A New York judge has temporarily barred the Hochul administration from overriding state law and giving prisons blanket permission to keep incarcerated people in prolonged solitary confinement.
The state’s correctional system in February suspended implementation of a law called the HALT Act, which limits the use of solitary confinement. Prison officials said they did so to address safety concerns when corrections officers went on strike.
But the unbridled use of solitary confinement continued well past the state’s self-imposed June 6 deadline to reinstitute the restrictions.
In a court order this week, Judge Daniel Lynch wrote that the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision violated “the separation of powers” by temporarily suspending a law that sets limitations to the use of solitary confinement.
Lynch wrote that the department, or DOCCS, “wholly failed to demonstrate” that temporarily repealing the HALT Act “has a basis in rational fact.”
Riley Doyle Evans, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society who represented the six inmates who filed the lawsuit, said his clients and others had been “subjected, unlawfully, to prolonged solitary confinement for months — with DOCCS not providing justification.”
As a result of the HALT Act suspension, incarcerated people were in solitary confinement for 22 to 24 hours a day, Evans said — even if they did not have misconduct that merited temporary isolation.
“No agency in the executive has the authority to suspend a duly enacted law,” Evans said.
Lynch ordered the preliminary injunction to go into effect by July 11. He wrote that DOCCS would have to give an explanation to the court if the department needs exceptions in some facilities.
A DOCCS spokesperson said in a statement that officials are reviewing the decision.
Starting in February, DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello said the department would stop mandating that those in solitary confinement get four hours of time outside their cells for educational and health programs, as the law requires. All other individuals get seven hours of recreational and outside time. Martuscello extended the suspension in March for 90 days to last until June 6.
Martuscello said the measure was in response to a statewide emergency triggered by corrections officers’ three-week-long wildcat strike. The officers, in part, were striking to protest HALT, which stands for Humane Alternatives to Long-Term solitary confinement.
During a news conference in early March, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she supported the decision to temporarily pause the full implementation of the HALT Act, but specifically the requirement that those in solitary confinement get four hours for programs such as career services.
“That is the area that is temporarily suspended because I'm wildly acutely aware that the hours are just too long,” Hochul said at the time. “No one should have to work a 24-hour shift, but it’s been part of having to comply with that law that has created this tension here.”
Hochul's office did not respond to requests for comment.
But even after June 6, Evans and criminal justice advocates said, DOCCS never re-implemented the HALT Act, and that his clients were in cells for weeks on end.
“They were being essentially locked in their cells and not afforded any sort of access to programs or rehabilitative activities,” he said. “These conditions are profoundly harmful to human beings.”
The HALT Act, which went into effect in 2022, limits the use of solitary confinement to 15 consecutive days and 20 days within a 60-day period. Corrections officers have protested the law since its inception, arguing that it stripped officers of an option for disciplining incarcerated people, and was leading to increased violence in state prisons.
Repealing the HALT Act was a core demand among striking officers during the strike, which began days after 10 officers were charged in connection to the beating death of 43-year-old Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility in December.
