The governor is going to get someone killed.
Maybe an inmate, maybe a young National Guardsman, maybe a parole officer or prison guard.
Unless she cleans up her mess soon, someone is going to die.
And we’ll be lucky if it’s just one.
Because she is about a dozen pissed off inmates away from this being September 1971 all over again.
As New York’s wildcat prison-guard strike rounds out its second week, the continued mishandling of affairs by Gov. Kathy Hochul has gone from exasperating to dangerous. Her prison system, plagued by escalating problems throughout her administration, is approaching collapse, and that will manifest itself in prisoner violence and disorder.
Inmates have taken over buildings at four prisons thus far, and been pushed back quickly and safely by troopers and Corrections Emergency Response Teams, but at some point some inmate is going to go off on a National Guardsman or a correctional officer and an uprising is going to happen.
Maybe that’s what the governor wants. Maybe she cooked up this crisis to advance her party’s objective of emptying the prisons. Maybe she keeps kicking the hornets’ nest for a reason.
Because she couldn’t have handled things any worse if she tried.
Ignoring years of cries for help from correctional officers, sending her corrections commissioner to retaliate against officers for their no-confidence vote, yanking health insurance from striking officers, sending troopers to guards’ homes with paperwork that could eventually land them in jail, and then her latest press conference. Another shrill, condescending, dishonest diatribe, more of the bullying that has defined her administration, speaking to and about correctional officers like they were children or idiots, piss ants to be ground into the dirt beneath her feet.
Somehow, she thinks she can bully men and women whose jobs teach them that giving in to a bully can cost them their lives.
Instead of grabbing a box of coffee and a sheet pizza and heading out to one of the protest sites to talk to guards like humans and hear for herself what they go through, she is reinforcing their view that she doesn’t care about them or their safety.
Any more than she cares about the safety of the National Guardsmen, who she has sent in like lambs to the slaughter, untrained soldiers, many of them 18 and 19 years old, to watch over hardened criminals. In Attica yesterday, after working a 12-hour shift, National Guard soldiers were given a three-hour class on handcuffs and pepper spray, so they could – while wildly outnumbered – supervise maximum-security prisoners in “the yard.”
These are the same National Guardsmen who don’t get paid overtime, are missing out on college classes or higher-paying civilian jobs, and are being fed crap in filthy, cramped inmate quarters, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, day after day after day.
The parole officers, just as untrained as the National Guard soldiers, work 16-hour shifts, but they get to go home at night, as long as they’re back in the next morning. In Rochester, almost all active supervision of parolees – like the Level 3s with the ankle monitors – has been suspended as terrified parole officers have been sent behind the wall at Attica.
And all across the state, loved ones fear for their inmates, knowing that if the guards are chased out of the institution, inmates will begin savaging one another, based on gang affiliation or race.
It’s a ticking time bomb. Kathy Hochul started it and only Kathy Hochul can stop it.
How? By actually being the governor.
By standing up to the legislature and demanding that it modify or repeal the HALT Act. Since Democrats put it in place, inmate attacks on inmates have more than doubled – they are up 169%, in fact – and inmate attacks on guards have increased more than 75%. With record-low numbers of inmates and guards, New York prisons have record-high levels of inmate attacks on guards. That’s not coincidence, that’s cause and effect.
That’s the consequences of no consequences. When inmates can’t be punished for doing wrong, they do more wrong, and guards break and bleed, and ultimately some might die.
The governor has to use her power to get rid of the HALT Act.
And she has to show some humility, compassion and respect.
She needs to stop scorning guards and start embracing them.
She needs to talk to their wives and children, she needs to understand their sacrifice, she needs to treat them like the public servants they are. She needs to go their burn barrels and living rooms, she needs to go behind the wall and see where they work, and truly understand what they need.
And she must fix her prison system.
The commissioner has to go, the culture has to change, the prisons must be made safe for everyone – guards and prisoners alike.
If she wants to save lives.
But if she wants to keep playing this to help her in a Democrat primary next year, where hating cops and prison guards will win her votes, then she should keep doing what she’s doing.
And not be bothered by the funerals.
Because the governor is going to get someone killed.
And we’ll be lucky if it’s just one.