (the point at which international human rights bodies deem it torture); and enumerated higher treatment standards for people whom facilities wanted to isolate for longer.

New York prisons are holding hundreds of people in solitary confinement longer than state law permits, effectively refusing to implement the heart of one of the state’s highest-profile recent criminal justice reforms.

The state legislature passed the law, the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, in 2021, but it only went into full effect a year later, on March 31. The law placed strict limitations on whom prisons and jails can place in solitary confinement, what infractions they can send them there for, and how long they can keep them there.

The law has been met with pushback from corrections officers unions, which have launched an aggressive public campaign demanding its repeal. They argue that prolonged solitary confinement, which has been shown to produce grave mental anguish, is key to preventing prison and jail violence.

Officials at the Albion Correctional Facility, a women’s prison halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, sent Doreen to solitary confinement as punishment for getting into a fight. (She said she was defending herself.) They kept her there for 15 days, the maximum allowed by a recently enacted solitary confinement reform law. But under that same law, the prison shouldn’t have put Doreen in solitary in the first place.

Under the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, which went into effect across New York state on March 31, prisons and jails aren’t allowed to hold people with physical or mental disabilities in solitary for any length of time, for any reason. But prison staff placed Doreen in solitary confinement, isolating her in a cell for some 20 hours a day, even though she had a decade-old diagnosis for bipolar disorder and, according to her mother, a doctor at a county jail diagnosed her with schizophrenia before she entered prison last year. Albion gives her medication for both illnesses, her mother said.

When it’s time for Leroy Burton to attend the “therapeutic” classroom time offered to his unit at Upstate Correctional Facility, a state prison at the northern tip of New York, he puts his hands through a slot in the door to his cell. An officer on the other side cuffs his wrists, then opens the door so a second officer can pat Burton down, connect the handcuffs to a chain, wrap the chain around his waist, and use it as a leash to walk him down the hall. When they get to the room where the therapeutic programming is held, the officers order Burton to kneel on a box so they can place another pair of cuffs around his ankles. They guide him to his seat and shackle him to a table, where he stays for the duration of the classroom time — usually over two hours, he said.

Shackling is the rule, not the exception, for the more than 1,400 people incarcerated daily in units like Burton’s across the state. The prison agency has instructed superintendents to use restraints for all of them, despite state law that bans the practice without individualized safety assessments.

A recently enacted reform law strictly limits the reasons for which prisons and jails may send incarcerated people to solitary confinement as punishment. But the New York state prison system has been using its own criteria, illegally sending hundreds of people to solitary for lesser infractions, New York Focus has found.

In early 2023, top members of New York state legislative committees got to publicly question Anthony Annucci, the “acting” head of the state prison agency, for the first time in almost a year. Last March, lawmakers refused to confirm Annucci’s nomination to the position — which he has held for the past nine years — paradoxically letting him keep his post.

Annucci faced legislators again last week after 10 months of flouting them: Shortly after his last hearing, the landmark Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act went into effect, and Annucci’s department has violated nearly every facet of the law since. But during the hearing, an annual meeting to discuss public safety elements of the state budget, the perpetual interim commissioner seemed comfortable. Most of the legislators didn’t seem to know what to ask.