New York Prison Overdoses Rise Despite 2021 Physical Mail Ban

New York prison staff administered the overdose-reversal drug naloxone 51 percent more often in 2025 than the year before, and fatal overdoses behind bars remain far above the level recorded before the state restricted physical mail in 2021, according to Department of Corrections and Community Supervision data compiled by the Correctional Association of New York.

The numbers, reported last week by THE CITY, trace a policy that has not produced its intended result. In August 2021, prison officials banned most physical mail, arguing that drug-laced letters and packages were a primary smuggling route for fentanyl and other contraband. Overdose deaths in state custody then rose from two in 2021 to 11 in 2022, fell to six in 2023, and reached 12 in each of the past two years.

A crackdown that narrowed one channel, not the flow

Officials and advocates read the same figures differently. Department spokesperson Nicole March defended the mail restriction and said there is "no one reason for the changes in the overdose deaths from year to year." She added that the drugs in the system and the ways they are used have changed, noting that some incarcerated people now smoke paper soaked in drugs — a problem that has appeared in lockups nationally. March said the department has strengthened "contraband interdiction efforts" through expanded screening and investigations.

She also acknowledged that intoxications and overdoses have increased across the department's 41 facilities, which contributes to the higher naloxone count. Staff are instructed to administer the reversal drug whenever someone is found unresponsive, regardless of the suspected cause, which means the 51 percent increase measures emergency responses rather than confirmed opioid overdoses alone.

Scanners for visitors, discretion for officers

Advocates point to an asymmetry in how the department screens the people who enter its buildings. Visitors must pass through body scanners at all 41 facilities. Officers cannot be compelled to do the same: state law bars the department from forcing correction officers to submit to body scanners, and they may decline for medical or other reasons and choose alternative screening instead.

"Make that make sense," said Michelle Bonet, founder of NYS DOCCS Federal Oversight, an advocacy group that works with incarcerated people and their families. She described the contraband issue as real but argued the department uses it to justify restrictions on the people inside, in what she characterized as a campaign dominated by the officers' union.

Prison reform groups are calling on the state to revisit the mail restrictions, contending that the photocopied-mail policy has failed to keep drugs out while cutting off a primary channel of contact with families.

Staffing, cell time and the conditions around use

The 2025 figures were collected during one of the most turbulent years in the system's recent history. Thousands of correction officers went on strike; the department says it fired about 2,000 who refused to return, and it has not yet replaced them. Earlier this month, roughly 3,000 National Guard members were supporting operations at 32 state facilities.

Sumeet Sharma, director of policy and communications for the Correctional Association of New York, told THE CITY that staffing shortfalls translate directly into time locked in cells, because there are not enough officers to supervise out-of-cell hours. A recent review by the association found that at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, incarcerated people were leaving their cells for a little more than an hour of recreation a day.

"We know that people being confined to their cells for a long time has an impact on their mental health," Sharma said, adding that people have described turning to substances when they have nothing else to fill the day.

The union that represents officers has framed conditions differently, writing to Gov. Kathy Hochul in April that the department faced a "systemic emergency" and citing incidents in which staff were injured by prisoners or exposed to unknown drugs. Its spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the overdose data.

A national decline that state prisons are not sharing

The prison figures land against a different trend outside the walls. National overdose deaths have fallen for three consecutive years, and the CDC provisionally estimated 69,973 drug deaths in the United States in 2025, down almost 14 percent from 2024. In New York's state prison system, the direction has been the opposite.

That divergence is the crux of the argument now aimed at Albany. Advocates tie the persistence of fatal overdoses to a strategy built around blocking mail rather than expanding medication-assisted treatment, improving screening of staff entrances, or restoring out-of-cell time — the conditions, they argue, that shape whether people use drugs at all, and whether anyone is nearby when they do.