It has been one year since some members of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision held a wildcat strike.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, it’s illegal to strike under the Taylor Law, but if you have people that are your employees, state employees, and they’re telling you that we can’t go further under these working conditions, you should really sit down at the table and try to fix it,”\u00a0said Erie County Sheriff John Garcia.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
During the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision employee strike, state prisons stopped taking inmates sentenced to more than a year, leaving local jails having to make room.<\/p>\n
One year later, the Erie County Sherrif’s Department is almost back to their normal state-readied inmate numbers, but they are still waiting on approximately $2 million in backlog pay.\u00a0
\n
The New York State corrections law for reimbursement is $100 per day per inmate on the 11th day an inmate is in custody.<\/p>\n
But Garcia says that last\u00a0year’s\u00a0strikes still\u00a0has\u00a0the local sheriff department feeling the impact of the backlog of\u00a0state-ready\u00a0inmates.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs of today, we have about\u00a032\u00a0state-readies,\u00a0and those include people that have been sentenced and parole violators. At our height, we\u00a0had\u00a0in our custody, over 160.\u00a0So\u00a0it was very taxing upon our staff and also on our budget,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The New York State corrections law for reimbursement is\u00a0$100 per day per inmate on the\u00a011th day an inmate is in custody.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo\u00a0between day one and day\u00a010, we\u00a0don’t\u00a0get anything.\u00a0So\u00a0on day 11, if\u00a0they’re\u00a0still in our custody, then we get $100 a day,\u201d Garcia said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s\u00a0a\u00a0number he says is\u00a0nowhere\u00a0near enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne-hundred dollars\u00a0a day in today’s day and age, with inflation and everything else. When you look at housing, food, medicine\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that’s\u00a0gone through the roof. And unfortunately, I would say about 90% of our incarcerated individuals have some sort of medical condition, be it physical or\u00a0mental,” Garcia said.<\/p>\n
And to add to the financial strain, local\u00a0sheriff’s\u00a0departments\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0receive reimbursement for medication costs for state-ready inmates.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat’s happening is this state is doing all these different mandates, MAT (Medication-Assisted Treatment), HALT (Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement) and everything else, and the costs are passed on to the counties,\u201d Garcia said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Erie County is expecting a reimbursement payment of approximately\u00a0$2 million that would cover a backlog from April 1 to Sept.\u00a031, 2025, and Garcia thinks other counties are due the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bad decisions that were made at a state level, the domino effect came to Erie County and the other 61 counties, because I could tell you every single sheriff, it doesn’t matter what the capacity is of your jail,\u00a0if you’re holding the state-readies, you’re not prepared for that. And the costs you incur\u00a0are\u00a0not something you budget for,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been one year since some members of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[387,113,26008,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,108,308,6317,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-136764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-app-public-safety","9":"tag-buffalo","10":"tag-halena-sepulveda","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-news","14":"tag-new-york-state","15":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","16":"tag-new-york-state-news","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-ny-state-of-politics-blog","19":"tag-public-safety","20":"tag-swarm","21":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}