April 16, 2026 — Read her letter. Slowly. The way her husband must have read it — the man who ran toward the ambulance with tears in his eyes and received a thumbs up from the woman he loves, because she was alive.
Now ask yourself: how many warning signs does it take?
For the past three years the New York State Public Employees Federation has been sounding the alarm, walking into legislative offices, sitting across tables from DOCCS leadership, filing grievances, submitting health and safety complaints and raising our voices in every forum available to us.
We have told the State: if policies are not changed, someone is going to be seriously hurt. Or killed.
On February 23 at Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in Brocton, N.Y., that warning came true.
A rehabilitation counselor was attacked while alone in a locked room with no security personnel and four unrestrained incarcerated individuals with a history of violence. During the attack, she was forced to rely on her training – curl up in a ball, protect your vital organs and wait for help to arrive. As she lay on the ground, blind from the blows, hands over her head, she wondered whether her brain would swell or bleed. She thought about her daughters. About dying. About being an organ donor and what good she might do for others.
She survived by the grace of God and the heroism of Correction Officer Samuel Murdoch.
I refuse to wait for the next one. And there will be another unless something changes.
Let me be direct about what caused this: the misguided and under-resourced implementation of the Humane Alternatives to Long-term Solitary Confinement (HALT) legislation, security staffing shortages, and the reckless removal of restraint protocols for individuals with a history of committing violence.
From the very first day that restraint use was limited, frontline workers warned leadership. They said: There’s not enough staff to do this safely, it is only a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt. Leadership minimized it, told them to manage – told them they were safe.
They were not safe.
This is not a debate about whether incarcerated individuals deserve dignity or rehabilitation. They do. Every person behind the walls — uniformed and civilian staff, as well as incarcerated individuals — has a right to a safe environment. Safety and rehabilitation are not mutually exclusive. As this counselor herself wrote, “rehabilitation cannot exist in an environment where survival is the primary concern.”
Restraints, used appropriately, are not punishment. They are protection for everyone. Removing them wholesale for large groups of incarcerated individuals with a history of violence, without adequate safeguards, did not make these facilities more humane. It made them more dangerous.
The HALT Act, in principle, is well intentioned. It sought to address legitimate concerns about the overuse of solitary confinement. We understand that. But implementation has been a disaster — driven by ideology rather than operational realities. Our members are not opposed to reform. They are opposed to being sacrificed for it.
I am angry. A public servant, whose career has been dedicated to educating and rehabilitating incarcerated individuals, nearly died while she was doing her job. Officers are being forced to choose between written protocol and watching a colleague get beaten to death. I am angry that we have been raising these concerns for years and it took a near-fatality to get any attention.
But anger is not enough. Anger without accountability changes nothing. So let me offer something that DOCCS leadership and legislators have been unable or unwilling to produce on their own: common sense.
The solutions are not complicated and do not require years of study or mountains of funding. They require the same logic that any reasonable person would apply if they were the one walking into that locked room.
First: A security officer must be present whenever civilian staff interact one-on-one with an incarcerated individual. If DOCCS cannot provide that level of protection immediately, partitions should be used to separate staff and participants during programming. This is not dehumanizing; it is the same barrier you find between a bank teller and a customer, for example.
Second: Video conferencing for live programming. Technology exists for counselors, educators, and program facilitators to deliver meaningful services without being physically present in the same room as individuals who have not yet demonstrated they can safely manage themselves.
Third: Restraint chairs for individuals with a demonstrated history of violence. It is a targeted, specific tool for situations when an individual has shown they pose an active danger to others.
All of these recommendations are already in use in correctional and mental health settings across this country. They represent the floor — the absolute minimum — of what responsible facility management looks like.
To the legislators who voted for HALT and have not been open to reasonable amendments: Watch the video of this attack. Visit facilities and see what these policies have created. Talk to staff and incarcerated individuals, sit in the rooms where PEF members work. Look them in the eye; hear their fears.
To DOCCS leadership: The time for reassuring PEF members that they are “safe” while doing nothing to make them safe is over. We demand immediate action — the reinstatement of appropriate restraint protocols, physical barriers, video conferencing, adequate staffing levels, and a full operational review of how HALT is implemented.
This counselor ended her letter with a prayer: Let this not be a close call. Let it be a wake-up call. I echo her prayer. But prayers are not policy. If people in power continue to ignore what is happening inside these walls, then when the next attack comes — and it will come — they will have to answer for it. We have been warning you for three years. We are warning you again. Act now. Before someone dies.
Randi DiAntonio is a Vice President of the New York State Public Employees Federation, which represents more than 3,000 civilian employees at the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS).