State prisons failed to track compliance with solitary confinement ban, IG finds
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The New York State inspector general this week said the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s antiquated paper-based record keeping systems make it difficult to assess whether or not it’s actually in compliance with the HALT Solitary Act, a law the state has been accused numerous times of violating. AP file photo by Bebeto Matthews
By Jacob Kaye
Even if corrections officials are complying with a recently passed law banning solitary confinement in New York State prisons, they are having a hard time proving it.
A new report from the New York State inspector general found that the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s “antiquated paper-based record keeping” practices make it difficult to track the prison system’s compliance with the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, a law advocates have accused DOCCS of violating.
In the two years since the bill became law, the state’s correctional agency has been accused of holding detainees in segregated cells without justification, holding people in segregation for more than 15 days and of holding disabled New Yorkers in solitary confinement – all violations of the HALT Act.
Though Inspector General Lucy Lang said that DOCCS, in response to those allegations, has made major improvements in the law’s implementation over the two years it's been in effect, true compliance will likely never be possible until the agency changes its record-keeping practices.
Not only do a number of facilities still use paper and pen to keep track of a number of programs and operations in the state’s jails and prisons, DOCCS officials haven’t instituted a uniform method for each of their facilities to keep track of the key components of the HALT Solitary Act.
The record-keeping issues mean that even as the agency claims that it isn’t in violation of the law, it’s having a hard time proving it.
“DOCCS’s use of antiquated and nonuniform paper recordkeeping practices and electronic tracking mechanisms hinders internal monitoring and compliance reviews by outside agencies,” the inspector general’s report read.
“As such, DOCCS could not provide the level of detail sought by the inspector general in its analyses of DOCCS compliance with various requirements of HALT, such as providing the required hours of out-of-cell programming and recreation,” the report continued.
According to the report, DOCCS was unable to prove its compliance with some of the more basic elements of the HALT Solitary Act, like the requirement that individuals in confinement are still given four hours of out-of-cell time per day.
“Given the inconsistencies and inadequacies in DOCCS records, and the conflicting information reported by other sources, the inspector general could not always determine whether the incarcerated population was offered the appropriate amount of out-of-cell time,” the report read.
Advocates this week said the IG’s findings are just one of many pieces of evidence to prove that New Yorkers are being held in isolated conditions in violation of state law.
“How many more reports and lawsuits is it going to take for Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to follow the HALT Solitary Confinement Law? Said Jerome Wright, the co-director of the #HALTsolitary Campaign. “It is outrageous that this rogue state agency continues to flagrantly violate a law passed by a supermajority of both houses of the state legislature and signed by the governor.”
“It is now three and a half years since the law was enacted, two and half years since it went into effect, and despite report after report, lawsuit after lawsuit, media exposé after media exposé, the state continues to maintain its regime of torture, trauma, and death,” Wright added. “Enough is enough. Solitary confinement is torture. It leads to psychosis, heart disease, self-harm, suicide, and death. It also worsens safety for everyone inside of prisons and in outside communities. It needs to end.”
The HALT Act was inspired by the United Nations' "Nelson Mandela Rules," which advocate for the humane treatment of prisoners.
The law redefined segregated confinement and established Residential Rehabilitation Units to provide therapy and rehabilitative programs to incarcerated individuals who commit acts of violence while already locked up behind bars.
The law requires that evidentiary hearings be held before someone is transferred to an RRU. It also caps the use of segregated confinement at 15 consecutive days, or 20 days in any 60-day period. The law also prohibits DOCCS from placing people in RRUs before a disciplinary hearing is held.
The HALT Solitary Act also prevents incarcerated people under the age of 21, above the age of 55, those who are pregnant, up to eight weeks postpartum, caring for a child in the facility or those with a disability from being put into an RRU.
The law also prevents DOCCS from putting people in solitary as a means to keep them safe from another incarcerated person.
The state agency has been accused of violating a number of the law’s requirements, as noted by the IG in this week’s report, which also claims that the agency has made a number of corrective actions to get itself into compliance with the law.
But before making changes, the agency held people far longer than they should have in solitary, ordered people into segregated units without first holding hearings or providing justification and didn’t allow people adequate out-of-cell time.
Ultimately, in order to ensure the agency is adhering to the law, the IG recommended it make a number of changes to its record-keeping systems.
“Modernizing DOCCS’s movement and tracking systems and ensuring its disciplinary policies are aligned with contemporary rehabilitative and therapeutic standards will assist DOCCS…and the inspector general in achieving their shared goal,” the report read. “Only then will the system move towards one that no longer promotes confinement that, to its subjects, is ‘the most forbidding aspect of prison life.’”
In response to the report, DOCCS said it will “clarify in written policy and practice the requirement of tracking the offering of out-of-cell opportunities for people serving a disciplinary confinement sanction and will standardize such recording with the creation of a stamp to be utilized in all such unit log books.”
But the agency also said that fully incorporating electronic record keeping would be difficult.
“While the Department has established a long term goal of delivering increased technology to staff, which would allow for more electronic record keeping, our housing units are not wired nor do they have connectivity to the DOCCS network, which we are beginning to explore, however,
would be a costly and time consuming endeavor,” the agency said. “We also have to balance such use of technology with the importance of interacting with the incarcerated individual rather than spending the majority of time on data entry, and detracting from safety and security procedures.”
The IG’s report comes around a month after a judge ruled that DOCCS routinely violated the HALT Solitary Act by not adopting a uniform process for placing people into solitary confinement. Under the law, a hearing must be held prior to someone’s confinement where it must be determined that their conduct was “so heinous or destructive that…placement in general population housing would create a significant risk of imminent serious physical injury to staff or other incarcerated persons.”
However, a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union claimed a number of their clients were placed in solitary without such a determination being made beforehand.
The ruling from Albany State Supreme Court Justice Kevin R. Bryant said that the state correctional agency did virtually nothing to prove that it wasn’t in violation of the landmark criminal justice legislation that first passed in 2021 under former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
“It is the finding of this court that the administrative record and the affidavits submitted in support of the agency’s action do not adequately refute the allegation in the complaint that DOCCS has failed to follow the mandates of the HALT Act,” Bryant wrote.
“Notably, at this late juncture, other than the general and ambiguous denial in their answer, DOCCS has still failed to specifically admit or deny that the challenged policy exists,” Bryant continued.
Bryant ordered the state to comply with the requirements of the HALT Act in his ruling and more specifically ordered them to “conduct fact-specific inquiries and make specific findings-of-fact in any hearings requesting an extended segregated confinement.”
