Hochul May Deploy National Guard as Wildcat Strikes Hit 25 N.Y. Prisons

Gov. Kathy Hochul threatened on Tuesday to use the National Guard to ensure the safety of New York’s prisons after wildcat strikes by corrections officers spread to more than half of the state’s 42 penitentiaries.

The threat was a response to labor actions that began on Monday with officers assigned to two upstate prisons refusing to come to work to protest staff shortages and other conditions. By Tuesday, strikes had emerged at 25 prisons, state officials said.

The officers’ union said it had not authorized the job actions, and Ms. Hochul, calling them “illegal and unlawful,” said she was considering forcing the officers back to work by invoking a state law that prohibits most public employees in New York from going out on strike.

“We will not allow these individuals to jeopardize the safety of their colleagues, incarcerated people and the residents of communities surrounding our correctional facilities,” the governor said in a statement.

The strikes, the first widespread work stoppage in New York’s prisons since a 16-day walkout by officers in 1979, come as the state correctional system faces close scrutiny stemming from the fatal beating of a 43-year-old inmate by officers in December.

Criminal charges are likely to be announced on Thursday against at least some of the officers and other corrections department employees whom state officials have implicated in the killing of the man, Robert Brooks, at Marcy Correctional Facility near Utica.

The attack on Mr. Brooks, who had been serving a 12-year sentence after pleading to first-degree assault in the stabbing of a former girlfriend, was captured on several officers’ body-worn cameras. The footage shows some officers punching, kicking and violently grabbing Mr. Brooks, who is shackled and handcuffed, while others look on.

Two weeks after Mr. Brooks’s Dec. 10 death, Ms. Hochul ordered the state corrections commissioner to suspend those implicated in the attack — 16 corrections officers and two nurses — as a step toward firing them. Two officers have resigned.

Like Ms. Hochul, the commissioner, Daniel F. Martuscello III, and the union representing officers, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, were in harmony as they both condemned the deadly assault on Mr. Brooks.

The Times Union of Albany reported this month, however, that the union had issued a vote of “no confidence” in Mr. Martuscello, in part because a reduction in the number of officers has forced the union’s members to work overtime in increasingly dangerous conditions.

Anger at the commissioner appears to have increased after he issued a memo to prison superintendents last week in which he said the department would have to get by with 70 percent of its typical work force because of the persistent staff shortages.

The striking officers, whose current three-year contract runs through March 2026, refuse to accept the smaller force as permanent, and increasing its size is among their demands.

Another major point of contention is a state law that took effect in 2022 and strictly limits who can be placed in solitary confinement, for what reason and how long they can be kept there.

When it was passed by the Legislature, the law was hailed as a groundbreaking measure that would fundamentally change life for people behind bars. But the officers’ union has said that the restrictions endanger them and incarcerated people alike, and the strikers are demanding that the law be reversed.

When the first picket lines began to form at the Collins and Elmira correctional facilities on Monday, a spokesman for the union said the actions were “not in any way sanctioned” by the group, and those who had failed to appear for their shifts were doing so “as a result of their discontentment with current working conditions.”

Jennifer Scaife, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a state prison oversight group, said officers at prisons across the state had complained to the association of regularly having to work 16-hour shifts.

Such schedules were “unsustainable” and a sign of “crisis” in the prison system, she said. But she also noted the strikers were demanding things the governor could not provide unilaterally in a way that did not “serve the union’s interest either in the short or long term.”

Prisoner rights’ groups criticized the strikes. One accused the strikers of trying to divert attention from the death of Mr. Brooks. Others warned that the actions were putting thousands of inmates at risk, causing them to go without meals, medications and programming.

Attica Correctional Facility was among the prisons targeted by strikers on Tuesday and one of eight where corrections officials suspended visitation.

Khadijah Shakur, whose son is incarcerated there, said in an interview that he had told her on Tuesday that he and other prisoners were given no meals until 1 p.m., when they received a small box of bran flakes, an apple and milk instead of a full meal in the prison cafeteria.

“He said, ‘Mommy, there’s nobody in here,’” Ms. Shakur said. “People are concerned.”