New York State prison guards have said that they are using force on inmates more often in recent years because their jobs have become more dangerous.
They have said that a law that took effect in 2022, the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, stripped them of a crucial tool for keeping order — because it barred holding certain inmates in solitary confinement.
As a result, they have said, more prisoners who should have been held in isolation have been moving freely among the general population, causing fights and attacking the guards, leaving them with no choice but to restore order with force.
The reality is different, a New York Times analysis of prison data has found. Times reporters scrutinized incident data, staffing figures and inmate population numbers.
Here is what their analysis showed:
The rate at which prison staff members are using force has been rising for a decade.
Long before the solitary confinement law was enacted, the rate was already climbing.
In 2014, guards and other staff members reported using force against inmates, on average, three times a day across the prison system.
By 2019, that figure had risen to about seven times a day, records show.
By last year, it had climbed to more than 11.
It’s not because the prisons are holding more inmates.
On a per-inmate basis, use of force has risen even more sharply from 2014 to 2024, increasing sixfold.
Over the past decade, the number of people incarcerated in New York State prisons has decreased significantly.
In 2014, the prisons held, on average, close to 53,000 people. By 2024, that figure had fallen to nearly 33,000.
It’s not because attacks on guards have become more serious.
As the use-of-force rate has risen, the rate of assaults on staff members and among inmates has kept pace. But the share of assaults recorded on use-of-force reports has fallen.
Each time prison staff members report using force on an inmate, they have the option of indicating whether that prisoner committed an assault during the incident — either on a staff member or another prisoner.
In 2014, there were 1,056 such reports filed, and 724 — 69 percent — indicated such assaults.
By 2024, there had been a shift. The number of reports filed that year climbed to 4,286, but a far smaller share of those, just 51 percent, indicated assaults.
And in 2024, at least, a majority of the assaults appeared to be minor incidents, records from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision show.
Just 1 percent of those cases were reported to have caused moderate, serious or severe injuries on staff members. About 15 percent were described as causing minor injuries.
The remaining 84 percent led to no injury at all.
It’s not because fewer prisoners are being held in isolation.
The solitary confinement law, also known as HALT, took effect in 2022.
It was supposed to curb the use of solitary confinement, which on a given day kept thousands of inmates isolated in concrete cells the size of a parking space. Some of those prisoners spent months and even years in confinement and suffered serious mental health problems as a result.
The law provided another avenue for separating inmates from the general population. It introduced “residential rehabilitation units” as a therapeutic alternative to the “special housing units” used in solitary confinement.
Under the law, certain prisoners, including those with mental illness, are supposed to receive intensive programming.
Nevertheless, the rehabilitation units still effectively house inmates in isolation.
Since HALT took effect, the number of people being held in special housing has plummeted, but the number of those being held in the rehabilitation units has surged.
Now, the two types of housing combined hold more people in isolation than were held before the law was passed.
HALT barred prison officials from placing any person with a disability in solitary confinement for any amount of time, and it forbade them from holding any person in isolation for more than 15 consecutive days.
Inmates in rehabilitation units were supposed to receive intensive services and spend at least seven hours a day out of their cells with other inmates.
But reports by the Correctional Association of New York, a state watchdog panel, and New York State’s inspector general found that the law was not being followed in all prisons.
In some cases, inmates were being held in special housing units for more than 15 days.
In others, inmates in rehabilitation units were not regularly being allowed out of their cells and were not receiving services.
In many prisons, the watchdog panel found, the special housing and rehabilitation units were “indistinguishable.”
“We’ve seen some horrific abuses in the New York State prisons system of late and we know that when corrections officers are not held accountable for wrongdoing, abuses are more likely to happen,” said Donna Lieberman, head of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Corrections officers have a hard job, but it is their responsibility to ensure that the rules are followed and that no harm comes to people whose safety and well-being is entrusted to them.”
Bianca Pallaro is a Times reporter who combines traditional reporting with data analysis skills to investigate wrongdoing and explain complex issues by turning numbers into insightful information.
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