A western New York state prison was placed under lockdown Wednesday after inmates barricaded themselves in a prison dorm.
The incident began at about 1 a.m. Wednesday at Collins Correctional Facility when a corrections officer discovered inmates using banned items, according to WGRZ.
The incident resulted in a scuffle. Two cell phones were found. One officer suffered a minor injury but returned to duty. No prisoners were injured, according to WIVB-TV, which said inmates in three dorms barricaded themselves inside during the incident.
The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said the prison was under control as of 5 p.m. Wednesday,
During a lockdown, inmates are largely confined to their cells. There is no indication of when the lockdown will be lifted.
The incident resulted in Correctional Emergency Response Teams and members of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s Office of Special Investigations being sent to the facility, according to the Times-Union.
The CERT teams regained control of the dorms before the lockdown began.
DOCCS said in a statement that after the initial incident, prisoners became “agitated and attempted to check on the incarcerated individual in possession of the phones, who was not injured. … Later that morning, as a result of various potential threats, staff exited three dorms without incident. There were no hostages taken in any of the three dorms.”
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The incident at Collins, a medium-security facility for men, comes against a contentious backdrop of concerns over staffing.
Corrections Commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III has said that due to staffing shortages, full staffing is now regarded as 70 percent of former levels.
State Prisons In New York
💣💣A TIMEBOMB💣💣
The Collins Correctional Facility is on lockdown after prisoners took over 3 buildings.
🧯Annual cost for one prisoner- $500,000
🧯Prisoners over 50 years old. Doubled since 2008.
🧯NY has a bill to give prisoners $2500 after release…— D. O. (@D2O2D2) February 13, 2025
Kenny Gold, a regional vice president of the New York Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, said that policy has been a disaster.
“Collins has been so short-staffed and screaming for help, and [managers] were taking their regular scheduled days off away for a while now,” Gold said. “They’re mandating people on triple shifts all the time because they don’t have enough staffing.”
“The actions that we see like what happened and what has transpired today is strictly only because they know there’s no penalty and the politicians making the changes they’re making the changes to better the convicts, not to make it safer for the staff that work in there every day,” Gold added, according to WGRZ.
Chris Summers, president of the union, told the Times-Union in August that closing prisons to save money has taken precedence “over the safety of staff and the overall protection of the communities in which these facilities reside.”
He said then that 1,600 corrections officers had left in the past year while the inmate population statewide rose by 2,100.
“Assaults on staff are occurring at historic levels,” the union said in a release last summer.
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