by Chuck Sharman

A state court in New York granted class certification on February 16, 2026, to a suit challenging suspension of the state’s Humane Alternatives to Long Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act in prisons operated by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). However, the Supreme Court for the County of Albany refused to sanction the DOCCS for violating an injunction issued earlier to keep it from suspending the law, even after a lawyer for the prison system told a judge on October 22, 2025, that the prison system had no intention of applying the law to most prisoners.

“HALT is the statute relating to humane alternatives to long-term solitary confinement,” declared DOCCS attorney Jason Golub. “It does not apply to general population.”

“It’s absurd,” responded James Bogin, senior supervising attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services (PLS). Accusing DOCCS officials of “playing it both ways,” he told New York Focus that “[t]hey’re turning to us and saying, ‘We’re trying to get back to HALT, we’re doing what we can,’ but they’re turning to their staff and their unions and saying, ‘We got your back.’”

Lawyers with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners Rights Project brought the suit to challenge DOCCS’s decision to suspend the HALT Act’s provisions in state prisons in February 2025, as part of negotiations with the Corrections Officers and Police Benevolent Association (COPBA) to return striking prison guards to work.

As PLN reported, the strike began not with passage of the HALT Act in 2022 but shortly after 16 staffers were suspended in January 2025—10 of whom were indicted the following month—over the fatal beating of prisoner Robert L. Brooks, 43, at Marcy Correctional Facility. Across the street at Mid-State Correctional Facility, another 15 guards were put on leave after another prisoner, Messiah Nantwi, 22, was fatally beaten on March 1, 2025, while the strike dragged on. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.61; and Apr. 2025, p.54.]

COPBA was careful not endorse the strike, but it led negotiations to end it. Guard leaders, seizing the opportunity presented by blowback over the indictments, then wrested the HALT Act suspension from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) as an incentive to return them to work.

That Act, as PLN also reported, limits a prisoner’s placement in “segregated confinement”—defined as in-cell confinement exceeding 17 hours per day—to a maximum of three consecutive days and six days in any 30-day period. Beyond that, DOCCS must find “by written decision” and “pursuant to an evidentiary hearing” that the prisoner’s actions involved physical injury, sexual assault, extortion, coercion, a major prison disruption, possession of a weapon or dangerous contraband, and/or escape, such that placing the prisoner in general population would create both a “significant risk of imminent serious physical injury” and “‘an unreasonable risk’ to facility security.” Even then, the law places an absolute limit on confinement in segregation of 15 consecutive days or 20 days within any 60-day period. [See: PLN, Feb. 2025, p.54.]

Fighting on Two Fronts

Guards have made their antipathy to the HALT Act loudly known, and the DOCCS has seemed to have their backs, fighting not one but two lawsuits filed to force them to abide by the HALT Act’s provisions. One was the suit brought by the Legal Aid Society in 2025 to stop the DOCCS from suspending HALT Act requirements to end the guard strike.

The other was filed the year before by a group of prisoners who called their solitary confinement a violation of the law. Again, the DOCCS resorted to semantic arguments; the Act requires finding a prisoner guilty of acts so “heinous or destructive” that leaving him in general population is untenable, but the DOCCS insisted it didn’t need to include those words in disciplinary findings before throwing a prisoner in “the hole.” The state court in Albany disagreed and voided the disciplinary findings in June 2024. See: Fields v. Martuscello, N.Y. Supr. (Albany Cnty.), Case No. 902997-23.

The Legal Aid Society won the injunction in its case in July 2025, preventing the DOCCS from following through on any suspension of HALT Act provisions. But DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III seated a committee that in September 2025 issued recommendations on rolling back the HALT Act. Hochul has not taken them up so far. Meanwhile, the DOCCS announced that “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.”

After the October 2025 hearing, the court took up the Legal Aid Society’s motion to enforce the injunction. Even though the DOCCS had made it clear that it intended simply to say that the prisoners it threw into solitary were not covered by the HALT Act, the court declined to grant the motion to enforce the injunction in its February 2026 ruling.

However, it granted Plaintiffs’ request to certify a class consisting of “(1) all individuals in DOCCS custody who are or will be subject to cell confinement exceeding 17 hours per day under the HALT Suspension and who are not, at the time of such confinement, subject to placement in segregated confinement as a disciplinary sanction, and (2) … all individuals in DOCCS custody who are or will be in disciplinary confinement or housed in a setting whose conditions must at minimum conform or be comparable to the requirements of [residential rehabilitation units] under the Correction Law.” See: Smalls v. Martuscello, N.Y. Supr. (Albany Cnty.), Case No. 903926-25. 

Additional source: New York Focus

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