the announcment<\/a>.<\/p>\nThis comes after the March closing of Bare Hill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in northern New York, and the partial consolidation of Collins Correctional Facility in western New York amid a staffing crisis exacerbated by a three-week illegal correction officer strike in February and March of 2025.<\/p>\n
In a statement, a DOCCS spokesperson said it was in the early stages of exploring what a modern facility could look like.<\/p>\n
“Beyond infrastructure, new facilities present an opportunity to elevate the work of our security and civilian professionals and drive meaningful culture change across the system,” the DOCCS spokesperson said in a statement. “This is strictly a conceptual exploration, and no decisions have been made. Should any plans move forward, we will fully engage the Legislature, labor unions, and key stakeholders.”<\/p>\n
State Assemblyman\u00a0Michael Cashman, whose district includes Franklin County, where the Bare Hill Correctional Facility was located, released a statement Friday calling the state’s latest move “tone deaf.”<\/p>\n
“We don\u2019t have enough staff to fill our current needs. We have many closed and standby-status facilities throughout the state that could reopen rather than wasting a projected nearly one billion dollars on a brand new facility,” Cashman said. “We still have national guard members in facilities because the state cannot fill correction officer roles. We still have widespread safety concerns and hazardous work conditions for the correction officers and civilians within the active facilities. This is where investment needs to be made.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spectrum News 1 has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York state is examining the construction of a new 3,000-plus bed correctional facility, according to a solicitation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[303,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,87,308,380],"class_list":["post-344453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-crime","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-public-safety","tag-spectrum-news-staff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344453","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=344453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}