Plans to release more inmates not well received by North Country state lawmakers
PLATTSBURGH — State Sen. Dan Stec (R-Queensbury) criticized a state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision decision to release certain inmates early to alleviate staffing shortages after the recent 22-day correction officers' strike.
'In view of the current staffing crisis, and in order to have the appropriate balance between the safety and well-being of those working and residing in DOCCS corrections facilities and public safety, it is appropriate that I, as commissioner, exercise my authority … to move individuals from the department's general confinement facilities into residential treatment outcount status,' state corrections Commissioner Daniel Martuscello wrote Monday, in an internal memo, which the department released to The Press-Republican.
Those convicted of violent and non-violent felonies non-drug-related felonies, Class B-to-E violent felonies, and sex offenses would not be eligible for early release.
To be released early, qualifying inmates must have a department-approved resident to be released to, other than a homeless shelter or Department of Social Services placement.
'Commissioner Martuscello has directed that a list of incarcerated individuals who are scheduled to be released in the next few months be reviewed for their transition into residential treatment,' said Thomas Mailey, a department spokesman.
'Governor Hochul's top priority is the safety and well-being of all New Yorkers. The Governor is aware of Commissioner Martuscello's memo and supports his efforts to safely address staffing shortages and personnel concerns,' Gov. Kathy Hochul Spokeswoman Jess D'Amelia, said in a statement.
Return the officers
Stec argued that a better way to deal with the staffing shortage is for Hochul to rescind her ban on state employment for about 2,000 correction officers who did not return to work after the strike.
'This move is a slap in the face to correction officers, who went on strike for 22 days to call for better conditions, and to all law-abiding citizens,' Stec said, in a statement issued on Tuesday.
Assemblyman Billy Jones (D-Chateaugay Lake), a former correction officer himself, agreed with Stec.
'It's been weeks since correctional officers returned to work, but there has been no real progress towards resolving short staffing and safety issues,' Jones said.
'I have been working the last couple of weeks to find a solution to get correction officers back to work but we must work together to find a path forward for Corrections in our state.'
Jones said the DOCCS decision to release prisoners early due to the short staffing issues, is, 'simply ridiculous and unacceptable.'
'A better solution to this problem would be to hire correction officers who were wrongfully terminated. Those who had legitimate excuses to miss work such as family or sick leave, or workman's compensation. They want to return to work, and New York state needs to allow this to happen.'
Jones said state owes it to the workforce and the correction officers who work in prisons and to the families of the officers impacted.
'Releasing convicted felons early is not the solution our taxpayers and law-abiding citizens deserve,' he said.
Union
New York State Correction Officers Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents correction officers, was still reviewing details of the early release policy on Tuesday afternoon, said Matt Keough, the union's executive vice president, in a telephone interview.
'Obviously, I think it's best that people complete their sentences, but we don't make that decision,' he said.
The state has had difficulty recruiting correction officers, even before the recent correction officers' strike in which about 2,000 officers did not return to work.
Before the strike, there were about 2,000 vacant correction officer positions in the system, and now that number has doubled to about 4,000 vacant positions, said Mailey, the department spokesman.
The job has a starting annual base pay of $56,465, including during training, increasing in increments to $72,904 annually after seven years, yet it has been difficult to maintain adequate staffing.
Explanations for the long-standing shortage of correction officers are myriad, including the aging of Baby Boom era officers, changes in state law that have reduced the proportion of less-violent offenders incarcerated, the delay of correction officer academy sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and general labor shortages.
The pandemic played a big role in the shortages, said Keough, of NYSCOPBA.
'That was two years without a single person going through the (correction officer training) academy, he said.
The state has a number of initiatives to rebuild staffing levels, said Mailey, including officer cash bonuses to correction officers who refer applicants who become new correction officers.
The referring officer receives $1,500 when the new officer graduates from the academy, and a second $1,500 payment when the new officer completes a 52-week probationary period.
A 'large-scale' social media and video recruitment campaign began in February focusing on upstate community college students and military personnel.
The department is operating recruitment enters in the Destiny USA mall at Syracuse and Champlain Centre mall at Plattsburgh.
An 'advanced placement initiative' offers applicants with correction officer experience a pay rate commensurate to their experience.
Budget
Hochul's state budget proposal includes language to amend the public officers' law, in relation to residency requirements for certain positions as a correction officer, allowing recruiting from other states which could greatly expand the number of potential applicants.
Stec is skeptical the state will be able to rebuild staffing levels anytime soon, given current discontent among the workforce.
'The National Guard is going to be in these facilities for months, if not beyond the end of the year,' Stec said in a recent telephone interview.
'The National Guard will remain in a support posture and begin to draw down as staff return to work,' Mailey said
'The overall support and draw down will remain under the Governor's discretion. National Guard that remains in place will be used to help prevent an employee from being mandated to work a 24-hour overtime shift.'
Stec said he does not foresee a strong interest in corrections jobs unless the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement, commonly known as the HALT Act, is repealed.
'They will lose people faster than they can replace them,' he said.
The legislation limits long-term solitary confinement to 15 days, the maximum duration under a United Nations standard, and allows solitary confinement to be served in traditional cells, among other changes in procedures.
HALT
Stec said the HALT Act has contributed directly to the staffing shortage, because guarding inmates outside solitary confinement is more labor intensive, and indirectly, because HALT has diminished correction officer morale.
Martuscello, the DOCCS commissioner, has temporarily suspended certain provisions of HALT for 90 days, and in early April will begin evaluating on a facility-to-facility basis whether reinstating suspended provisions would create a safety risk, Mailey said.
A committee of union and state government representatives will make recommendations to the Legislature on potential changes to the HALT Act.
Stec said the debate over the HALT Act is largely geographical and partisan.
A handful of Democrats voted against the legislation in 2022, but he does not foresee enough Democrats switching course now to repeal the law.
He said he suspects that's because there are no state correctional facilities within New York City. With few or no correction officers and families of officers living in those districts, New York City legislators do not face constituent advocacy to repeal HALT, he said.
Keough, of NYSCOPBA, said the union is encouraged that a new class of correction officer trainees started at the academy on Sunday.
The union is advocating that the state increase the Civil Service classification of correction officer from Level 14 to Level 17, which would increase the pay.
'That should certainly help with recruitment and retention,' Keough said.
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2 hours ago
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And Obama's detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump's assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified. 'There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,' Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. 'It is heartbreaking,' he added, 'to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.' People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. 'We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,' Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. 'There is a dilution factor that we're very aware of.' 'The thing you don't want to do is, you don't want to regularize him,' former Attorney General Eric Holder, a close Obama friend and collaborator, told me. When I asked Holder what he meant by 'regularize,' he explained that there was a danger of turning Obama into just another hack commentator—' Tuesdays With Barack, or something like that,' Holder said. Like many of Obama's confidants, Holder bristles at suggestions that the former president has somehow deserted the Trump opposition. 'Should he do more? Everybody can have their opinions,' Holder said. 'The one thing that always kind of pisses me off is when people say he's not out there, or that he's not doing things, that he's just retired and we never hear from him. If you fucking look, folks, you would see that he's out there.' From the April 2016 issue: The Obama doctrine Obama's aides also say that he is loath to overshadow the next generation of Democratic leaders. They emphasize that he spends a great deal of time speaking privately with candidates and officials who seek his advice. But unfortunately for Democrats, they have not found their next fresh generational sensation since Obama was elected 17 years ago (Joe Biden obviously doesn't count). Until a new leader emerges, Obama could certainly take on a more vocal role without 'regularizing' himself in the lowlands of Trump-era politics. Obama remains the most popular Democrat alive at a time of historic unpopularity for his party. Unlike Biden, he appears not to have lost a step, or three. Unlike with Bill Clinton, his voice remains strong and his baggage minimal. Unlike both Biden and Clinton, he is relatively young and has a large constituency of Americans who still want to hear from him, including Black Americans, young voters, and other longtime Democratic blocs that gravitated toward Trump in November. 'Should Obama get out and do more? Yes, please,' Tracy Sefl, a Democratic media consultant in Chicago, told me. 'Help us,' she added. 'We're sinking over here.' Obama's conspicuous scarcity while Trump inflicts such damage isn't just a bad look. It's a dereliction of the message that he built his career on. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, his former life as a community organizer was central to his message. His campaign was not merely for him, but for civic action itself—the idea of Americans being invested in their own change. Throughout his time in the White House, he emphasized that 'citizen' was his most important title. After he left office in 2017, Obama said that he would work to inspire and develop the next cohort of leaders, which is essentially the mission of his foundation. It would seem a contradiction for him to say that he's devoting much of his post-presidency to promoting civic engagement when he himself seems so disengaged. To some degree, patience with Obama began wearing thin when he was still in office. His approval ratings sagged partway through his second term (before rebounding at the end). The rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 was a fiasco, and the midterm elections of 2014 were a massacre. Obama looked powerless as Republicans in Congress ensured that he would pass no major legislation in his second term and blocked his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. 'Obama, out,' the president said in the denouement of his last comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in 2016. In Obama lore, this mic-drop moment would instantly become famous—and prophetic. After Trump's first victory, Obama tried to reassure supporters that this was merely a setback. 'I don't believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes,' he said in an interview with The New Yorker. Insofar as Obama talked about how he imagined his post-presidency, he was inclined to disengage from day-to-day politics. At a press conference in November 2016, Obama said that he planned to 'take Michelle on vacation, get some rest, spend time with my girls, and do some writing, do some thinking.' He promised to give Trump the chance to do his job 'without somebody popping off in every instance.' But in that same press conference, he also allowed that if something arose that raised 'core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it's necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I'll examine it when it comes.' That happened almost immediately. A few days after vowing in his inaugural address to end the 'American carnage' that he was inheriting, Trump signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. The so-called Muslim travel ban would quickly be blocked by the courts, but not before sowing chaos at U.S. points of entry. Obama put out a brief statement through a spokesperson ('the president fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion'), and went on vacation. Trump's early onslaught made clear that Obama's ex-presidency would prove far more complicated than previous ones. And Obama's taste for glamorous settings and famous company—Richard Branson, David Geffen, George Clooney—made for a grating contrast with the turmoil back home. 'Just tone it down with the kitesurfing pictures,' John Oliver, the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, said of Obama in an interview with Seth Meyers less than a month after the president left office. 'America is on fire,' Oliver added. 'I know that people accused him of being out of touch with the American people during his presidency. I'm not sure he's ever been more out of touch than he is now.' Oliver's spasm foreshadowed a rolling annoyance that continued as Trump's presidency wore on: that Obama was squandering his power and influence. 'Oh, Obama is still tweeting good tweets. That's very nice of him,' the anti-Trump writer Drew Magary wrote in a Medium column titled 'Where the Hell Is Barack Obama?' in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. 'I'm sick of Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole.' Obama did insert himself in the 2024 election, reportedly taking an aggressive behind-the-scenes role last summer in trying to nudge Biden out of the race. He delivered a showstopper speech at the Democratic National Convention and campaigned several times for Kamala Harris in the fall. But among longtime Obama admirers I've spoken with, frustration with the former president has built since Trump returned to office. While campaigning for Harris last year, Obama framed the stakes of the election in terms of a looming catastrophe. 'These aren't ordinary times, and these are not ordinary elections,' he said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Yet now that the impact is unfolding in the most pernicious ways, Obama seems to be resuming his ordinary chill and same old bits. Green, of the Progressive Change Institute, told me that when Obama put out his March Madness picks this year, he texted Schultz, the Obama adviser. 'Have I missed him speaking up in other places recently?' Green asked him. 'He did not respond to that.' (Schultz confirmed to me that he ignored the message but vowed to be 'more responsive to Adam Green's texts in the future.') Being a former president is inherently tricky: The role is ill-defined, and peripheral by definition. Part of the trickiness is how an ex-president can remain relevant, if he wants to. This is especially so given the current president. 'I don't know that anybody is relevant in the Trump era,' Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, who wrote a book called Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, said that Trump has succeeded in creating a reality in which every president who came before is suspect. 'All the standard rules of being an ex-president are no longer applicable,' he said. Still, Obama never presented himself as a 'standard rules' leader. This was the idea that his political rise was predicated on—that change required bold, against-the-grain thinking and uncomfortable action. Clearly, Obama still views himself this way, or at least still wants to be perceived this way. (A few years ago, he hosted a podcast with Bruce Springsteen called Renegades.) From the July 1973 issue: The last days of the president Stepping into the current political melee would not be an easy or comfortable role for Obama. He represents a figure of the past, which seems more and more like the ancient past as the Trump era crushes on. He is a notably long-view guy, who has spent a great deal of time composing a meticulous account of his own narrative. 'We're part of a long-running story,' Obama said in 2014. 'We just try to get our paragraph right.' Or thousands of paragraphs, in his case: The first installment of Obama's presidential memoir, A Promised Land, covered 768 pages and 29 hours of audio. No release date has been set for the second volume. But this might be one of those times for Obama to take a break from the long arc of the moral universe and tend to the immediate crisis. Several Democrats I've spoken with said they wish that Obama would stop worrying so much about the 'dilution factor.' While Democrats struggle to find their next phenom, Obama could be their interim boss. He could engage regularly, pointing out Trump's latest abuses. He did so earlier this spring, during an onstage conversation at Hamilton College. He was thoughtful, funny, and sounded genuinely aghast, even angry. He could do these public dialogues much more often, and even make them thematic. Focus on Trump's serial violations of the Constitution one week (recall that Obama once taught constitutional law), the latest instance of Trump's naked corruption the next. Blast out the most scathing lines on social media. Yes, it might trigger Trump, and create more attention than Obama evidently wants. But Trump has shown that ubiquity can be a superpower, just as Biden showed that obscurity can be ruinous. People would notice. Democrats love nothing more than to hold up Obama as their monument to Republican bad faith. Can you imagine if Obama did this? some Democrat will inevitably say whenever Trump does something tacky, cruel, or blatantly unethical (usually before breakfast). Obama could lean into this hypocrisy—tape recurring five-minute video clips highlighting Trump's latest scurrilous act and title the series 'Can You Imagine If I Did This?' Or another idea—an admittedly far-fetched one. Trump has decreed that a massive military parade be held through the streets of Washington on June 14. This will ostensibly celebrate the Army's 250th anniversary, but it also happens to fall on Trump's 79th birthday. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million, including $16 million in damage to the streets. (Can you imagine if Obama did this?) The spectacle cries out for counterprogramming. Obama could hold his own event, in Washington or somewhere nearby. It would get tons of attention and drive Trump crazy, especially if it draws a bigger crowd. Better yet, make it a parade, or 'citizen's march,' something that builds momentum as it goes, the former president and community organizer leading on foot. This would be the renegade move. Few things would fire up Democrats like a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Obama. If nothing else, it would be fun to contemplate while Democrats keep casting about for their long-delayed future. 'The party needs new rising stars, and they need the room to figure out how to meet this moment, just like Obama figured out how to meet the moment 20 years ago,' Jon Favreau, a co-host of Pod Save America and former director of speechwriting for the 44th president, told me. 'Unless, of course, Trump tries to run for a third term, in which case I'll be begging Obama to come out of retirement.'
