New York State Closes Yet Another Prison
In November 2025, the state of New York announced that it will close the Bare Hill Correctional Facility (BHCF), a prison near the Canadian border, by March of next year. The closure of the facility, which has a staff of 293 and incarcerates 709 people, comes amid severe staffing shortages within the New York prison system after thousands of guards were fired in the wake of a weeks-long wildcat strike. The staffing crisis led Gov. Kathy Hochul to deploy National Guard members as guards to make up the shortfall. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p. 61.]
First opened in 1988, BHCF holds about half of its total capacity, and the prisoners locked up there will now be transferred to other facilities that the state considers to be underpopulated. The guards who work at BHCF will be offered positions at nearby facilities. In total, New York has closed 12 state prisons in the last ten years, with ten of those closures occurring since 2020. While staffing is a major driver of the closures, there is also less of a need to maintain as many facilities given a steep decline in New York’s prison population, which has decreased from around 70,000 people in 1999 to 33,000 today.
Source: The Times Union
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