BEHIND THE BARRELS: HOW A MESS HALL BRAWL SPARKED THE WILDCAT STRIKE BY NYS PRISON GUARDS
A MENTALLY-ILL PRISONER WITH A HISTORY OF ATTACKING POLICE APPEARS TO HAVE CATALYZED GUARDS' CONCERN WITH THE HALT ACT
Striking state prison guards outside the Collins Correctional Facility on Monday, Feb. 17. Photo credit: unkown, courtesy of Frank J. Panasuk, 1791 Society.
EXCLUSIVE Mar. 5, 2025
Correction Officer Charles Magee had enough. Instead of going to work inside the Collins Correctional Facility on Monday, Feb. 17, Magee and his colleagues went on strike. Across the street from the prison that frigid mid-winter morning, they stood around metal barrels filled with burning wood for warmth.
The burning barrels have become an icon of the guards' strike, symbolized in the social media posts of strikers and their supporters.
Sometime around mid-morning the first day of the strike at Collins, those who were there and court records say, a lieutenant left the prison and walked over to the strikers. He wanted to know what the strike was about. No one wanted to tell him. That's when Magee grabbed a piece of green paper with strikers' demands on it and handed it to the lieutenant.
Their first demand: "Reversal of the HALT bill, enabling meaningful and just disciplinary actions."
The illegal, wildcat strike by New York State prison guards started on Feb. 17, but its cause traces to a mess hall brawl at Collins two years before that, in 2023, which sent six officers to the hospital.
The Correction Officer at the center of that fight was Magee.
The brawl crystalized officers' growing concerns over the impact of a new law called the HALT Act. The act limited the amount of time prisoners could be locked in solitary confinement, which guards say compromised their control of prisons.
It's not really right to blame the strike on any one thing or event. But it's also true there's one person who, if he didn't start it, fairly represents the striking guards' main complaint that the HALT Act has made their already-risky jobs unbearably dangerous.
AI generated image used as icon by striking New York State prison guards and their supporters.
Clive Decolines grew up in Brooklyn. He started collecting criminal charges in 2004.
"Low level stuff," a law enforcement source told The Free Lance, "fare evasion, misdemeanor assault, resisting arrest."
Decolines was allowed to plead guilty multiple times to non-criminal disorderly conduct charges, the source said.
He caught what appears to be his first felony conviction in 2010.
Decolines was 22 at the time, living in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. He attacked City Police Officer Kenneth Jones and tried to take his handgun away from him while yelling "I will fucking kill you cracker". It took two more cops to cuff Decolines.
When they searched him, they allegedly found a knife.
Jones needed stitches to close a cut and his knee was so badly banged up he missed two months of work, he later testified.
Decolines was charged with two counts of aggravated felony assault, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27-to-54 months in state prison, Pennsylvania court records show.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections refused to provide Decoliones’ disciplinary record to this reporter.
Decolines re-surfaced in Brooklyn in 2016. He was 28 and armed with a 9mm Hi-Point Model C. Semi-automatic pistol in hand, he attempted to rob the B.K. St. Joseph Barber Shop in the middle of the afternoon on Aug. 1, 2016. He barged in, pointed the gun at customers and demanded cash.
Patrick Benoit grabbed him and pushed him outside, where Lelio Destin, Larry Jackson and others tackled him to the ground, according to Brooklyn Criminal Court records.
While wrestling with him, Decolines squeezed off a shot that wounded Destin in the scrotum. When they finally pinned Decolines to the ground, Benoit told police he observed "Defendant's finger on the trigger of said gun."
Jackson took the gun from Decolines, cracked the slide and peeked into the chamber. Brass from a live round glinted back. The gun was loaded.
A year later, Decolines pleaded guilty to first degree assault, attempted first degree robbery and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. Now a two-time loser, he was sentenced to nine years, flat.
If he was convicted of another violent felony, he would be a three-time loser subject to a mandatory 15-to-life sentence as a "persistent violent felon" under New York law.
No lawyer currently represents Decolines and visitation is suspended at all DOCCS facilities because of the strike, precluding an interview with him.
DOCCS refused to provide Decolines' disciplinary record.
Per its usual practice, DOCCS will take months to respond to the Freedom of Information Law request The Free Lance submitted for those records, and will likely deny that request too.
List of demands striking guards handed to bosses outside the Collins Correctional Facility on Feb. 17. Photo credit: source.
Decolines landed in the Collins Correctional Facility in 2023.
At first, he was confined in a cell in the Special Housing Unit. But the HALT Act limited the time a prisoner can spend in solitary confinement to 15 days. Decolines, now 35, was released into Collins' general population, a law enforcement source said.
The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act placed a 15-day limit on the length of time prisoners can be held in solitary confinement. After that, they can be segregated from the general population but must be given rehabilitative programming and allowed 4-6 hours outside of a cell everyday in dedicated housing units.
The striking guards say the HALT Act emboldened prisoners to break rules, prey on other prisoners and attack guards. If accurate, statistics appear to at least partially confirm their claims.
Assaults on prison staff were rising before HALT was signed into law by former-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021. They jumped from 1,043 in 2019 to more than 1,938 in 2024, according to data published by DOCCS.
DOCCS also says Inmate-on-inmate assaults rose from 1,267 to more than 2,697 in those years.
Most of the assaults occurred inside maximum-security prisons, but a growing proportion occur in medium security prisons, DOCCS’ data says. In 2019, there were 249 assaults-on-staff in medium-security prisons; in 2024, there were 693.
The increase mirrors an increase in the percentage of violent offenders incarcerated in medium-security prisons, according to the data.
Strikers’ sign tapped over the Franklin Correctional Facility sign. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Once released from solitary into the general population at Collins, a medium-security prison, Decolines' requested to see a mental counselor.
"That's an inmate other inmates said 'He's crazy. We want him out of here,'" a law enforcement source said.
"Mental health refused to see him because he had an appointment three days later," they said. "That should've never happened."
"If an officer says there's something wrong with this guy, he's got to see mental health," they explained. "It should happen right away."
Before it did, Decolines was walking out of Collins' mess-hall a quarter past 7:00 AM on June 9, 2023. CO Magee stopped him and asked to see his prisoner identification card. Decolines moved a hand toward his pants' pocket as if complying with Magee's demand, then quickly punched Magee in the face, according to court records.
Other Correction Officers came to Magee's defense, but Decolines fought them all.
"He was absolutely annihilating us," one recalled.
Once cuffed, Decolines was transferred to Attica. He assaulted two more Correction Officers there, two law enforcement sources said.
Decolines injured "Six officers in one day," they said. He broke one officer's neck, a second officer's shoulder and brutally beat a third so badly "he can't pass a cognitive exam anymore."
A sergeant who was not striking and was at work inside the Franklin Correctional Facility hugged his wife during a brief visit. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Former Correction Officer Peter R. Seereiter jr. was that officer.
"I still don't remember anything," Seereiter said on Tuesday. "I woke up in the hospital."
Decolines broke his right cheek bone, broke his right hand, knocked a tooth out, herniated two discs in his back and gave him a life-altering concussion.
"Next thing I remember I was waking up in a triage room laying on a hospital table looking at a bright light," Seereiter swore in a deposition in support of criminal charges against Decolines. "I looked down and saw the doctor cut all my clothes off and a bunch of medical staff checking me out."
Seereiter spent five days in the hospital. He remains in recovery from traumatic brain injury.
"I want to pursue criminal charges against Clive Decolines," Seereiter wrote at the end of his deposition.
DOCCS, Seereiter's employer, denied him the 3/4 pension usually granted to officers so badly injured on the job they can't work again, a person familiar with his case said.
"The sad reality is, this inmate, who has a history of disciplinary infractions since being incarcerated, is eligible for parole next year," Kenny Gold, Western Region Vice President for the New York State Correctional Officer and Police Benevolent Association, said in a news release at the time.
"Unless he is prosecuted for this violent attack on staff, the parole board needs to seriously question his ability to be a productive individual in society," Gold added. "If not, more than likely he will hurt someone again, as he has already proven.”
Striking guards from the Upstate Correctional Facility standing around a burn barrel with a pile to chopped wood. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Police and prosecutors arrested Decolines, but they only charged him with misdemeanor assault and only for the attack on Seereiter, Kait Munro, spokesperson for Erie County District Attorney Michael J. Keane, confirmed.
"Decolines was sentenced to 8 months of incarceration" in 2024, Munro added, to be served concurrently with the 9-year sentence he was already serving for the botched Brooklyn hold-up.
Because the prosecutor agreed to a concurrent sentence, Decolines escaped punishment.
Keane, the Erie County District Attorney, could have charged him as a three-time felony offender and sentenced him to life in prison, but didn't.
"That's a huge part of the strike," one striking officer from Collins explained. "How many officers do you have to see lose their job, get medically terminated, and nothing happens to the perpetrator?”
State Police say Decolines, now 37, hasn't been re-arrested since pleading guilty to the attack on Seereiter in 2024. He is scheduled to be released at the end of July.
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