Why jails and prisons can’t recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis

Jails and prisons across the country have record-high vacancies, creating bad working conditions for corrections staff and nightmarish living conditions for incarcerated people. Why haven’t pay raises, benefits, and new facilities turned recruitment around, and what does that tell us about the state

by Brian Nam-Sonenstein and Emmett Sanders

Prisons and local jails struggled with staffing well before the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a national labor shortage, and they haven’t bounced back since. Recruitment and retention are still a high priority for corrections agencies, with nearly half reporting between 20 and 30% of their workers leaving each year. Many departments have tried increasing compensation, lowering employment requirements, hiring more part-time workers, and building new facilities to attract recruits but it hasn’t worked. Why not? Because “understaffing” is an untreatable symptom of mass incarceration — not a recruitment problem.

When there are fewer workers than necessary to operate facilities as planned, correctional authorities cut back on the things staff are needed to manage, and conditions get worse: people are stuck in ‘lockdown’ conditions, they’re transferred around, housing units are consolidated, access to services and programming is limited, and fights break out. As conditions deteriorate, fewer people want to work in these facilities. Decarceration should seem like the obvious way to break the cycle, but it’s readily dismissed by corrections leaders whose livelihoods depend on mass incarceration. In this light, understaffing is a bad way to understand what’s plaguing jails and prisons but a good way to demand more investment; it’s why recruitment is the only solution corrections can offer and a dead end at the very same time.

It has become clichéd for corrections departments and news media to blame understaffing for nearly every problem in jails and prisons; everything would be so much better (the thinking goes) if departments simply had enough workers. This framing conveniently overlooks mass incarceration as a policy choice, restricting the universe of available policy solutions to greater investments in locking people up. Many of the issues for which “understaffing” is blamed are fundamental to mass incarceration, and are best addressed through decarceration — not a jobs program for corrections officers or further investments in surveillance and imprisonment. Decarceration takes incarcerated people (and workers) out of harm’s way while freeing up resources for more constructive uses in the community, which are far more effective at deterring crime and ensuring safety than criminalization.

In this briefing, we look at what’s happening to the corrections workforce, how staff shortages harm incarcerated people and workers, and how corrections agencies have tried (and failed) to address staffing problems without addressing mass incarceration. In the end, we urge jurisdictions to prioritize release and reduced admissions over futile attempts to make mass incarceration “work.”

According to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll, the number of state prison and local jail workers fell substantially with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to rebound.

Staffing is down despite annual wage growth

Prisons and local jails have shed thousands of full-time workers in recent years. Despite rising wages, this decline in the workforce — which began to accelerate in 2020 — is expected to continue into the next decade and has been markedly worse in state prisons than in local jails.

Employment. State prisons lost 12% of their full-time workforce between 2013 and 2023, with nearly all (93%) of this decline coinciding with the pandemic, according to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll. Local jails lost 2% of their full-time workers over the past decade, with a 7% decline in the workforce since 2020. Meanwhile, part-time employment in jails and prisons has grown since the first year of the pandemic. The total correctional workforce has shrunk by 11% in state prisons and 7% in local jails since 2020, and agencies are expected to see, on average, a 6% decline in employment between 2023 and 2033.

Corrections wages have risen and largely kept pace with inflation over the past 10 years; even during high inflation following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the purchasing power of corrections workers’ salaries remained relatively consistent.

Wages. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, the median annual wage for correctional officers and jailers in 2023 was $53,300. The median corrections salary grew by 35% in the decade between 2013 and 2023, and 12.5% since 2020 alone. Wages have remained relatively consistent with inflation for the last 10 years, but these figures notably exclude premium wages, which are significant and have skyrocketed in recent years. There are no public data on premium pay, but news reports indicate that workers racked up hundreds of millions of dollars of these additional wages in many prison systems. While overtime puts more money in workers’ pockets, demanding work schedules burn people out and deter them from seeking or keeping corrections jobs.

Working as a delivery truck driver is roughly 15 times as deadly as working in a jail or prison, and yet corrections workers’ median annual salary is around $13,300 higher.

Jail and prison officials consistently blame low wages as an obstacle to recruitment, but it’s worth noting that the median annual corrections wage ($53,300) is higher than professions requiring more training and education, like EMTs ($53,180) and counselors and social workers ($44,040). Additionally, corrections work isn’t among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, but their median annual salary is still higher than those for jobs that are, such as loggers ($48,910 per year), roofers ($50,030), delivery truck drivers ($39,950 per year), and construction workers ($44,310 per year).

Recruitment strategies can’t address fundamental problems in jails and prisons

The narrow focus on recruitment as the antidote to understaffing poses serious risks to the health and well-being of incarcerated people and workers (albeit in very different ways). To be clear, incarcerated people undeniably face the worst harms of understaffing. Incarcerated populations are consolidated and crowded together when there’s not enough staff, and they’re often transferred to other facilities and housing units. Those transfers disrupt supportive connections to local communities, programming, and services like visitation, medical services, or the commissary. Crowding and transfers also lead to violence and the spread of infectious diseases. Lockdowns and other restrictions on movement have become more brutal and frequent without the necessary staff to facilitate movement throughout facilities or to and from court. As a result, time out-of-cell is significantly limited. All of this has contributed to the deterioration of incarcerated peoples’ mental health and their inability to get care, raising the risk of death and suicide: in-custody deaths have spiraled out of control as staff shortages intensified, forcing more people to endure the trauma of witnessing and being victims of violence. Understaffing is routinely blamed for deaths in part because there is also a shortage of medical and social work staff — shockingly, these professionals are sometimes tapped to handle officer duties when there is a shortage of trained security staff.

While our work focuses mostly on how the system harms incarcerated people and their communities, we’ve written before about how corrections work harms workers. A recent job posting for a Georgia corrections officer provides an instructive example, noting that applicants must be prepared to work nights, weekends, and holidays; be exposed to violence and disease; strip search people; and kill them “if necessary:”

Select requirements listed in an additional “Note” in all Georgia Department of Corrections job vacancy listings for Correctional Officers (accessed December 7, 2024).

In addition to working in the same overcrowded and dangerous environments facing incarcerated people, corrections workers are exposed to physical health risks such as injury or an increased risk of infectious diseases including COVID-19, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B. They have high rates of death and suicide from routinely experiencing trauma: one 2013 study of nearly 3,600 corrections professionals from all over the country estimated that 34% of correctional staff in security roles have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while 31% have depression — rates that are much higher than the 6 out of every 100 people (or 6% of the U.S. population) who will have PTSD at some point in their lives.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder why several recruitment strategies have failed to make these jobs more attractive:

Pay increases haven’t worked: As we’ve noted, the median annual salary for corrections officers has increased year over year. Agencies have tried to use higher salaries, signing bonuses, generous benefit packages, and other compensation to recruit workers but this generally hasn’t made a difference. Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, which has a lot of problems including that it hasn’t had enough staff for many years, deployed hiring bonuses and the highest salaries of any sheriff’s department in the state but still struggles to fill positions. Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Corrections has tried offering up to $7,000 in bonuses and received around $192 million to increase compensation, recruitment/retention incentives, staff overtime, and contracted personnel, but still faces a major labor shortage.

Easing employment requirements hasn’t worked: Corrections officials have also tried to relax various employment requirements to boost recruitment. In most cases, this involves changing the minimum or maximum age requirement to work as a corrections officer. In Mississippi, teenagers are expected to manage people incarcerated in state prisons with as little as an 8th-grade education, and the state still ranks among the worst of the worst for understaffing. The federal Bureau of Prisons, meanwhile, faces staff shortages despite temporarily raising its maximum age for corrections officers to 40 years old.

Staff wellness programs haven’t worked: Employee wellness programs are a popular approach to making corrections workplaces more attractive. The American Correctional Association surveyed 45 state prison systems and 25 local jails and found that 96% of those corrections agencies offered some form of employee wellness programming. However, over half of the 61 corrections agencies that reported barriers to wellness programs said that “lack of adequate staffing” was a barrier to implementation.

New facility construction hasn’t worked: Correctional facilities are often cited as obstacles to recruitment for reasons that include their vulnerability to climate change and old and crumbling architecture. We’ve previously written about the dangers of new jail and prison construction (and how to fight it), and one of the most pernicious myths supporting these projects is that newer, nicer facilities will stimulate recruitment by improving working conditions for staff. Yet time and time again, agencies struggle to staff new facilities. Marion County, Indiana built a new $570 million campus for its courts and a jail, arguing it would help resolve staff shortages, which it did not. Denver, Colorado spent millions to renovate a jail and improve working conditions and still can’t fully staff it.

Other desperate measures: Florida and West Virginia have called in the National Guard to maintain a brutal state of emergency rather than release people in response to staff shortages. West Virginia recently ceased its emergency as staffing levels have improved compared to two years ago, but overcrowding and staff vacancies persist nonetheless. Meanwhile, Nevada has contemplated turning to drones and monitoring shackles, and the federal government is considering taking over Alabama prisons amid hundreds of deaths, years of understaffing, and a plan to build a new $1 billion prison.

Conclusion

Understaffing is a real problem in jails and prisons, and is directly tied to the living conditions of incarcerated people. It is an inevitable consequence of the U.S.’s limitless dependence on criminalization and mass incarceration — not a failure to provide higher wages, new prisons, and yoga classes. We know this because narrowly focusing on the needs of the corrections workforce has not made a dent in staffing, nor has it improved conditions for incarcerated people.

Decarceration is the most straightforward, workable solution to the problems for which “understaffing” is blamed. This means increased use of parole and other forms of release, ending cash bail, reducing arrests and police contact, and other interventions aimed at removing people from the system and preventing more people from going in are all targeted policy solutions to understaffing. When policymakers abandon the idea that these problems can be addressed as narrow recruitment and human resources issues, and instead move away from mass criminalization and incarceration, we will finally see real movement on these issues and real relief for workers and incarcerated people alike.

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For more information, including an additional data visualization, and detailed footnotes, see the full version of this briefing on our website.