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| N.Y. Prison Officers Protest Special Housing Closings |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 10/17/2002 |
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State officials on Tuesday said they have now eliminated special housing units at nine prisons to save $2 million a year and to make better use of more modern units in other facilities. Meantime, prison officers staged another in a series of demonstrations to protest the decision to take the units for disruptive inmates offline. Tuesday's picketing was held at the Altona Correctional Facility in Clinton County, where use of a 12-bed special housing unit has been discontinued. In all, the state says it took 124 special housing beds offline as a cost-saving move first proposed by Gov. George Pataki in his 2002-03 state budget in January. Of the 76 officer jobs affected by the decision, officials said 46 positions will be eliminated through attrition and 30 other officers in the special units will be reassigned. 'We have vacancies in some of the most state-of-the-art disciplinary housing units in our system,' Corrections Commissioner Glenn Goord said. 'We should be using them while phasing out the older, smaller, less cost-efficient space around the system.' At the Mount McGregor prison in Saratoga County, for instance, state officials said it cost $80,000 a year per inmate to staff the seven-bed special housing unit with 13 officers. But when disciplinary cases are sent to the newer 32-cell special housing unit at the nearby Washington Correctional Facility, officials said security costs drop to $20,000 per inmate. An average of 97 inmates occupied the 124 special housing beds at the nine prisons -- all medium-security facilities -- affected by the state's decision, state officials said. At the same time, about 500 of the 4,500 beds in disciplinary housing units in the prison system as a whole have been unoccupied. State prison spokesman James Flateau said the special housing units at the nine prisons will be kept in working order and disciplinary cases will be quartered there temporarily while awaiting transportation to units in other prisons. But protesting prison officers said special housing units improve discipline and reduce further trouble when unruly inmates are transported to other prisons. The officers' protests have been organized by their union, the state Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, and are part of more general complaints about what they say is prison understaffing. |
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