ALBANY — State leaders are defending their decision to offer early release to people held in state prisons, and their approach to rebuilding the state prison security staff ranks after losing more than 2,000 corrections officers over a strike that ended in mid-March.

On Wednesday, Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III, told reporters in the state Capitol that the decision to offer early release to nonviolent offenders between 15 and 110 days from their judicial release date was a targeted move to try to rightsize a prison system running with at least 4,000 fewer COs than it is supposed to have.

Martuscello said he doesn’t have a target for the number of incarcerated people to release early, but review of prisoner rolls is ongoing.

He said there are about 700 names being considered, and there will be fewer than 700 released.

“We’ve taken a very narrowly focused approach to this to make sure we’re balancing the staffing crisis with preserving public safety by eliminating certain crimes like A1 and A2 offenses, other than nondrug, violent felony offenses, and any sex offenses are not eligible for this whatsoever, so it’s really just nonviolent felony offenses that are already approved to go out the door within the next 90 days,” he said.

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National Guard deployments

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Martuscello has clear authority to extend these early releases, under the terms of Corrections Law 92.

He could expand the early release terms to include a number of offenses and incarcerated people with up to a year left on their sentences.

The conditions within the state prisons are suboptimal — 34 of the 42 open state prisons still have a contingent of National Guard troops stationed to pick up shifts left open by a lack of staff.

Roughly 8,200 National Guard troops have been mobilized for prisons since the strikes, with a peak of 7,000 troops deployed at one time.

Currently, more than 2,400 National Guard troops are stationed in state prisons, and 3,400 are deployed in total for all purposes.

The National Guard troops are being transitioned to a “voluntary mission” wherein individual troops can request to be spun down from their deployment, but there is an expectation that there will be at least some contingent of National Guard troops in the prisons for the next few months at least.

The state has also authorized extra pay for those who continue to work in the prisons.

There are about 10,000 security staff working in the state prisons as of today, down from the nearly 14,000 that were at work as recently as February.

The state prisons need about 16,000 officers to run the facilities safely, the department has said.

Martuscello didn’t have a timeline for when the National Guard will be pulled from the state prisons.

That is ultimately up to the governor, and until the prisons have hired enough security staff without asking COs to work 24 hour shifts, they will remain.

There is also a plan to close up to five state prisons this year, to consolidate the incarcerated population and also consolidate security staff headcounts.

Martuscello said that decision came after the strike began and it became clear the state would be losing more COs this year.

The commissioner said he has not weighed sending prisoners to outofstate prisons to rightsize the population with the security staff available, but has moved people between state facilities for that purpose.

And the state prisons are still not accepting new inmates from county jails.

It has been more than a month since someone held at a county jail has been sent to a state prison, and Martuscello kept the door open to extending that moratorium for much longer.

“We recently just extended the moratorium to April 21, so we will be doing that,” he said.

“We’ll take a look at that as we approach that date.”

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Republican reaction

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The state Republican conference is overwhelmingly critical of Democratic Gov. Kathy Hohcul and DOCCS for the decisions they’ve made in the past few weeks and months.

On Wednesday, a handful of upstate Republican Assembly members who represent prison communities or sit on the Assembly Corrections Committee hosted a press conference where they denounced the early release order.

“The corrections department seems to be focused on the problems, not the solutions,” said Assemblyman Scott A. Gray, RWatertown.

He said the prisons have undergone a rapid decline, and worker safety has been rapidly degraded with apparently little action from the state.

“We work hard to make sure all our employees have workplace safety, we work hard to make sure that they are safe, troopers at work with the Move Over Law, we make sure that our DOT people are safe with workzone safety measures, but what happens when our corrections officers ask for workplace safety? We tell them ‘no.'” he said.

Gray and his GOP colleagues said there are other ways to solve the staffing issues without releasing people early from the prisons.

They asked the governor to reconsider the ban on rehiring any of the 2,000 COs fired after the strike ended in midMarch, and especially to reconsider the firm rules applied to who was fired.

When the strike ended, COs were given a deadline of 6:45 a.m. on March 10 to return to work or start the termination process.

Some officers returned to work on Monday but after the morning deadline, and others were unable to because they were taking prescheduled time off.

Those fired were fired whether or not they were on approved time off on the March 10 deadline, but Republicans said they think Hochul and DOCCS should weaken the terms of that firing and allow at least some of the fired COs back to work.

“The solutions are right in front of us, and it’s inept that we cannot arrive at some meaningful solution to these problems,” Gray said.

The Republicans were largely critical of a recent package of legislative language that Hochul has started to push regarding prisons.

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CO counts

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Sources with knowledge of ongoing negotiations between Hochul and the legislature’s leaders have confirmed that the governor is now seeking a new proposal to boost CO headcounts, reduce workloads and increase the number of people released from prison.

According to those sources, Hochul is seeking a legislative change to allow people as young as 18 to be hired as COs, expand virtual court hearings to limit inmate movements and expand good behavior time credits to get wellbehaved inmates out of prison faster.

Sen. Mark C. Walczyk, RWatertown, said there are a number of reasons he is opposed to that push.

Firstly, this proposal is coming after the state budget is already officially late, and is being pushed with none of the usual review, hearings or public input that budgets and state laws are supposed to get.

“We have public hearings on the governor’s presentation of the budget, the Senate and Assembly answer the governor’s budget with their own budgets, there’s public dialogue about the proposals in the budget,” he said.

“You’re talking about things that are added in, possibly late after all the process, after the budget has been late, not negotiated in public, not seeking feedback from the public or all the interested parties here. We’ve seen every single time they do this, it has disastrous impacts.” Walczyk said.

Walczyk said he is also opposed to the idea of 18-, 19- and 20-year-old people working in state prisons.

“There’s good reason corrections officers have to be 21, it takes a certain level of maturity and physical stature to be a corrections officer,” he said.

He said he hasn’t yet had a chance to consult the state CO union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, or other stakeholders on the issue, but he knows that the union and other prison safety advocates have not previously asked for a lower hiring age for COs.

“I have a lot of concerns about sending teenagers in with convicted felons,” he said.

Walczyk said he is open to expanded virtual court hearings, which advocates including NYSCOPBA union members have asked for in the past.

The idea is that virtual court hearings would reduce extraordinary movements of incarcerated people and would allow more COs to focus on prisoncentric tasks rather than security for transportation.

But the expanded good behavior time rewards aren’t a good idea in Walczyk’s book.

“We’ve seen in the past, criminals who are released early, who are out on parole and supposed to be supervised, who violate their parole, they passed Less is More, which means they can violate their parole and not go back to prison,” he said.

“They continue to recriminalize and revictimize our communities.”