In Brief:
- New York officers went on strike over understaffing and a prison reform law they said made conditions less safe. Reported assaults against incarcerated people and against staff have been rising for years.
- Prison environments can be traumatizing to incarcerated people and correctional officers alike. Failure to provide enough staff or meet prisoners’ needs can also create tensions and stresses.
- Prison reformists say providing trauma supports and creating an environment that lets staff and incarcerated people see each other as people, not antagonists, can lower tensions.
New York prisons are facing headline-making violence.
Correctional officers in Marcy, N.Y., beat an incarcerated 43-year-old to death in December — six were later indicted for murder. Early this month, officers at another facility allegedly beat a 22-year-old man to death.
And it's not just assaults from officers — violence from incarcerated people against one another is also on the rise.
Assaults on incarcerated people by other incarcerated people rose about 41 percent from 2023 to 2024. That’s after several years of increases, according to data from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
In 2025, “I feel as though I’ve seen more [incarcerated] people than I have in previous years with scarring on their faces from having been cut. Freshly healed wounds on people's faces and necks where they've been assaulted by other incarcerated people,” says Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York (CANY), an organization that conducts independent monitoring and oversight of state prisons in New York.
Staff also are concerned, and this month, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association reported four officers injured by a person incarcerated at Sing Sing. Assaults against staff rose 24 percent from 2023 to 2024. That’s after rising 13 percent in 2022-2023 and 25 percent in 2021-2022.
Correctional officers have said that understaffing has created unsafe conditions for them and for incarcerated residents. Earlier this year, officers went on a 22-day strike in part to protest grueling schedules, including consistent overtime hours that leave them exhausted.
They’ve reported working 16- or even 24-hour days to make up for a lack of staff. Striking officers also said that a 2022 prison reform measure restricting the use of solitary confinement has made the facilities more dangerous.
The issues didn’t come out of nowhere — nor is prison violence a struggle unique to New York. Experts on prisons say violence is often the result of understaffing, deprivation, trauma and a dehumanizing culture within prisons. They believe new approaches show promise for helping curb such harms.
What’s Happening in New York?
A 2022 New York law — the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act (HALT) — limited when and how incarcerated people could be sent to segregated confinement. Under the law, people could only be put in special housing units for 15 days in a row, and, while there, could only be locked in their cells for up to 17 hours per day. (Previously, they could be locked in for up to 23 hours a day for months or years, per the Offices of the Inspector General.) The law also required a disciplinary hearing before incarcerated people could be sent to such confinement, and provided for a transitionary high-security housing unit for people leaving long periods of isolation.
The police union reportedly complained that HALT made it harder to discipline incarcerated people and that the new practices were more staff-intensive, which resulted in officers being forced to work long overtime shifts.
HALT’s implementation has been flawed and has led to violence and fears of violence among incarcerated people, says CANY’s Scaife.
“On the one hand people are ... committing some violent acts because they think that they can get away with it,” Scaife says. “And then in other cases, people are committing violent acts in order to get in trouble, so that they can be removed from what they perceive as a less safe environment in the general population” and be put into special housing units or RRUs [the new transitionary high-security housing units], which they see as safer, more controlled environments. In one account, an incarcerated person made a weapon, then immediately handed it in to a correctional officer, so he’d be sent to the special housing unit. Mental health staff also report more people self-harming so they will be moved into a residential crisis treatment program for people at risk of suicide, where they feel safer.
What Is — or Isn’t — in the Data?
The data suggest violence had been rising since well before HALT — but there’s plenty of murkiness in the figures.
There were more assaults against incarcerated people and more assaults on staff members in 2023 than in 2019, despite prison populations declining during that time, the Times Union reports.
Scaife says recorded assaults are rising, but it’s hard to get exact numbers. Sometimes it’s unclear if rising “reported incidents of violence” mean rising violence or just more reports getting filed, and reporting itself can be inconsistent, she says. What qualifies as a “violent” incident can also be broad: An incarcerated person brushing their shoulder against a staff member’s can get logged as an “assault,” for example.
Plus, Scaife says, assaults by staff on incarcerated people aren’t officially reported, and are believed to sometimes be falsely recorded as an attack by the incarcerated person: “We document lots of allegations among incarcerated people that they're given this behavior report for assaulting staff, when actually, in reality, what happened is that they were being assaulted by staff.”
What Drives Prison Violence?
“I don't believe that many people who are incarcerated and who work in the system are inherently violent,” says Nneka Jones Tapia, managing director of justice initiatives at the nonprofit Chicago Beyond and a clinical psychologist studying impacts of jails and prisons on behavior.
“I do believe that the system itself produces trauma in people, and that trauma changes the way our brains function,” says Tapia, who was also formerly the warden of Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where she worked to reduce violence. “And when it changes the way our brains function, it puts us in a position where we have more fear for those who are around us and the environment, and we can act out in ways to protect ourselves.”
Prison environments are often high-stress and traumatizing — both for those incarcerated and those working there. There’s the constant sense that one needs to be on guard, a general lack of fresh air or natural light and the tension that comes with being locked away (or locking someone away) in a cage, all of which can take a toll over time, says Ryan Shanahan, global justice exchange director at the Vera Institute of Justice.
Thirty-four percent of prison guards in a 2017-2018 study reported suffering PTSD — which is almost five times the rate of the general population, and more than twice the rate of military veterans.
In situations where deprivation is common, stress builds. Understaffing means officers often only have time to meet incarcerated people’s basic needs — providing food and medicine — but not to transport them to classes, exercise opportunities, therapy or other programming, for example, says Christine Tartaro, professor of criminal justice at Stockton University. When incarcerated people aren’t given acceptable ways to deal with stress, like exercise, “the pro-social ways of blowing off steam are gone. So, all that’s left are the anti-social ways of blowing off steam: maybe punching somebody, yelling,” Tartaro says.
New York prisons report they don’t have the staff to give all prisoners the seven hours a day of out-of-cell time required for everyone not in solitary confinement. Officers have interpreted the HALT Act as requiring them to first deny programming to people in the general population before denying it to people who are being disciplined in high-security units, if they’re unable to serve everyone’s needs. “Which was not the intent of the law and has created a great deal of resentment, frustration and friction in the facilities,” CANY’s Scaife says.
People sometimes turn to violence against themselves or others to get the attention they feel they cannot get otherwise, Scaife says. Difficulty getting medical appointments or getting access to programs necessary if they want to qualify for early release can cause resentment. Even smaller things like not being called out for recreation time one day, without being told why, can become a deep source of frustration. People with grievances become more likely to lose their temper in a conversation with an officer, which officers then may interpret as aggressive and respond to with force, turning the encounter violent.
A Better Approach?
Returning to heavier use of solitary confinement isn’t a real fix for violence, experts say. For one, it can deepen incarcerated people’s mental distress while also providing them opportunities to harm themselves or take their own lives, says Tartaro. Solitary confinement, while a painful experience, also doesn’t make someone take accountability for their offenses and change their behavior, Shanahan says.
One measure that can help? Giving incarcerated people incentives for good behavior — that is, providing a carrot, not only a stick, Tartaro says.
Addressing trauma and promoting a more community-minded culture in prison are also among the big fixes. CANY’s Scaife recommends providing programming to help people process and cope with trauma. Chicago Beyond’s Tapia recommends providing emotional wellness supports both for incarcerated people and staff, and engaging both parties in finding ways to improve safety at their facilities.
There’s often an us-versus-them mentality in prisons; staff are taught to be always alert against attempts to take advantage of them, and incarcerated people often assume the worst of staff, too, Shanahan says. She and Scaife say that when staff and incarcerated people are encouraged to talk and view each other as individuals, the interpersonal relationships they form become a deterrence to violence.
Tapia spoke similarly: “When we see each other as humans, we’re less likely to engage in acts of harm against another person.”
When she was a warden at Cook County Jail, Tapia says she brought together staff and incarcerated people to discuss what they needed to feel safer — an approach she now champions at Chicago Beyond, which works with correctional systems. These kinds of conversations have led some to adopt initiatives like staffwide wellness programs, incarcerated people’s peer support programs and the creation of a quiet room where staff can take a break to calm themselves before going back out into a living unit.
Shanahan works with Vera to pilot a more community-minded culture and approach in juvenile housing units in various prison systems. As part of the approach, staff get training on de-escalation and conflict resolution techniques and are encouraged to build relationships with those incarcerated. Both staff and incarcerated people engage in restorative justice practices over any issues that arise in the unit. The organization says this so far has helped prisons reduce violence and the use of solitary confinement.
