Prisons are struggling to hire and retain correctional officers to keep prisons safe and humane. At current levels of incarceration, neither incarcerated people nor the people who guard them are safe.
That’s the bottom line of Safe Inside, a report from Safe Inside, a group assembled to promote a data-driven approach to resolving the staffing crisis in the nation’s prisons.
The situation is the same in many states, including Pennsylvania, where more than 1,200 corrections officers left their jobs in 2024, leaving 5% of officer positions unfilled.
“Frontline staff, their supervisors, and incarcerated people, no matter the state or the county, are suffering in a way I never experienced or witnessed when I was in the job,” John Wetzel wrote in the forward to the 148-page report analyzing workforce and prison population trends.
Wetzel, the retired secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, now leads the Safe Inside project. The report focuses on prisons run by the state, not jails run by counties, although many issues are the same.
Ripple Effects
Because of staffing shortages, the health and safety of staff and incarcerated people are at risk, the report says, and the “ripple effects of prison understaffing reach families and communities. Millions of people have a loved one working or incarcerated in a state prison. How they return home, whether from a shift or sentence, affects everyone’s well-being.”
“So true,” said Claire Shubik-Richards, executive director of the Prison Society.
“The Prison Society sees this all the time,” she said.
“While before the pandemic, most correctional facilities had people spend the majority of the days out of their cells in common areas or attending programming, and eating in dining halls, and receiving regular visits from family, now many facilities struggle to allow people out of their cells for more than three hours a day.
“There simply aren't enough staff for the number of people in custody,” Shubik-Richards said. “Many programs and other activities haven't come back, the dining halls remain closed, and visiting hours are reduced, all in the name of short staffing.
“And it's good for no one.
“It's not good for the state workers,” she said. “It's not good for the people in custody. It's not good for the families and communities that correctional officers and incarcerated people come from.
“And it's not good for taxpayers who end up paying more for overtime, emergency medical care, and the long-term effects of the trauma experienced by both the people working in prison and those confined to it,” Shubik-Richards said.
Transparency Helps Workers and Incarcerated People
Moreover, the working conditions of corrections officers are hidden from public scrutiny, the report notes. When there are too few air traffic controllers, travelers complain. When there aren’t enough teachers, parents complain. But politicians, journalists, and the general public don’t see what goes on behind prison walls.
However, the Prison Society does, as the only organization statutorily guaranteed access to all state and county correctional facilities. Since 1787, the Prison Society’s mission has played a significant role in promoting the dignity and safety of everyone in the corrections system.
Transparency is key, the report says, but many states don’t publish the necessary statistics.
Pennsylvania, for example, publishes less than half of key 14 health and safety metrics tracked by the Safe Inside project. The state’s Department of Corrections keeps track of assaults on staff, physical altercations between incarcerated people, escapes, deaths, suicides, and reports of sexual assault. Missing are reports on staff uses of force, several kinds of contrabands, self-harm, lockdowns, disciplinary incidents, and programming cancellations.
The lack of reporting is “leaving a big gap in what is publicly known about what happens in Pennsylvania state prisons,” Shubik-Richards said.
Low Pay, High Turnover
But Pennsylvania does publish all six metrics on workforce staffing tracked by Safe Inside, according to the report, which lists many factors contributing to recruitment and retention problems across the nation.
- Fewer correctional officers are guarding more incarcerated people.
- Corrections officers typically earn less than police officers — an average of $21,000 less nationwide.
- The job can be dangerous — with corrections officers experiencing more than 18 times the national average of nonfatal workplace violence.
- Hours are long and unpredictable. Staffing shortages often lead to mandated double shifts and long stretches without days off, all contributing to “fatigue, safety risks, and burnout.” In Pennsylvania, the Department of Corrections made up 43% of state overtime spending — $164 million in 2024, up 37% from 2017.
- Turnover is high, meaning that a higher percentage of inexperienced officers are working in prison.
Staffing Strategies
The report describes a number of states’ strategies to improve the situation. Pennsylvania, for example, has increased correctional officers’ salaries 11% between 2023 and 2026. It has also assembled a special 15-member recruitment team to widen the search for candidates. Other states have shortened training times and lowered job qualifications. Some states, including Pennsylvania, have lowered the minimum age for corrections officers from 21 to 18 and loosened state residency requirements.
“Whenever we talk about understaffing, it is important to realize that staffing is a ratio, not an absolute,” said Noah Barth, the Prison Society’s prison monitoring director. “In other words, we need to remember that the other way to address this issue is to have fewer people in prison.”
The report makes the same point.
“One option would be to reduce the number of incarcerated people enough to close facilities and significantly cut the number of positions needed to be filled,” the report said.
Barth noted that “the report does not analyze how states set these staffing ratios. It examines gaps between how many officers a state says they need and how many they have, but does not look at how those thresholds are determined or how those choices compare across states.”
“Making that happen depends on leadership from elected officials. Although legislators and governors across the political spectrum and in every region of the U.S. took major steps to reduce incarceration rates over the past 15 to 20 years, appetite for such reforms seems to have waned, at least temporarily,” the report said.
“As this report shows, prison populations are rising, not falling.”
