(AP) — Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs in the United States are vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates.
At a federal penitentiary in Texas, prisoners are locked in their cells on weekends because there are not enough guards to watch them. Elsewhere in the system, fights are breaking out, several inmates have escaped in recent months and, in Illinois, at one of the most understaffed prisons in the country, five inmates have died in homicides or suicides since March 2020.
The Justice Department budgeted for 20,446 full-time correctional officer positions in 2020, but the agency that runs federal prisons said it currently employs 13,762 officers. The Bureau of Prisons insists that many of its facilities still have a full complement of officers who focus solely on maintaining order.
Decisions to use other staff as guards are based on a facility's needs and are made to ensure critical positions are covered, the agency said. Staff members also may be pressed into duty as correctional officers "during irregular periods such as a pandemic,” the agency told The Associated Press.
For years, the Bureau of Prisons has been plagued by systematic failures, from chronic violence to high-profile deaths. But the staffing crisis is reaching a breaking point, and the pandemic hasn’t helped. Nearly 7,000 employees were sickened with Covid-19. Officers were sent to hospitals to guard inmates being treated for the virus. Four staff members and 235 inmates died.
Overworked employees are burning out quickly and violent encounters are being reported on a near-daily basis. At a prison in Illinois, there are so few staff that officers are sometimes forced to work 60 hours of overtime in a week. At a facility in California, a fight broke out among inmates soon after a teacher was sent to fill in as an officer.
The expanded use of that practice, known as augmentation, is raising questions about whether the agency can carry out its required duties to ensure the safety of prisoners and staff members while also putting in place programs and classes such as those under the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul that received wide bipartisan support in Congress.
“You can’t do programming, you can’t have safety, you can’t have a lot of things that make prisons operate without proper staffing," said Kevin Ring, the president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
The bureau insists everyone working at its facilities is a trained, sworn correctional worker, regardless of position or job title. All 35,000 employees are told when they are hired that they should expect to perform law enforcement functions, the agency said, even if they are signing on as counselors or teachers.
But pulling employees away from other duties up to twice a week means they have less time to do their regular jobs such as teaching classes, reviewing release paperwork and providing vital inmate services.
“When they augment you, you’re not doing your job that you’re hired for,” said Jonathan Zumkehr, the union president at the federal penitentiary in Thomson. “If you’re a counselor, you’re not able to counsel the inmates. If you’re a case manager, you’re not able to do the First Step Act. Those are two days that you’re not going to get back.”
The issue came up when wealth financier Jeffrey Epstein took his own life while in one of the most secure jails in the country, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. One of the two prison workers assigned to guard Epstein the night he killed himself was a warehouse worker who was augmented to work as a correctional officer. Both were working overtime because of staffing shortages.