Unrest in Ogdensburg, Malone prisons as officers and advocates trade blame
Two North Country prisons experienced unrest Wednesday night and Thursday morning as corrections officers continue to strike statewide over dangerous conditions and staffing shortages.
According to the state's Dept. of Corrections and Community Supervision, staff at Riverview Correctional in Ogdensburg "vacated their posts leaving the dorms unsupervised" Wednesday night into Thursday morning.
The Albany Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT), the Riverview CERT Team, and NYS Troopers all responded to the incident at the prison. Thomas Mailey, the Director of Public Information for DOCCS, said several corrections officers also left the strike and returned to work to help secure the facility.
"Their efforts were instrumental in regaining control of the facility and preventing further escalation," Mailey said in a statement.
The city of Ogdensburg's police chief told North Country Now his department was also asked to secure the perimeter of the prison overnight. The reports say the facility was taken back under control by around 8 am Friday.
There are also reports of unrest at Bare Hill Correctional in Malone. Levar Butts, an incarcerated person at Bare Hill, called his sister Unique around 8 am Thursday morning and she recorded the phone call.
"We're locked in the dorms right now," Butts told his sister. "They literally just left us in here for dead. Anything can happen, like anything could happen to anybody."
Bare Hill has dorms that do not contain individual cells that lock, but rather open-style areas, so incarcerated people like Butts were locked in among other inmates in the same dorm.
Levar's sister, Unique, said it was scary to hear what her brother was going through and she sympathizes with some of the concerns of corrections officers. "I feel for the corrections officers if they [are] short-staffed, but that’s something that you have to take to HR, your higher-ups. It has nothing to do with the inmates," said Butts.
Four National Guard helicopters arrived in Malone midday today. It's unclear if the prison has been secured and officers have returned to work.
Visitations at all of New York's 42 correctional facilities have been canceled until further notice.
Corrections officers held unauthorized strikes outside prisons across the state this week, saying their jobs have become too dangerous due to staffing shortages, disciplinary changes, and increased flow of drugs into the prison, and the state isn't doing enough to help.
“The union has presented to them many options on how we can make changes through like secured vendors and other ... ways of preventing the drugs flowing in," retired corrections officer Gregory King told NCPR while protesting Wednesday in Dannemora said. "The state’s just not taking action so it’s becoming unsafe for everybody that’s working in there.”
On Thursday afternoon, New York’s prison commissioner Daniel Martuscello issued a memo meeting some of the officers’ demands.
It temporarily suspends part of the HALT Act, which has limited the use of solitary confinement. It also provides extra overtime pay for officers working amid the strikes and it says any officers who return to work by midnight tonight won’t be disciplined. It’s illegal for state workers to go on strike.
Advocates for those who are incarcerated say the unrest is a product of corrections officers' reducing their staffing levels for the strikes.
William Stradtman, who was incarcerated at Riverview for two and a half years, says COs hold the keys to inmates' food, medicine, and other necessities. "It can turn into a crazy environment really quickly" when they walk off the job, he said. The unrest, he said, "was not provoked by, y'know, let's cause a riot or an uprising. This was provoked by these [corrections officers'] protests."
The corrections officers' strikes come the same week as officers involved in fatal beating of inmate Robert Brooks late last year are scheduled to be arrested and arraigned. Stradtman believes that's not a coincidence. "It seems like a really big publicity stunt in order to take all the attention off of Robert Brooks," he said.
The unrest at Riverview Correctional in Ogdensburg has halted SUNY Potsdam’s bachelor’s degree program inside the prison.
About one hundred inmates take classes in person with university professors. But those classes were suspended starting Tuesday until further notice due to the corrections officers' strike.
In a statement, SUNY Potsdam president Suzanne Smith said the university is “concerned for the safety” of its incarcerated students and the staff at Riverview and is monitoring the situation.
