Family Visitation Rights Have Eroded in New York Prisons Following Guard Strike

Before the break of dawn on May 3, the families of incarcerated individuals begin gathering around the processing trailer at the bottom of the concrete steps leading up to New York’s Elmira Correctional Facility. After being denied the opportunity to visit for over a month due to a wildcat strike by New York State Correctional Officers, family members, longing to embrace their loved ones, line up extra early to ensure they are among the first to enter the prison. Most came from many hours away, many from New York City, making a long drive to the relatively remote, rural town of Elmira.

As the daylight comes, the line of visitors lengthens down the ramp, winding along the side of the trailer into the parking lot, where visitors pool in the empty parking spaces. By the time doors open around 9 am, the line is so long families just arriving are stuck waiting in a slim patch of grass adjacent to the parking lot. These latest arrivals, though still technically early, will not see their loved ones today. But they don’t know that yet…

Visiting incarcerated family members has never been an easy process, logistically. In the aftermath of the guards’ work stoppage, visiting has become even more difficult. On Feb. 17, only three days before the state announced murder charges against a group of corrections officers from Marcy Correctional Facility over the brutal death of Robert Brooks, thousands of officers across the state abandoned their posts. Though some officers arguably have legitimate labor concerns, the central demand of this strike was to repeal the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act. As the name implies, the HALT Act aims to reduce the use of solitary confinement, increase access to programming, services and time out of our cells. As someone who has endured approximately seven cumulative years of solitary confinement, I am all too familiar with its tortuous effects. I am also familiar with how the gratuitous use of solitary confinement fails to make prisons safe. Fundamentally, this strike was about rejecting the humane treatment of incarcerated people.

With staff shortages at an all-time high, Elmira Correctional Facility (along with most other facilities in the state), has restricted visits to weekends, forcing the families of over 1,000 prisoners to compete for space on small visiting floors with maximum capacity ranging from 50 to 100 people. With such limited capacity, many visitors are denied access to their family despite traveling for hours, arriving extra early and exercising incredible patience.

The correctional administration wants us to believe there is nothing they can do to accommodate all of the families that want to see their loved ones. They claim each facility is so short-staffed that it is impossible to open additional visiting rooms or operate visiting rooms on additional days. In the midst of these staffing shortages, however, most facilities still manage to find employees during the week to staff their industry programs, the prisoner-operated programs overseen by correctional staff which generate various products for the state. With the staffing of programs that profit the state taking precedence over family visitation, the administration makes its priorities plain: The profitability of prisoners comes over our relationships with our families.

Almost every facility in New York State has an industry program. Elmira has a foundry that manufactures sewer covers and a print shop that produces paper products for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. In most instances, incarcerated employees are paid less than a dollar per hour for their labor. Sometimes we are forced to labor against our will. Prisoners who refuse work orders are subject to an infraction and disciplinary action. These working conditions, deplorable under any circumstances, are made worse by the present state of the carceral system.

When the protesting correctional officers first traded their nightsticks for picket signs to protest the HALT Act and other incremental prison reforms in February, prisoners and their families suffered new hardships. Prisoners like me were unconstitutionally confined to our cells for almost a month. We were denied access to the programs, daily recreation and visits we are legally entitled to. Our loved ones were denied the ability to see us and, in most instances, even speak to us. Even after over a thousand National Guard members were deployed to “understaffed” facilities, prisoners remained caged, and our families and even legal counsel continued to be deprived of access to us.

Nearly three months have passed, and almost all the state facilities are still barely operational. Most prisoners are still being denied daily recreation and access to vital programs including education, and many families are unable to see each other because of the prohibitive visiting restrictions.

The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision insists its priority is building and strengthening family ties and ensuring the humane treatment of its prisoners so as to reduce recidivism and violence. Yet its current response to staffing shortages does not support that claim. As time passes and more correctional staff are arriving in our facilities, the priority has been to relieve the National Guard of their posts — not to restore the programs and visits that help us feel like human beings. When the administration chooses to assign available employees a post in industry, rather than on the visit floor, it sends a very clear message.

Of course, this is not surprising to those of us who are imprisoned or to the people entangled with this institution by proxy of their relationship to us. This is not the first time laws have been flouted and basic, dignified treatment has been withheld. This is not the first time these institutions have made it difficult or impossible for our families to spend time with us. This is not the first time we have seen the systems designed to uphold the law exercise discretion when it comes to enforcing it.

And, unfortunately, it won’t be the last.