Gothamist: A New York judge has temporarily barred the Hochul administration from overriding state law and giving prisons blanket permission to keep incarcerated people in prolonged solitary confinement.
The state’s correctional system in February suspended implementation of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, or HALT Act, which limits the use of the practice. Prison officials said they did so to address safety concerns when corrections officers went on strike.
But the unbridled use of solitary confinement continued well past the state’s self-imposed June 6 deadline to reinstitute the restrictions.
In a court order this week, Judge Daniel Lynch wrote that the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, violated “the separation of powers” by temporarily suspending the law.
Lynch wrote that the department “wholly failed to demonstrate” that temporarily repealing the HALT Act “has a basis in rational fact.”
Riley Doyle Evans, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society who represented the six inmates who filed the lawsuit, said his clients and others had been “subjected, unlawfully, to prolonged solitary confinement for months — with DOCCS not providing justification.”
Evans said that as a result of the HALT Act suspension, incarcerated people were in solitary confinement for 22 to 24 hours a day — even if they did not have misconduct that merited temporary isolation.
“No agency in the executive has the authority to suspend a duly enacted law,” Evans said.
Lynch ordered the preliminary injunction to go into effect by July 11. He wrote that the corrections department would have to give an explanation to the court if the department needs exceptions in some facilities.
A spokesperson for the department said in a statement that officials are reviewing the decision.
During a news conference in early March, Gov. Kathy Hochul supported the decision to temporarily pause the full implementation of the HALT Act. She specifically cited the requirement that those in solitary confinement get four hours for programs such as career services.
“That is the area that is temporarily suspended because I’m wildly acutely aware that the hours are just too long,” Hochul said at the time. “No one should have to work a 24-hour shift, but it’s been part of having to comply with that law that has created this tension here.”
Hochul’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
