ALBANY, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — New York’s prisons face a human rights complaint filed with the United Nations. Filed this week, it coincides with the release of an oversight report on the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, a state law meant to limit segregated or solitary confinement.
The HALT Act (S2836/A2277A) took effect on March 31, 2022. With few exceptions, the law bans prisons from confining anyone to a cell for over 17 hours a day for more than 15 days in a row, or for a total of 20 days within a 60-day period.
It also prohibits segregated confinement for “special populations,” like people under 22 or over 54, or with mental health conditions or physical or cognitive disabilities. Instead of solitary, the law created new therapeutic residential rehabilitation units to isolate and discipline an incarcerated person for over 15 days.
An RRU is not designed as a punishment cell. The law mandates that people in the RRU receive at least seven hours out-of-cell daily for programming and activities. And anyone in the SHU is supposed to get at least four hours of out-of-cell, including at least one hour for recreation.
UN complaint
On Wednesday, the HALT Solitary Campaign alleged widespread abuse, torture, and deaths in state prisons and local jails. The complaint filed with UN Special Rapporteurs accuses New York State, New York City, and other localities of “egregious practices” violating both domestic and international human rights law.
They claimed ongoing use of solitary and staff brutality against the incarcerated. They pointed to the killings of 43-year-old Robert Brooks in 2024 and 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi in 2025.
The campaign cited a chilling statistic, that someone dies in the New York prison system once every two and a half days. They tallied over 60 deaths in New York City jails since 2021 at least 91 deaths in state prisons from January through September 1, 2025. That included at least 12 deaths during the wildcat strike among correction officers that ended in March. At least one of those, 67-year-old Anthony Douglas, reportedly died by suicide during the height of the unsanctioned work stoppage.
The HALT Solitary Campaign wants the UN to investigate these human rights issues and to recommend that state officials fully implement HALT and a similar New York City law, Local Law 42.
Asked for a response to the complaint, a spokesperson from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said, “The Department has not been served the complaint and has no comment.”
And according to Republican New York State Senator Rob Rolison, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction: “Respectfully to the United Nations, I do not believe their involvement in the New York State correctional system is warranted or necessary.”
But “The U.S. Constitution prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment, which is what long term solitary confinement is,” said Democratic New York State Senator Julia Salazar, who sponsored the original HALT legislation and chairs that Senate Crime Committee. “That’s why we passed the HALT Solitary Law, which DOCCS openly violates. Even a judge ruled that DOCCS has no rationale for failing to implement the law.”
CANY report
The Correctional Association of New York published its report on improvements and challenges under HALT on Monday, monitoring DOCCS facilities from January 2023 to July 2024. It found that the number of people in disciplinary isolation in state prisons has actually increased since the 2022 HALT implementation.
While the SHU population dramatically fell from 5.7% of the prison population in March 2022 to 2.4% in April 2022, the overall figure rose as placements in the RRU increased to a maximum of 6.1% of the prison population. Totals in disciplinary confinement rose from a range of 4.9% to 5.9% pre-HALT, to a range of 4.9% to 7.2% from May 2022 to July 2024, CANY said.
They also found overrepresentation in solitary among Black prisoners and those under 30:
| Demographic | Share of prison population | Share of SHU or RRU population |
|---|---|---|
| Black | 49% | 60% |
| Age 22 to 30 | 22% | 42% |
| Under 21 | 2% | 8% |
Fifty-five percent of the incarcerated people interviewed in the SHU by CANY alleged “provocations, set-ups, or false accusations by staff.” They alleged what they called a lack of accountability for officers ignoring HALT Act requirements.
Staff and union representatives, meanwhile, said the new disciplinary system is too lenient and needs more ways to deter misbehavior. Some staff accused incarcerated individuals of intentionally offending to get moved to an RRU for better treatment.
But the report also found that conditions in RRUs are often “indistinguishable” from SHUs “both physically and operationally.” It argued that some of those therapeutic alternatives were hardly changed when shifting from SHU to RRU, maintaining original designs that minimized human contact. All told, they found that only 29% of RRU occupants got six hours of out-of-cell programming per day mandated by HALT.
This blurred line between the units is often because of gaps in the therapeutic programming the law requires. Although 35% to 40% of people in an RRU are considered mental health cases, the New York State Office of Mental Health hasn’t operated any programs in those units. That’s because of staff safety concerns, since DOCCS requires program facilitators to be locked in with participants during instruction.
Violence increased across the board—committed against staff and the incarcerated alike—in the two years after HALT was signed into law. Reported assaults rose from 1,573 in the year before HALT to 2,421 by the second year after the law took effect. But the proportion of staff reporting “no injury” also rose during the same time period, from 74% to 83%.
DOCCS responds
The official perspective from DOCCS came in the CANY report itself—across pages 42 to 48—arguing that the data shows a significant reduction in SHU confinement since 2022. Numbers in SHU fell from 607 to 268 individuals between April 2022 and July 2025. That’s a 55.8% decrease overall.
DOCCS acknowledged limited RRU bed capacity and challenges when coordinating transfers, possible reasons that individuals are held in SHU beyond the 15-day limit. Still, DOCCS criticized CANY’s methodology, arguing that it’s misleading and inaccurate to draw broad, systemic conclusions from a small subset of the population. The department compared the report to a previous Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs publication using a larger sample size in 2024.
The department said everyone confined to the SHU for over 15 days are offered three extra hours of outdoor recreation, for a total of seven hours out-of-cell daily.
On the issue of disparities in race or age among people in solitary, DOCCS called CANY’s conclusions dangerous and irresponsible, drawn “without specific evidence of racially or age-related disparities.” The department said that it applies the same due process standards regardless of demographics. Noting a correlation between age and serious crime rates nationally, DOCCS argued that the proportions of younger inmates punished in isolation align with those rates.
The department also dismissed the claim that special populations, like people 21 and below or 55 and above, were in segregated confinement in 2024, citing its own data and findings from the Justice Center. Furthermore, DOCCS contended that raw numbers in disciplinary confinement represent an “ineffective comparison” to pre-HALT solitary, because the law “was not intended to bar DOCCS from applying standards of behavior for the incarcerated population.”
DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello suspended parts of HALT during and after the strike because of “ongoing emergency and exigent circumstances” and a “significant staffing deficit.” In September, the agency proposed revisions to the law.
Legislators respond
Rolison pointed out that those proposed HALT amendments come from a working group that included CANY, a non-profit that provides independent oversight of state prisons. “I look forward to helping implement policy changes put forward by this working group to improve safety for facility staff and the incarcerated population,” he said. “They are comprehensive and common-sense initiatives to create a safer working environment for those working in correctional facilities and those incarcerated there.”
Even so, “The courts ruled that DOCCS has no legal basis or factual reasoning for not implementing [HALT],” Salazar said, arguing against amending measures that haven’t actually been followed. “We need the law to finally be properly implemented and followed for prisons and jails to become safer and more humane.”
Republican Assemblymember David DiPietro, ranking member of the Assembly Committee on Correction, said Governor Kathy Hochul should repeal what he called a reckless policy that only appeals to radical activists and criticized distorted descriptions of state prison as torture. “This misguided law has stripped COs of essential tools to maintain order,” he said, arguing that HALT created “chaos where both COs and inmates are at greater risk.”
But Salazar offered a different take. “Both the CANY report and the recent request to the United Nations make it clear that HALT needs to be fully implemented by DOCCS,” she said. “New York will never return to the practice of torturing people through the use of solitary confinement.”
Take a look at the letter to the UN from the Halt Solitary Campaign:
And here’s the CANY report, “Two Years of HALT: Use of Segregated Confinement, Implementation of Core Requirements, and Perceptions Across the System”:
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