By Alex Gault
Watertown Daily Times, N.Y.
ALBANY, N.Y. — The organization representing New York state’s county sheriffs is hoping Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul will relax her wholesale ban on any state or local government from hiring any of the 2,000 corrections officers fired after they refused to return to work this week.
From mid-February to Monday, around 8,000 state corrections officers went on strike without union approval, in violation of state law, demanding a change to their working conditions and safety rules in the state prison system. After a handful of deals were offered and rejected, a final agreement outlined over the weekend got about 5,000 of the striking officers back to work. The remaining 2,000 were terminated effective Monday afternoon.
Hochul then signed an executive order, declaring a state of emergency within the prisons and ordering that no state agency, county, city, town or village government hire any of the 2,000 officers who had been fired.
“There are consequences when people break the law, and that means you’re not working in our state workforce, ever,” Hochul said on Tuesday when asked about the order.
But sheriff’s across the state want to hire those COs to staff their own county jails. In Jefferson County, Sheriff Peter R. Barnett said he’s had more than 25 applications submitted by COs who appear to be covered by the governor’s order. With 12 open positions at the Jefferson County jail, Barnett said hiring those COs could give him a full complement of jail staff for the first time in decades.
“Might as well say it’s been 20 years,” he said. “The Jefferson County correctional facility has always been short.”
That issue persists across the entire state: for years, law enforcement leaders have said there’s a hiring crisis, with too few qualified applicants for their complex, difficult and dangerous jobs.
Peter R. Kehoe, executive director of the New York Sheriffs Association, said in an interview Friday that he would project there are about 1,000 open officer jobs at county jails across the state.
Kehoe said he and his team have been in discussion with the governor’s office to get her to change course on the hiring ban. He stressed that his organization is not critical of the governor’s position, but hoping a compromise can be made to give its membership a chance to solve their own hiring crises.
“She doesn’t want the COs to be basically rewarded with new employment,” he said. “We think it’s not a good attitude, but there’s merit on both sides.”
Under the terms of the powers given to the governor in times of emergency, the hiring freeze can only persist for 30 days before she must either renew it or let the order lapse. Kehoe said that some of the governor’s staff have indicated she intends to regularly renew the emergency order every 30 days for an extended amount of time.
Both Kehoe and Barnett said they think that allowing those fired COs to work in county jails would be a positive step for all involved. The COs who walked out, and especially those who remained on strike after the Monday deadline to return to work, have complained that conditions within the state prisons are increasingly unsafe, with violence and contraband becoming a regular and growing problem in all facilities.
Kehoe said that while the jails see many of the same incarcerated people as the prisons do — as almost all people who go to state prison spend at least some time in a county jail before and during trial, the overall situation in county jails is less tense.
“Even before the Governor issued her order, we had many sheriffs across the state who were hiring state COs who were looking got work and to get out of that environment,” he said. “It’s a tough, tough environment to work in, and I think they see the jails as a more calm and more safe environment.”
Barnett in Jefferson County said that his jail is at capacity almost all the time, and he often has to “house out” people ordered to be held at the Watertown facility. He said there are certainly difficult aspects of jail work, and things are made more difficult by the staffing issues he’s been having.
He said getting a full complement of jail staff would make things much better for everyone who works there.
“Having all budgeted positions filled is going to be a big relief for the current staff,” he said. “That way that will cut down on mandatory overtime.”
Barnett, who is critical of the HALT Act that requires hours of programming for incarcerated people every day and restricts solitary confinement among other things, said that his jail is required to follow many of the same rules that the COs had to follow in the state prisons — at jails that means 7 hours of out-of-cell time per day per incarcerated person.
Adding more staff to his roster would help run those programs more safety, Barnett said.
“It’s a logistical nightmare,” he said. “The staff that I have down there, I can’t say enough, we have tremendous staff.”
Barnett said he is reviewing all applicants who have reached out to him; he said moving from a state prison to a county jail can be a big move and could prove to be a bigger challenge for some COs than expected.
“It’s a bigger transition going from state prisons down to a county jail,” he said.
But he noted that it’s a much more secure job for the average CO — in an era where the state has sought to close a few state prisons every few years, Barnett noted that the county jails will never close.
“You can close prisons, but you’re not touching my jail,” Barnett said.
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