Prison understaffing: A crisis seen by few, felt by prisoners and prison employees

We have lived on opposite sides of prison bars. One of us spent 22 years incarcerated for a nonviolent drug offense. The other dedicated over 20 years of career service in maximum and medium security prisons.

We both landed in prison, in a sense, trying to escape broken homes and poverty.

Although our situations are quite different, corrections staff and incarcerated people have more in common than people think. We eat the same prison meals. We sweat in the same un-air-conditioned blocks. We are both exposed to infectious diseases such as MRSA and COVID-19. We often see each other more than we see our own families.

We have both seen too much violence and death for anyone to bear. Corrections staff have a life expectancy 16 years shorter than the average American, higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than returning war veterans and a higher suicide rate than any other law enforcement profession.

Likewise, prison inmates lose two years of life expectancy for each year spent behind bars. Nearly all have experienced severe trauma before arriving in prison, and this is exacerbated by the violence and poor conditions inside many correctional facilities.

Today, the two of us work together out of our mutual passion to enhance public safety and improve conditions for the people who live and work in prisons. We’re both alarmed by a growing crisis that too many ignore: Prison understaffing and overcrowding. 

Understaffing harms everyone who lives and works in prisons. Due in part to rising prison populations, understaffing has reached unsustainable levels, and there appears to be no end in sight. Recently, corrections officers in New York engaged in a wildcat strike because of the severe impacts that understaffing is having on employees’ health and wellbeing.

The numbers are shocking. Our data shows that the number of corrections officers working in state prisons has fallen by 20 percent since 2017. At least 13 states have lost more than a quarter of their corrections officers since 2017. At the same time, state prison populations are rising, and of the 13 states facing the highest loss in officers, ten have imprisonment rates higher than the national average.

This has forced many states to take drastic measures. In the past five years, states including Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, Indiana, Idaho, Montana, and, most recently, New York, have used the National Guard to fill prison staffing gaps. In 2023, Texas spent nearly $14 million on travel and hotels to shuttle around workers to keep prison lights on — a rate double the previous year’s costs. At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons also struggles with staffing shortages, yet it just eliminated employee retention bonuses, which were created in 2021 to keep prisons open.

This crisis is now a self-fueling monster. Low staffing levels cause mandatory overtime, stressful conditions, burnout, and, unsurprisingly, high rates of turnover. 

For incarcerated people and their families, the impacts of understaffing are severe. Maintaining family bonds is one of the greatest predictors of successful rehabilitation, yet visitations and phone calls are among the first things cut when prisons are understaffed. 

Unsafe prisons also create unsafe communities. Teachers, social workers and counselors, who normally provide vital programming that reduces recidivism, such as education, job training, and drug and mental health treatment, are essential for effective prison operations, but are now growing absent from our prison system due to the staffing and overcrowding crisis.

Without critical programming, communities endure higher crime and recidivism rates. In many facilities, staff hired to be nurses, educators, or even food workers are forced to take on patrol and safety jobs that they aren’t trained to handle, which puts everyone’s safety at risk and has resulted in horrifying cases of neglect and unnecessary deaths. 

We need a way out of this cycle. In his first term, President Trump helped enact several important and smart changes to our criminal justice system. We urge his administration to draw on their previous success by consulting with corrections officers, incarcerated people and their families, and experts to slow this sprawling problem. 

As a formerly incarcerated person and a former correctional officer, we understand the “us versus them” mentality that drives so many of our conversations about the criminal justice system -- but we must come together to solve this.

Our prisons cannot create public safety, and cannot rehabilitate, if they are in chaos. Until we take bold action, we will continue to see the devastating ripple effects on communities and families across America. 

Andy Potter is the executive director and founder of One Voice United, a national organization dedicated to elevating the voices of correctional officers and staff in national conversations about corrections and the criminal justice system. Matthew Charles is the state legislative affairs manager at FAMM, a national organization that believes in the humane treatment of incarcerated individuals, supports fair and individualized sentencing, and advocates for sentencing and prison reform.