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.

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.

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