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Alliance Alert: A recent ���ϲ����� Focus investigation reveals deeply troubling attempts by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to dramatically narrow the scope of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act—a landmark reform law the Alliance for Rights and Recovery has strongly supported.

HALT was designed to end long-term solitary confinement and ensure that no person is kept in a cell for more than 17 hours a day, regardless of where they are housed. Yet DOCCS is now claiming that HALT does not apply to general population units, despite clear statutory language stating otherwise. This interpretation would exempt thousands of incarcerated ���ϲ�����ers from protections that lawmakers, advocates, and impacted families fought for over a decade to secure.

Reports from inside multiple facilities tell a very different story from DOCCS’s assurances of compliance. Incarcerated people across the state report being locked in their cells up to 23 hours a day, canceled programs, and near-total isolation in units that DOCCS claims are operating “normally.” Courts, legal advocates, and the law’s lead sponsor have all rejected the agency’s interpretation as legally unsound and inconsistent with the intent of HALT.

The Alliance remains proud members of the #HALTsolitary Coalition. We will continue working alongside advocates, legislators, and directly impacted individuals to ensure full implementation of the law and to stop any attempt to weaken or distort its protections.

People who are incarcerated deserve humane treatment that supports healing and rehabilitation—not policies that inflict psychological harm, worsen trauma, and undermine public safety. HALT exists to prevent precisely the kinds of abuses and extreme isolation now being documented in prisons across the state.

The Alliance will continue monitoring this situation closely and will provide opportunities for our members and community partners to take action. Upholding HALT is essential to ensuring that ���ϲ����� moves forward—not backward—on human rights, dignity, and recovery-oriented practices within its correctional system.

Prison Agency Seeks to Dramatically Narrow Solitary Confinement Law
By Chris Gelardi | ���ϲ����� Focus | November 13, 2025

As its latest defense in an ongoing court battle, ���ϲ�����’s state prison agency is arguing that the core of a landmark solitary confinement reform law does not apply to the vast majority of the people it incarcerates. Advocates, attorneys, and the legislation’s lead sponsor say the agency is mischaracterizing the law and obscuring what incarcerated people describe as dire conditions in the prison system.

The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prison system, recently said that all but seven of its 42 facilities are in compliance with the law, which restricts the use of isolation in ���ϲ����� jails and prisons and mandates adequate out-of-cell time. 

Affidavits from three dozen incarcerated people, as well as 10 sources who spoke to ���ϲ����� Focus last month, indicate that’s false. Some say they’re locked in their cells for upwards of 23 hours a day. One said he’s been let out of his cell only twice in two months.

To explain the discrepancy, DOCCS has used a novel legal reading of the 2021 law, called the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, stating that it does not apply to general population cell blocks, where most of its population is incarcerated.

Democratic state Senator Julia Salazar, who heads her chamber’s corrections committee and crafted and sponsored HALT, called the state corrections agency’s interpretation “demonstrably false.”

“No one who is licensed to practice law in ���ϲ����� should be giving such terrible legal advice,” she said of the agency lawyer’s argument.

The prison system is still reeling from a  that ended in March with about 20 percent of guards losing their jobs. With fewer security staff to watch over and escort incarcerated people, prisons have taken to canceling programs, recreation, and visitation, instead keeping prisoners confined to their cells and dorms.

In April, the Legal Aid Society sued DOCCS, accusing it of keeping facilities locked down after the strike without proper justification under HALT.

HALT mandates that facilities let most incarcerated people out of their cells for at least seven hours a day, and enacted strict rules for the use of solitary confinement as discipline. Advocates see it as one of the most consequential laws governing prison conditions that ���ϲ����� has passed in decades.

The law included carveouts for situations like the strike: DOCCS can temporarily suspend its compliance with HALT at an individual facility if the agency declares that the facility is in a state of emergency. After the strike,  the whole system was in an emergency, allowing individual prisons to opt out of the law as they saw fit — a move that a judge later said the agency “wholly failed” to rationalize. He  to narrow the scope of its HALT suspension to individual prisons and offer detailed justifications for each one.

Nearly four months later, in an October 22 hearing, lawyers for DOCCS finally did so. They said that only seven prisons — Adirondack, Attica, Cayuga, Five Points, Gouverneur, Greene, and Lakeview correctional facilities — were under states of emergency, according to an . All other facilities had restored the programs and out-of-cell time that HALT requires, the lawyers said, and general population units were operating normally across the prison system.

Last month, however, ���ϲ����� Focus reported that  from facility to facility, with some incarcerated people in general population units locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day. Legal Aid  last week, citing ���ϲ����� Focus’s reporting, that included 37 sworn statements from people locked in their cells across the system. Most, , are housed in general population units and say they’re getting far less than seven hours out of their cells every day.

Smalls, incarcerated at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, said he is locked in his cell for at least 21 and a half hours a day. Staff sometimes let him out to attend recreation, showers, meals, and classes, but his schedule varies; most days, his classes are canceled, his statement said.

DOCCS has said that situations like Smalls’s — in areas that the agency itself said have resumed “normal” operations — don’t amount to legal violations. At the center of the department’s argument is whether the reform law applies to prisons’ general population units.

“HALT is the statute relating to humane alternatives to long-term solitary confinement. It does not apply to general population,” said Jason Golub, DOCCS’s top lawyer and one of its deputy commissioners, at the October 22 hearing.

The argument has stunned prisoners’ rights advocates and attorneys.

HALT places strict limits on what it terms “segregated confinement,” defined in both &�Բ�����;���Ի�&�Բ�����;�ٰ���䳧’s&�Բ�����; as “any form of cell confinement for more than seventeen hours a day.” The limits apply to any place an incarcerated person is locked in a cell, whether that’s in a general population unit or an area dedicated for isolation, according to attorneys, advocates, and Salazar, the bill sponsor. Roughly half of the state’s prisons house their populations in cells, as opposed to dormitories, Golub said at the hearing.

“It’s absurd,” James Bogin, senior supervising attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services, said of Golub’s argument. “There’s no reason why it wouldn’t apply” to general population units, he said.

Asked about its deputy commissioner’s comments, DOCCS pointed to a May , which clarified what requirements prison staff must meet under HALT to send people to special mental health disciplinary units. The ruling didn’t wrestle with the question of general population out-of-cell time, and echoed that HALT’s definition of “segregated confinement” isn’t limited to any specific area in a prison.

An agency spokesperson said “the reasoning and rationale” in the court decision led the department to interpret the limits as not pertaining to general population units.

“HALT’s provisions regarding the circumstances under which someone can be confined in a cell for over seventeen hours and the out-of-cell programming and recreation required to be provided do not apply to individuals housed in a general population setting,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The law’s programming and recreation requirements mostly apply to disciplinary isolation. The department’s assertion that the same is true of out-of-cell time requirements is “unequivocally false,” said Matthew McGowan, an attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services who argued the appellate court case that DOCCS cited. The judge’s decision in that case addressed a “narrow question,” he said, not “DOCCS’s authority to confine people for more than 17 hours per day.”

“It strikes me as a bad faith, intentional misrepresentation.”

—Matthew McGowan, Prisoners’ Legal Services

In another statement, DOCCS said that Legal Aid’s lawsuit has nothing to do with out-of-cell time in general population units; three of the six plaintiffs listed in the  were in general population units.

The court, for its part, also considers general population units to be within the scope of the Legal Aid case. Its July order scolded DOCCS for only sharing information on its progress to improve conditions in isolation units. “It did not address conditions in general population, where [Legal Aid] represented their clients remain in cell confinement for more than 17 hours a day,” .

“It’s alarming that DOCCS’s chief legal officer appears either unable to understand or unwilling to accept fundamental aspects of a law his agency is required to follow,” said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project, who is arguing the case against DOCCS. “HALT clearly requires that people in general population receive at least seven hours a day out of their cells.”

Meanwhile, people are also locked down in disciplinary, mental health, and other units apart from the general population — including in facilities that aren’t on the list of emergency declarations that DOCCS lawyers dictated in court last month — according to affidavits submitted by Legal Aid.

Donavin Taveras, housed in a disciplinary unit at Upstate Correctional Facility, said in a court filing that he has experienced near-total isolation for over two months. Since he was transferred to Upstate on August 29, staff have only let him out of his cell and the small outdoor pen attached to it twice, for visits from his lawyers, he alleged. DOCCS has  that solitary time in the cell-attached pens satisfy the law’s requirement for “congregate” recreation.

“Being cooped up in a cell where you’re not able to move at all messes with you. I sit in one spot all day,”  reads. “The only way to interact with other people is to yell so they can hear you through the wall.”

DOCCS’s interpretation of HALT is  by the agency to circumvent the law.

Under former commissioner Anthony Annucci, DOCCS enacted policies that  to solitary confinement using its own definition of a solitary-exempt disability, rather than what was outlined in the law. It also kept incarcerated people  at a time — under a similar state of emergency — and sent people to solitary . Each of those apparent violations came with its own legal justification that legislators who sponsored HALT described as bogus.

DOCCS’s current commissioner, , reversed one of Annucci’s old HALT policies and appeared to be taking some aspects of the law more seriously — until this year’s strike.

The striking guards, who said that HALT jeopardizes their safety, made repealing the law . Martsucello convened a committee that in September issued recommendations to the governor and state legislature on how best to roll back the law. Neither Governor Kathy Hochul nor members of the Democratic majority in the state legislature have expressed willingness to make changes.

Bogin, of Prisoners’ Legal Services, said state corrections officials were “playing this both ways.”

“They’re turning to us and saying, ‘We’re trying to get back to HALT, we’re doing what we can,’” he said. “‘But they’re turning to their staff and their unions and saying, ‘We got your back.’”