Latest news with #DOCCS
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Several former NYS correction officers sue state, DOCCS claiming wrongful termination
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — Several former New York State correction officers are suing the state and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to get their jobs back. DOCCS started firing employees in March after the multi-week strike took place at facilities statewide, with correction officers asking for safer working conditions, limits to overtime, and a reversal of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act. DOCCS says strike is over, more than 2K fired According to a complaint filed on Friday, over a dozen former correction officers are suing the state, claiming they were wrongfully terminated while they were off the job under the Family Medical Leave Act. The suit calls for monetary damages and the reinstatement of employment and health benefits. DOCCS said it does not comment on pending litigation. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
As dust begins to settle on prison chaos, reformers hold somber hearing
ALBANY — 'I hate coming here,' Robert Ricks said. Ricks sat at the focal point of a hearing room in the New York state legislative office building. He'd traveled to Albany last Wednesday to testify for a second time about his son, Robert Brooks, whom prison guards beat to death in December at the Central New York prison where he was incarcerated. Video of the gruesome killing sparked nationwide outcry and calls to reform New York's state prison system. Prison reform was the topic of last week's all-day hearing, which took place as the state legislature approaches its final weeks of the annual legislative session. Amid emotional testimony, Ricks outlined the Robert Brooks Agenda for Justice, a suite of legislation to expand prison oversight and make it easier to hold abusive officers to account. If lawmakers don't pass the bills before the session ends in less than a month, they'll have to wait until next year to try again. Earlier in the hearing, the head of the state prison system had touted reforms he implemented after Brooks was killed. Ricks, seated next to two other loved ones of Black men who recently died after beatings by prison guards, expressed skepticism at the state's willingness to curb the violence. 'From the moment I step in this building, I want to cry,' he said. 'And I don't want to cry because my son is dead. I want to cry because there's an eerie feeling in the African American community that's often unspoken that nothing's going to change.' 'I come here feeling like I'm getting ready to fight the wind,' he said. During the nearly seven-hour hearing on Wednesday, advocates, union representatives, and family members of incarcerated people testified about conditions in New York's state prisons, particularly corrections officer violence. Despite the somber subject matter, the hearing kicked off with optimistic testimony from Daniel Martuscello, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision's earnest commissioner. For an hour and a half, he fielded questions from lawmakers and advocates about how his prison system is handling its worst year in recent memory. Just weeks after Brooks's killing — and hours after a special prosecutor announced the impending arrest of the guards who killed him — corrections officers across DOCCS's 42 facilities launched a wildcat strike to protest what they called unsafe working conditions. The three-week strike resulted in 2,000 guards losing their jobs and saw the deployment of thousands of National Guard personnel to staff the prisons, many of which remain on partial lockdown. During the strike, corrections officers allegedly killed another incarcerated man — 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi, whose mentor also testified Wednesday — at a prison across the street from where guards beat Brooks to death. With the dust from the strike and killings still settling (3,000 National Guard troops remain in the prisons, Martuscello testified), the prison chief is fielding flak from all sides. He's juggling reformers' calls for accountability, demands from officers for new solitary confinement and staffing policies, and a massive hit to his prisons' already under-capacity staffing levels. At the hearing, legislators grilled him over progress on measures he's promised to curb abuse. Martuscello was confident about 'improving prison culture.' The agency is contracting with a law firm and two nonprofit organizations to evaluate every aspect of how staff and incarcerated people interact, he explained. The law firm will issue publicly available recommendations late in the summer. DOCCS can also change its culture through recruitment, Martuscello said. He touted a new state policy, passed earlier this month in the budget, that lowers the minimum age for corrections officers from 21 to 18, as well as an aggressive recruitment campaign DOCCS has launched to fill 4,500 guard positions. New personnel can bring a new attitude, he said: 'That's an opportunity you don't often get.' To address demands for more direct reform, Martuscello outlined a series of initiatives he launched with Governor Kathy Hochul in recent months. None will fundamentally alter DOCCS's structure or the way it conducts oversight, and they've left others who testified at the hearing unimpressed. DOCCS has embedded its internal accountability unit, the Office of Special Investigations, in every prison, Martuscello explained, and is getting over $7 million to expand the unit. Lawyers who represent incarcerated people are skeptical that that will improve accountability. At the hearing, they characterized the office as a black box and said that DOCCS's internal mechanisms for investigating abuse more often than not let guards off the hook. 'DOCCS's internal investigations through the Office of Special Investigations are opaque, slow, and default to weighing staff credibility over incarcerated voices, regardless of the facts,' said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society's Prisoners' Rights Project. Martuscello also touted whistleblower policies he revamped after Brooks's killing. DOCCS now has an anonymous tipline for staff to report their colleagues' malfeasance or abuse, he said. Representatives for DOCCS staff said they thought little of the effort. 'It's toilet paper,' Wayne Spence, president of the union that represents DOCCS civilian staff, like nurses, testified at the hearing. The efforts do little to discourage retaliation against whistleblowers, he said. There was one effort the commissioner highlighted that everyone who testified seemed to support: more body-worn cameras. DOCCS has long promised to equip all of its officers with body cameras, but the rollout has taken years. Spurred by the Brooks and Nantwi killings, the state fast-tracked the effort with $18 million in additional funding. All facilities should have body cameras by mid-summer, Martuscello said, and officers will be required to have them turned on when they're interacting with incarcerated people. Martuscello's reforms aren't enough to fix the embattled agency, according to its critics. Reform-minded lawmakers have this session introduced legislation — part of the Robert Brooks Agenda — to expand prison oversight and officer accountability, as well as to give incarcerated people opportunities to earn time off their sentences. One bill would expand the powers of the Correctional Association of New York, the 180-year-old nonprofit organization tasked by the legislature with overseeing prison conditions. Another would add commissioner slots to the State Commission of Correction, which has oversight power over all carceral facilities in New York state. SCOC rarely uses its full authority to hold jails and prisons accountable, as New York Focus has reported. It also dodges scrutiny: SCOC representatives declined to attend last week's hearing, legislators said. (When asked why, a spokesperson simply said that 'SCOC submitted written testimony for the hearing.') The SCOC bill would triple the number of commissioners and require that they come from diverse backgrounds, including criminal defense and public health. Yet another bill would allow the DOCCS commissioner to discipline officers for serious misconduct without having to go through mandatory arbitration. A 2023 Marshall Project investigation showed that, over a 12-year period, arbitrators reinstated three out of every four DOCCS corrections officers who were fired for abusing incarcerated people or covering up abuse. Whether any of these bills make it to the Assembly or Senate floors before the end of the legislative session is an open question — subject to a complex process largely controlled by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Brooks's father, Ricks, isn't optimistic. Nor, it seems, are some of the legislators calling for reforms. 'Will they listen to us or will they continue to play politics with Black and brown men's lives?' Eddie Gibbs, the first formerly incarcerated person elected to the state Assembly, wondered at the hearing. He told the story of his own beatdown by guards at Midstate Correctional Facility, where Nantwi was allegedly murdered, in the late 1980s. 'They play politics with people's lives,' he said of legislators unwilling to support the reforms. 'Their reelection is more important than your sons' lives.'
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
DOCCS will rehire some of the 2,000 corrections officers fired after wildcat strike
May 9—Despite Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul's pledge not to rehire any of the 2,000 corrections officers her administration fired in March at the end of a 22-day wildcat strike, the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision is moving to do just that for a limited number of officers. A spokesperson for DOCCS confirmed that negotiations are ongoing through the grievance process outlined in the collective bargaining agreement the department has with the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, the union representing corrections officers and sergeants. "Employees that were terminated have subsequently filed grievances under the collective bargaining agreement," the spokesperson said. "As a result of these grievances, the department has begun holding individual meetings as required under the contract, some of which have resulted in settlement agreements for a limited number of former employees to return to work." The DOCCS spokesperson said the department is handling about 600 grievance hearings related to terminations, noting that a hearing doesn't mean the CO will receive an invitation to return to work, and not all COs offered a chance to return will take it. That's a departure from the governor's position from March, immediately after the strike ended. After weeks of negotiations and back-and-forth, Hochul's administration offered an ultimatum to the thousands of COs still on strike in the second week of March. They offered a "memorandum of understanding," a binding agreement between DOCCS Commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III and the security staff that the department would make significant changes, reduce reliance on officer overtime, improve security measures for visitors and legal mail, spin up a committee to recommend changes to state laws on solitary confinement use and rehabilitative programming and pursue increases in pay for security staff. Any officers who did not return to work by 6:45 a.m. March 10 were fired. As a result, about 2,000 COs and sergeants were fired that day, and Hochul signed an emergency order barring them from being rehired by any other government entity in New York, state or local. The COs were also stripped of their peace officer registrations and removed from the state database that tracks law enforcement officers. To restore those registrations, the COs would have to restart the academy and training programs, including any special certificates they pursued in their original training. The local hiring restrictions fell away in early April, after Hochul took criticism for the move and legal questions were raised over her authority to direct local hiring decisions. But when asked about her position during a press conference on March 18, Hochul was definitive. She said she felt those officers had risked the safety of their communities, their civilian staff colleagues in the prisons and the incarcerated people themselves, and had neglected their duties. "That is what we had to deal with for 22 days, and to say that we're going to forget, I will never forget that," she said. "They're not ever working for the state of New York." But it appears that position has changed — in part because at least some of those COs fired on March 10 were out on pre-approved leave unrelated to the strike. Late Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for Hochul said she remains committed to her original position. "Governor Hochul has been clear that there must be strict consequences for individuals who repeatedly broke the law and refused to end the illegal strike," the spokesperson said. "This administration follows the law and will do so when grievances are filed, but the Governor's commitment to reforming our correctional system is steadfast." A spokesperson for NYSCOPBA confirmed that the union is assisting its members in the grievance process, but said each negotiation is individual and conditions for rehiring are being set on a case-by-case basis. The NYSCOPBA spokesperson, James Miller, said that there are a number of cases where the terminated COs were out on medical leave, family-related leave or for work-related injuries and were not involved in the strike, and those employees have asked to be reinstated. "The settlements being offered by DOCCS today are for COs that were fired only and are being picked by DOCCS on a case by case basis," Miller said. "Currently, we have 3,200 grievances filed by NYSCOPBA on behalf of members who were fired that were on family leave, vacation, job related injury, etcetera. It also includes members who went back to work, but were considered AWOL and lost health insurance, and lastly the officers who were on the unsanctioned strike and were terminated." Miller said that the officers being offered settlements will make their own choices on whether to accept the deals or not. In the meantime, conditions inside the state prisons remain poor. Since February, the state has been relying on thousands of National Guard troops to shore up staffing headcounts at the prisons, and the COs who are back to work have been asked to work regular 12-hour shifts in exchange for boosted overtime pay. COs inside the prisons say things are far from normal, and both staff and incarcerated people are on edge after months in this emergency with no clear solution. The state is working to boost CO headcounts, moving in the state budget this year to lower the CO hiring age from 21 to 18, allow out-of-state applicants for security staff jobs, and also set aside $500 million to continue paying the National Guard for deployment to the prisons.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
North Country state lawmakers pushing to reinstate fired COs
PLATTSBURGH — Work continues from North Country state lawmakers to try to bring back 2,000 correction officers let go after a recent 22-day strike. Sen. Dan Stec (R,C-Queensbury) and Assemblyman Scott Gray (R-Watertown) have put forth legislation permitting the reinstatement of 2,000 correction officers fired by Gov. Kathy Hochul in the aftermath of the strike, and Assemblyman D. Billy Jones (D-Chateaugay Lake) also continues to push for their return to work. STRIKE Officers across the state were on strike for 22 days as they protested the dangerous working conditions inside prisons. The National Guard was activated to help cover prisons during the strike, and they continue to be deployed. The 2,000 officers who were fired did not return to work by deadlines imposed by the state after negotiations. But officers claim that those who were out legally for disability or other reasons, were wrongfully terminated as well. Senate bill S.7310 would grant a grace period for officers terminated by the governor to return to work without retribution, Stec and Gray said, which would also save the state money. State Budget Director Blake Washington has estimated that the deployment of the National Guard into correctional facilities has cost New York more than $100 million a month. The reinstatement of 2,000 officers – given a median annual salary of $75,000 and fringe rate of 60 percent – would cost the state $20 million in monthly costs, Stec and Gray said. Allowing these officers to return to work not only saves taxpayers money, but also ensures that qualified, trained personnel are working inside correctional facilities, they said. 'If New York state takes prison safety and costs seriously, Governor Hochul and Democrat leaders would end this vindictive firing and ban of 2,000 trained, dedicated correction officers,' Stec said. 'These men and women went on strike because they were in fear for their health and well-being due to unsafe conditions. In their absence, the state has deployed the National Guard, which is not trained or equipped for these circumstances. Instead of maintaining this new, dangerous status quo I urge the governor and Democrat leaders to take up mine and Assemblyman Gray's bill allowing these 2,000 COs the ability to return to work.' Gray said the 2,000 correction officers who were fired are being punished simply for speaking out against unsafe working conditions. 'Instead of addressing their concerns, just as any employer should handle workplace issues, the state fired them and treated them as if they were the criminals. Now, due to severe staffing shortages, DOCCS is forced to release prisoners early and, after a long delay, has finally acknowledged the real deficiencies in our prison system in a recently released video,' Gray said. 'However, before this situation spirals any further, we need to take immediate action to correct these wrongs, starting with reinstating the correctional officers who are ready and willing to return to the vital work they were doing. This is how we can truly begin rebuilding and restoring our prison system and public safety.' JONES EFFORTS Assemblyman D. Billy Jones (D-Chateaugay Lake) a former correction officer himself, said he has been working diligently to get the fired officers back on the job. Jones said the officers are still faced with almost daily 12-hour or longer shifts, critical staffing shortages, and continued dangerous working conditions. 'The fastest and simplest solution for the state to prevent the brewing safety crisis from getting out of control is to rehire the correction officers who are willing to return to work. Prioritizing those who were let go while on FMLA, sick leave, or other approved time off is critical to bring staff back to these facilities quickly,' Jones said. 'Restaffing the facilities also allows civilian workers – who are currently placed in positions that they are often not equipped for – to return to their normal positions and minimize the risks that come with low staff levels. Our civilian workers should not be paying the price for the inadequate staffing levels that the state can quickly resolve.' Jones said that will also help resume normal programming and other functions within the facilities. He also said that it is time for the state to return trained correction officers to their positions to lessen the burden on our state resources. 'The cost of keeping these members (National Guard) stationed in facilities they are not trained for is far higher than simply returning former corrections officers to their jobs,' Jones said. 'On top of the staffing issues, implementing safety measures that ensure all staff can go to work and know that they will return home safe is essential. We have seen far too many instances of dangerous substances getting into facilities and hospitalizing workers. It is beyond time for the state to agree that body and mail scanners are necessary for entry into our correctional facilities.' Jones said he has heard repeatedly from current corrections officers that this is an untenable situation. 'Many officers are already becoming burnt out from overexertion in poor working conditions, and it will only continue to go downhill if something is not done quickly,' Jones said. 'It is time for the governor and DOCCS (Department of Corrections and Community Supervision) to see the scale of this issue and act quickly to implement these solutions.'
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NYSCOPBA requests 'urgent meeting' with state over 'workplace crisis'
ALBANY, N.Y. (WWTI) – New York state's corrections union is asking for an 'urgent meeting' with the state to discuss what they call a 'workplace crisis.' In a letter from New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA), the union said there are a number of issues affecting the their members' safety, working conditions and well-being. 'There is nothing good in that bill': Retired deputy superintendent speaks out against HALT Act & striker firings Some of these issues include staffing shortages, workplace conditions, the implementation of 12-hour shifts, scheduled regular days off and vacation periods. The union would like to meet with Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) because these and other issues have 'reached a critical point following the recent organization of a grassroots strike organized by NYSCOPBA members to highlight unsafe working conditions.' The strike ended up leading to the firing of 2,000 correctional officers. A recent announcement regarding the early release of inmates up to 110 days before the end of their sentence is also compounding the issue. The early release of inmates undermines public safety and sends a troubling message to crime victims who continue to live with the trauma caused by those incarcerated and only highlights DOCCS failure to face the on-going consequences of staffing shortages in our prisons. NYSCOPBA President Chris Summers NYSCOPBA officials added that the state has 'been largely ignored by the Governor's leadership and DOCCS.' 'It's time for the State and DOCCS to recognize the importance of these concerns and work together with us to find lasting solutions,' Summers added. 'Temporary, short-sighted solutions of the early release of inmates is not a long-term solution needed to address workplace violence, staffing shortages and the inability to recruit new officers. ' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
