Some New York prison guards are fired for ignoring a deal to end their illegal strike

A wildcat strike by New York state prison guards stretched into a third week Monday, prompting officials to start firing workers for failing to abide by a deal to end the illegal labor action.

The state’s homeland security commissioner, Jackie Bray, said terminations began Sunday and that on Monday the state would begin canceling health insurance for correctional officers who have remained on strike. Their dependents will also lose coverage.

Fewer than 10 officers have been fired so far, Bray said, while thousands are in line to lose their health insurance benefits.

“None of these actions we take lightly,” Bray said. “We have tried at every turn to get people back to work without taking these actions.”

A message seeking comment was left with the officers’ union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association.

At the same time, some workers at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in Marcy, New York, have been put on administrative leave following the death Saturday of a 22-year-old prisoner. The New York Times, citing accounts from other inmates, reported that he was beaten by correctional officers.

Mid-State is located across the street from the Marcy Correctional Facility, where six guards have been charged with murder in the death of Robert Brooks, who was beaten by officers in December.

“Now that lawmakers feel an obligation to rein in these atrocities, guards are engaging in an illegal work stoppage as a distraction,” Jose Saldana, the director of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign, said in a statement.

“To put it more bluntly, guards are holding hostage tens of thousands of incarcerated people, whose basic survival needs are often going unmet, in order to demand even more power to harm those in their custody,” Saldana said.

Corrections officers began walking out Feb. 17 to protest working conditions.

Last Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a binding agreement between the state and officers’ union to end the picketing. Officers were required to return to work by Saturday to avoid being disciplined for striking.

The deal included ways to address staffing shortages and minimize mandatory 24-hour overtime shifts. It also offers a temporary bump in overtime pay, a potential change in pay scale and the suspension of a prison reform law that strikers blamed for making prisons less safe.

The strike violated a state law barring walkouts by most public employees. Hochul deployed the National Guard to some prisons to take the place of striking workers.

Corrections Commissioner Daniel Martuscello said Monday that the number of facilities with striking workers had dropped from 38 to 32.

Visiting is still suspended at all state prisons, Martuscello said.

The deal to end the strike included the 90-day suspension of a law limiting the use of solitary confinement. During the pause, the state was to evaluate if reinstating the law would “create an unreasonable risk” to staff and inmate safety.

The state also agreed to pay overtime for the next month at a rate of 2½ times regular pay instead of the usual 1½ times and, within four months, to finish analyzing a union request to raise the salary grade for officers and sergeants.

The state and union agreed to staffing and operational inefficiencies at each facility in an effort to relieve strain on existing staff.

“No matter when this ends or how this ends, our long term plan must be and is to recruit more corrections officers because our facilities run safer when we’re fully staffed,” Bray said, noting incentives that would include a $3,000 referral bonus for existing employees. “That work can’t really begin in earnest until folks return to work and we end the strike.”