New York is struggling to bring an end to a strike involving thousands of corrections officers that is leading to severe staffing shortages in the state’s prisons and concerns about deteriorating safety conditions. 

As the state tries to force corrections officers back to work, it has begun transferring inmates in prisons facing staffing shortages to other facilities.

The crisis began on February 17 at the Collins Correctional Facility, five days after a corrections officer was injured during an inmate uprising that broke out when an inmate was discovered to have a contraband cell phone. Inmates also reportedly took control of three areas of a dormitory during the “chaos.” The incident followed years of safety complaints from corrections officers and concerns about staffing shortages, and while there has been a backlash against corrections officers following the beating death of an inmate at a separate facility. 

In 2019, there were 1043 assaults on prison staff, which lept to 1,938 in the first 11 months of 2024. Assaults on inmates also rose from 1,267 in 2019 to 2,697 during the first 11 months of 2024. Meanwhile, the state corrections commissioner said that there were about 2,000 unfilled positions, which the corrections union says is only furthering its members’ fears for their safety. 

Despite a law that prohibits public sector strikes in New York, the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, corrections officers at the Collins Correctional Facility and the Elmira Correction Facility walked off the job. The strike quickly spread to more than 30 prisons across the state. 

State officials are scrambling to quell the illegal strike. A state Supreme Court judge, Donna Siwek, ordered the corrections officers to end their wildcat strike, as she said it was prohibited by law. Meanwhile, Governor Hochul called up 3,500 members of the National Guard to offset the staffing shortages caused by the strike.

“These disruptive and unsanctioned work stoppages by some correction officers must end as they are jeopardizing the safety of their colleagues, the prison population, and causing undue fear for the residents in the surrounding communities,” Ms. Hochul said.

While the National Guard was deployed to help fill staffing shortages, over the weekend, state troopers started serving judicial orders to striking workers and warned that they could be arrested if they were held in contempt for ignoring the court order to return to work. 

A spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Thomas Mailey, said in a statement Saturday that the striking workers have been listed as “absent without leave” amid their “illegal work action.” 

“Those participating in the illegal job action will face administrative penalties along with department discipline for violating the state’s Taylor Law and a judge’s temporary restraining order,” Mr. Mailey said. 

On Monday, the Albany Times Union reported that “some” corrections officers went back to work after the warnings from state officials. It reported that “a little more than 1,500 correction officers and sergeants are working at state prisons.” Negotiations between the governor’s office, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and the union that represents more than 13,000 corrections officers, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, or NYSCOPBA, began on Monday and were scheduled to continue on Tuesday. 

NYSCOPBA has said it did not sanction the strike and that it wants the dispute to be resolved. 

The director of research at the Empire Center, Ken Girardin, has faulted NYSCOPBA for apparently not taking advantage of the pathways for legal remedies to the safety concerns laid out in state law before the strike began. 

However, the union was not the only group that Mr. Girardin criticized, as he laid out a series of failures at multiple levels of state government that could have potentially prevented the strike. In a column for the New York Post, he said state officials have not “dropped the hammer” on NYSCOPBA as they did with other unions in the past when public employees tried to strike. He cited the example of the 2005 New York City transit strike when the state fined the transit workers’ union. 

“This situation was years in the making, and when the dust settles, both the Hochul administration and the state legislature are going to need to do some serious reflection on what went wrong in the lead-up and went wrong in the first few hours,” Mr. Girardin told the Sun about the corrections strike. “This is an extremely dangerous situation, both for people working in the prisons and for the inmates.”

To bring an end to the strike, Mr. Girardin said the state government would likely need to switch up its current strategy a bit. He said that Ms. Hochul has been working with a “downstate mediator” to try to resolve the standoff, who the corrections officers do not trust, and he suggested the governor should try to find a mediator who understands the conditions corrections officers face, but also understands the “importance of preserving the state ban on strikes.” 

As corrections officers refuse to return to work, state officials said that the striking workers are not getting paid, and their health insurance will be canceled. 

Meanwhile, some inmates were transferred from the Collins Correctional Facility to other prisons across the state due to staffing shortages. Attorneys for inmates have also complained that the strike is leading to deteriorating conditions in the prisons, as they have said that some inmates have been given cold meals and have not been able to shower or receive medical care. 

Over the weekend, a 61-year-old inmate, Jonathon Grant, who was serving a 34-to-40-year sentence for rape and burglary, was found dead in his cell at the Auburn Correctional Facility. State officials did not provide details about his cause of death. However, a public defender who gave counsel to Grant argued that the walkout led to a disruption of medical care. 

While the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said a medical examiner will determine the cause of Grant’s death, the news is fueling concerns that conditions in the state’s prisons will only further deteriorate.