NEW YORK TO CLOSE PRISON IN THE ADIRONDACKS
MEDIUM-SECURITY BARE HILL CORRECTIONAL FACILITY WILL CLOSE IN MARCH
Outside the Bare Hill Correctional Facility last March. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
MALONE, NEW YORK Nov. 18, 2025 Last updatedL 11:23am
New York will close one prison and half-close another, state officials announced on Tuesday.
The medium-security Bare Hill Correctional Facility will close in March and half of the Collins Correctional Facility, another medium-security prison, will also close.
Bare Hill is historically significant because it marked the start of a prison building boom in the Adirondacks in the late 1980s as New Yorkers responded to the Crack epidemic and resulting street wars with mass incarceration. Factories moved overseas and prisons replaced them. Bare Hill was the first of three prisons that would be built outside Malone, where shoes, boots and slippers were made beside the Salmon River for more than a century.
At its height at the end of the 1990s, New York’s state prison population was more than 72,000. Since then it has plunged to where its at today: about 32,000.
Collins is where a wildcat strike by almost all of the state's prison guards started last February, before spreading to 40 of New York's 42 prisons, as The Free Lance first reported.
This reporter remembers the half of Collins that will close because he was imprisoned there from 1992 until 1995. Everyone called it "Side 1." Side 1 was famous for its relatively laid-back atmosphere. I earned an associate's degree during my time at Collins.
Side 1 was also renowned for the real, organic maple sugar served in its mess hall for a few weeks every spring. It was made from maple trees that surrounded the prison, harvested by prisoners on an "outside work gang" and boiled down in a sugar house on prison grounds.
The state agency that manages New York's prison system said no one would be fired because of the closings.
"All 293 DOCCS staff assigned to Bare Hill will be offered positions at other facilities," a news release from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said. Prisoners would be moved to "neighboring correctional facilities.”
DOCCS revealed there were "over 650 vacant staff positions available in correctional facilities located in Franklin, Clinton and Essex Counties." This means DOCCS "will be able to ensure no staff are laid off, mitigating the impact on both staff, their families and the community."
Collins Side 1 would be closed by the "end of the Fiscal Year." What it called "consolidating" would allow prison officials "to more efficiently deploy staff." It was "part of the Department’s ongoing plan to be transparent and consolidate services to ease staffing."
Both prisons won't be mothballed, but "maintained in a state of ready, to include utilities (heat, water, electric, sewage, etc.)."
The murder of Robert Brooks by a beat-up squad of all-white guards while nurses watched at the Marcy Correctional Facility outside Utica on Dec. 9, 2024 exposed an ongoing crisis in New York’s prison system, fueled in part by an out-of-control illegal drug trade and a severe shortage of guards.
“Despite new and aggressive recruitment efforts,” DOCCS admitted, it continues “to struggle to meet staffing demands.”
“The decision to close any facility is difficult for all involved,” the news release concluded. “This decision was decisively made to minimize the effect on staff, and at the same time attempt to close the gap on staffing shortages in our correctional facilities.”
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