On April 17, the Legal Aid Society, a longstanding New York City-based nonprofit, filed a class action lawsuit against the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS), alleging that since the wildcat strike of prison guards in February, the department has engaged in an “unlawful rollback” of solitary confinement regulations.

The lawsuit is filed on behalf of six inmates currently incarcerated in the state, in facilities ranging from Coxsackie to Ossining, all of whom allege they’ve been kept locked in their cells for “over 17 hours a day” – and in one case in Stormville’s Green Haven Correctional Facility, “over 20 hours a day.” This flies in the face of the Humane Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (HALT) act, which puts strict limits on how long inmates can be confined in their cells.

It was widely reported, not least by us, that the department suspended the Humane HALT act for the duration of the strike, citing the emergency conditions caused by understaffing. Once the strike ended, the lawsuit alleges, DOCCS continued a “Vague HALT Suspension,” continuing to keep inmates on lockdown and to cancel programming, despite the end of the strike.

Then, on March 8, the suit alleges, DOCCS changed their rationale away from the strike, and declared that an indefinite suspension of the HALT act existed because of the “significant staffing deficit that existed prior to the illegal strike.”

This staffing deficit is real. Before the strike, DOCCS had approximately 2,000 vacancies among its correctional officer staff. They then fired an additional 2,000 officers for striking – although lawsuits just beginning to work their way through the system charge that, in the dragnet, they also fired a number of employees on medial and family leave.

The suit cited a number of instances of inmates who, since the strike, say they have been “deprived of access to religious services,” denied access to GED classes, and denied access to “a college program and… Aggression Replacement Therapy and Alcohol and Substance Abuse Treatment programs.” One of the inmates, housed in Green Haven in Stormville, alleges that “he must choose between one hour of outdoor recreation or access to the telephone after 5 p.m. Because he prioritizes speaking with his children after school, Mr. Jackson chooses not to go to recreation, which means that his only time out of his cell is for a ten-minute shower three times per week.”

Striking guards were uniformly opposed to the HALT act, a sweeping piece of legislation that passed in the wake of the George Floyd killing. It mandated that segregated housing units be replaced with rehabilitative units, in which therapists would treat inmates who had committed infractions that, until then, would have been disciplinary matters.

Guards and civilian staff we spoke to all told us that the rehabilitative units had staffing issues and were so underfunded that all the enrichment they offered inmates amounted to “coloring books.” They said that protective custody for vulnerable inmates fell by the wayside in the wake of the HALT rollout, and prisons became more dangerous for both inmates and staff. This was borne out by rising rates of violence every year in New York’s prisons.

Legal Aid Society was unsparing in their assessment of the striking officers. In the lawsuit, they tied the strike to the indictments of the murders of Robert Brooks, an inmate killed by staff members at Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County. Guards we spoke to roundly and repeatedly denied any link between the strike and the indictments. At a protest in Albany, the striking guards are said to have engaged in talks with some inmate advocacy groups, trying to find common ground on issues of prison safety. Still, the Brooks/strike link has been hard for them to shake.

“In a misguided attempt to appease the prison officers who participated in an unsanctioned strike – the deeply harmful consequences of which are still being felt by incarcerated people across the state,” said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Prisoners’ Rights Project, “DOCCS has unlawfully rolled back key provisions of a landmark human rights law, despite having no authority to do so.”

“HALT was duly enacted by the Legislature to protect incarcerated people from the profoundly damaging effects of solitary confinement. The law cannot simply be cast aside at the political whim of the commissioner,” he continued. “This illegal suspension – which remains in place weeks after the strike’s conclusion – must be lifted to ensure that our clients, and all similarly situated New Yorkers, do not continue to suffer precisely the harm HALT was designed to prevent.”

Last month, the New York Civil Liberties Union also sued DOCCS for suspending access to legal aid during the strike. DOCCS has not commented on either lawsuit.