Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
More than 2,000 strikers returned to work, “but there are approximately 8,000 corrections officers and sergeants still taking part in the illegal strike,” Thomas Maille, Director of Public Information for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, told The Chronicle Tuesday.
An apparent deal reached last Friday by the state and leaders of NYSCOPA, the correction officers’ union, via a mediator failed to settle the unsanctioned strike affecting prisons across New York.
The Albany Times-Union reported Monday, “Many officers returned to duty over the weekend after receiving a deadline to go back to work by Saturday or face termination. But many others have not, and [Corrections Commissioner Daniel F.] Martuscello began sending them termination notices on Sunday.”
The state says the strike is illegal, violating the Taylor Law. It has warned strikers that not only will they lose their jobs, their health benefits were to be terminated this week with no COBRA available to them to continue the benefits on their own.
The Times-Union said, “The holdout by many officers who are continuing to strike was exacerbated by an informal memorandum being circulated by correction officers on Friday that offered a rebuttal to each point of the mediator’s offer.”
The TU said, “The memo asserts that the state’s ‘failure to act for over four years is what led to this situation.’”
The memo contends: “Officers have endured chronic understaffing, mandatory overtime mandates that break their mental and physical health, and a HALT Act” — the Times Union explained refers to 2021 law banning the use of long-term solitary confinement — ‘that emboldens inmate violence while stripping officers of necessary tools to maintain order.”
The mediator Martin F. Scheinman refuted the memo and said a law cannot be unilaterally changed.
Leadership of the union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, urged the striking union members to return to work.
The situation has been further riled by another inmate death. The Times-Union reported Tuesday, “State Police are investigating the death of a 22-year-old inmate at Mid-State Correctional Facility who had been beaten by multiple correction officers on Saturday, according to inmates and their family members.”
It noted Mid-State is “a medium-security prison that is next to Marcy Correctional Facility, where 43-year-old Robert L. Brooks was fatally beaten by multiple officers on Dec. 9,” leading to murder and/or manslaughter charges against at least nine corrections officers.
State Senator Dan Stec (R-C, Queensbury) has been fierce in his defense of corrections officers and criticism of Governor Hochul, said in a press release Monday:
“The governor and DOCCS’ decision to make body scanners mandatory for visitors during the ongoing state of emergency is a welcome first step that myself, officers and other advocates for prison safety have called for. But a temporary change in policy and executive order is exactly that, temporary and must go further.
“Mandatory use of body scanners for visitors and inmates must become a permanent change in policy and that requires a legislative resolution….”
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