The New York Prison System Is Facing a Potential Disaster “Unprecedented Since Attica”

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In prison, the summer heat cooks us inside our cells, causing tempers to flare. If that’s not aggravating enough, every morning, when I’m lying down in my bunk here at Eastern Correctional Facility, a max prison located in Napanoch, New York, I’m forced to hear the same prisoner in a neighboring cell ask the same question to different corrections officers taking the list of our three-times-daily choice of activities. The same fist-clenching answer makes me and other prisoners want to melt down.

“Is the school building open?” asks my neighbor.

“I don’t know,” says the CO. “Chow or rec?”

“Are they at least going to run yard?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. We don’t have enough staff.” Then I usually hear the tip of their pen jab the clipboard. “So what do you want?”

“Just put me down for chow. And rec, just in case they run it.”

Even before February’s illegal prison guard strike, which crippled New York State’s financial resources, causing Gov. Kathy Hochul to call in the National Guard and fire 2,000 wildcat strikers, prison administrators in my previous facility, the now-shuttered Sullivan Correctional Facility, were using the shortage of staff as justification to cancel both religious and family-day events. Here in Eastern, the prison whose security staff held the strike line the longest in southern New York, officials until fairly recently limited Bard College classes, canceled a TEDx Talk program, shuttered the Family Reunion Program, and nixed weekday visits. Currently, inside most New York prisons, families are limited to a single Saturday or Sunday visit.

They say “Idle time is the devil’s playground.” This takes on a dangerous context inside a carceral setting. The time guys normally spend learning in GED or college classes, or socializing and building community in prisoner-run workshops, is now wasted inside their cells gossiping and scheming. Toxic energy and animosity get pent up, and carried out into the yard.

I witnessed this in action one June morning when I saw fists swinging and arms getting tangled. A prisoner had been swarmed by attackers in the recreational yard. Then they dispersed, and left him with three cuts on his face. As his assailants walked away, he started to follow them until one of them shouted: “Nah, hold it down! Hold it down!”

This caveat, not the blood dripping down his face, stopped him in his tracks. “Hold it down” means don’t tell the COs who jumped you, otherwise in your next facility you’ll be labeled a snitch and something like this will happen to you again. It’s a small prison system, and that threat had legs. As he took the “walk of shame” toward the guard station to notify them of his injuries, our eyes locked.

“Damn,” I said, dropping my eyes to the pavement. Seeing the cuts so close up twisted my conscience.

No one I asked even knew his name. He was the quietest guy on my tier. Now he’d be sent to the hospital, stitched up, placed in protective custody, and sent to another prison.

Security staff were nowhere in the vicinity. I’m not saying their presence would’ve prevented it, or even postponed it. The reason those guys jumped him is unknown to me. Some guys have beef from the street that follows them into prison, others accumulate prison beef that follows them from prison to prison. Still, whether in the street or in prison, the presence of security and the threat of immediate apprehension causes bad actors to self-police their behavior.

Attorney Karen Murtagh was switching lanes in rush-hour traffic when I called her for an interview. In my cell, I imagined myself riding shotgun, holding a stylus and Galaxy Note to take down our conversation. Murtagh began her legal career at New York’s Prisoners’ Legal Services as an intern, and through the years rose through the ranks until she became its executive director in 2007. Prisoners’ Legal Services has three branch offices and receives letters from all 42 prisons. Karen told me that for all of 2024 they received 8,750 letters asking for assistance, but in the first six months of 2025 they had already received nearly 8,000.

“People are desperate,” Murtagh told me. “Locked in their cell for days, weeks, months. Some guys have had their parole dates pushed back, can’t get their programs.”

The executive director’s words echoed ones she’d written in the Pro Se newsletter when she warned of the staffing shortage: “These factors in my view are a recipe for increased tensions unprecedented since Attica.”

The statewide strike isn’t over, but has been transformed into a less conspicuous on-the-job protest, making it harder for investigators to identify disgruntled staff and take disciplinary action, as the toxic staffers can easily blend in with their not-so-disgruntled co-workers who are simply grateful to have state employment and health insurance in an economy edging on a tariff-fueled recession.

The failure of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to recruit an adequate amount of staff is based upon a misunderstanding of how the job is viewed by most of society. Is correctional officer the job someone applies for when they have made all the right life choices? No. Usually, it’s the job someone applies for in an act of desperation when lack of education or ambition has limited their employment opportunities. Prisons are the most wretched and miserable, roach-infested, mice-ridden places in this country. They’re packed with mental health patients, addicts, and people convicted of every crime, some of whom are innocent. Many facilities are sweltering hot in the summer, and sometimes blistering cold in the winter. Warehouses of human suffering. No one wants to work inside prisons much more than the people locked inside want to live in them.

Back in March, when Hochul announced to fired federal employees that if Donald Trump is firing you, then New York is hiring, New Yorkers notably did not sign up in droves to be corrections officers.

Late this summer, a dude got stabbed in a cellblock down the hallway from mine. I liked the guy. I remember seeing him light up when he told me that he planned on taking Bard’s entry exam. Unfortunately, that is no longer in the cards for him, having transferred to another facility after repeated attacks.

Prison understaffing is not just a New York problem. Many U.S. prisons operate with a “ratio of 1 officer to 70 or more prisoners, making rehabilitation efforts virtually impossible,” according to Onevoiceunited.org^[7]. Abolitionists argue that America doesn’t have a mass staffing crisis, we have a mass incarceration crisis. Even if this is true, understaffing leads to neglect in rehabilitation and excessive idle time. When this happens, guys scheme on each other, gangs are empowered, and they monopolize coveted spots as prison porters (a job that allows prisoners to get out of their cells and pass around necessary goods—and occasionally contraband—to other prisoners), and prisoners will do anything to get out of their cells, even beat up or cut other prisoners to try to get a porter spot and a bit of extra time out of their cells.

I’m serving my 16^th year for manslaughter. I’m a credible witness to the ongoing understaffing issue. Lawmakers haven’t used their legislative power, nor the governor her clemency powers, to decarcerate. This plus understaffing mean that the system is in a fragile state right now, more than they realize.

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