The conditions at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are akin to solitary confinement, local experts say — an apparent violation of state law.

Screams echoed through the halls of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility as women begged for their solitude to end. The sound of desperate hands banging on cell doors rang out like a solemn chorus. Exhausted, an incarcerated woman named Cici Herrera reached for a book. “That’s the only way I can keep myself from thinking too much,” she said. “I’m going crazy.”

At Bedford Hills, a maximum-security women’s prison in Westchester County, New York, a new superintendent and a recent policy change have sharply restricted the limited freedom incarcerated people in the general population once enjoyed. They could no longer count on regular showers — times were limited to tightly controlled shifts — and indoor recreation was eliminated even on the coldest days of the New York winter. The women found themselves locked inside of their single cells for the majority of the day, in conditions detention experts and survivors of solitary confinement compared to solitary confinement.

“Nothing is consistent,” said Herrera, one of three people incarcerated at Bedford who told The Intercept about the conditions. “We have to scream for everything.”

The conditions likely violate state law, according to multiple detention experts, all of whom have spoken with people incarcerated at Bedford. The new restrictions put the women in the middle of a political battle between activists who fought to place restrictions on the use of solitary and prison guards who have protested their implementation.

New York’s Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, or the HALT Act for short, limits the amount of time an incarcerated person can be forced to stay in their cell and when a prison guard can put a person in solitary, taking into account the punishment’s severe harm to physical and mental health. Researchers have found that solitary confinement increases the risks of premature death both during and after incarceration, from deaths of despair like opioid overdoses and suicide. “People should be receiving at least a minimum… seven hours out of cell time under the HALT Act,” said Sumeet Sharma, director of policy and communications at the Correctional Association of New York. Most people at Bedford previously had some freedom of movement to access communal spaces, shower, and cook. But when his team conducted a two-day monitoring visit at Bedford in November, they found that “that’s just not happening anymore,” Sharma said. “Essentially, people are locked in.”

The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has denied these accusations.

“The allegations regarding recent operational changes at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are inaccurate and misleading,” wrote Nicole March, a spokesperson for the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in a statement to The Intercept. March said the changes were implemented to deal with “frequent fights and safety concerns” at Bedford Hills. 

March added that many facilities still lack adequate staffing due to an unauthorized prison guard strike in spring of 2025, but that “HALT programming is now fully operational in the overwhelming majority of facilities and, with respect to Bedford Hill, it has been for several months.”  

That compliance appears to exist “on paper,” said Sharma, whose team confirmed that people in the general population units had lost access to communal indoor recreation space and now had to sign up to leave their cells after speaking with prison guards, officials, and incarcerated people. A written copy of the policy reviewed by The Intercept also noted the restrictions on recreation.

“In practice,” Sharma said, even when people sign up to leave their cells, “they’re not getting the statutory amount out of cell time. That appears to be a violation of the HALT Act.”

Corrections officers in New York have long been resistant to implementing HALT. Thousands of guards went on a wildcat strike last year after a group of corrections officers was charged with murder for brutally beating and killing an incarcerated man named Robert Brooks. In addition to protesting accountability for Brooks’s killers, the guards demanded that HALT be repealed. They argue the law places an undue burden on them by making it harder to put people in solitary confinement, either as a punishment or a safety tool.

Although the guards didn’t get their wish, advocates who helped get the law passed said New York corrections officers and prison officials are still refusing to implement the limits on solitary confinement and mandatory out-of-cell time throughout the system.

“The legislation is not being adhered to” by administrators at Bedford, said Donna Hylton, an activist who was incarcerated at Bedford Hills for 27 years and campaigned to get the law passed.

Herrera said she’s especially worried for the women who are too old or sick to use the outdoor recreation space in winter.

“You put somebody, 24 hours, in one cell with four walls, it’s a lot to take,” she said. “Mentally, some people can’t handle this kind of situation.”

All three people incarcerated at Bedford who spoke to The Intercept characterized their treatment at the hands of the guards as vindictive, reflecting a conviction that incarcerated people deserve additional punishment beyond their imprisonment.

Herrera and two other people incarcerated at Bedford got in touch with The Intercept via the Fight 2 Live Relief Fund, a New York abolitionist organization that has been advocating for better conditions at Bedford.

An incarcerated woman named Kit, who requested anonymity because she feared retaliation from prison officials and guards, said she’d heard guards call incarcerated women “entitled, needy, [having] ‘princess syndrome.’ It’s that mentality that, oh, this isn’t hard enough for these women.”

“That is where these policies are coming from — not from a desire to make the facility safer or to operate better,” Kit said, “but this sick and twisted sense of entertainment and satisfaction out of the pain and the stress of incarcerated individuals who are affected by these policies.”

The Intercept report