TDCJ to Run Out of Beds in 2025
by Matt Clarke
The Sunset Advisory Commission, an oversight body for Texas government agencies, published a 189-page report in September 2024 that found persistent critical staffing shortages are making Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisons unsafe for staff and prisoners alike. In fact, some guards and parole officers find it impossible to perform their assigned tasks at all. At the same time, the Commission warned that by the end of 2025 the growing prisoner population will exceed the number of beds available in TDCJ’s already understaffed facilities.
TDCJ had a budget of $3.9 billion in 2023. In September 2024, the agency supervised 530,718 people, including 129,653 prisoners, 326,005 probationers and 75,060 parolees. TDCJ’s 101 facilities include 63 prisons and 16 state jails, where some 40,000 full-time equivalent positions are authorized. However, TDCJ employs only around 31,000 people—about 78% of its authorized strength.
That number includes 21,231 correctional staffers, 17,361 of whom are guards. The correctional staff vacancy rate is 28% overall, but 40 TDCJ lockups operate with a vacancy rate exceeding 40%. In fact, the severe staffing shortages have some prisons operating with only 30% of their guard positions filled, which in turn has driven the annual guard turnover rate to 31%. At that rate, it won’t be long before most guards have been on the job three years or less.
The short-staffing problem leaves remaining guards in the impossible position of trying to do the work of three or more people. As a result, important security functions, such as cell searches and roving patrols of housing areas, aren’t completed. Guards are also unavailable to provide security for programs or recreation, leaving prisoners with lots of idle time on their hands and no legitimate way to blow off excess energy.
The report recommended that TDCJ close prisons with persistent staffing issues which have either (a) no capacity to house maximum security prisoners or (b) no prisoners whose health means they require air conditioning—the two most urgent needs facing the prison system. The report further recommended retrofitting remaining prisons by adding 400-bed expansion dormitories to house more prisoners.
Each year, the report noted, TDCJ trains 74,000 people to become guards at an average cost of $9,300 each. Yet only 2,000 of them remain to work a second year. That whopping 97% attrition rate for first-year staff has lowered overall turnover rate for guards to 31% and 32% for parole officers. If TDCJ could identify the characteristics of its trainees to determine which will stay on, it could save $670 million—that’s the annual cost of training the 72,000 who quit—and use the savings to give each of its employees a $21,000 raise. That would also likely solve the retention problem, ending the need to pay $277 million in guard overtime each year and reducing the unmanageable caseloads parole officers are dealing with.
Besides poor pay for too much work, the report noted that exit surveys show TDCJ employees quit because of an “unfair and punitive leadership culture” in which employees are given impossible tasks, such as doing the work of three guards. Guards are then punished when they inevitably fail. Meanwhile, senior staff are not held to account for their failures. “Comments consistently indicated a pervasive culture of disrespect, callousness, and unfair treatment from supervisors,” the report noted. “Staff spoke of favoritism and ‘cliques,’ whereby supervisors privilege some staff while giving others worse assignments, publicly humiliating certain staff, and administering more severe or retaliatory discipline often for little apparent cause.”
Given that damning summation of its supervisory efforts, TDCJ should make reforming its workplace culture a top priority. But the report also said that “TDCJ’s scatter shot, reactive, and halting approach to strategic planning leads to incomplete reforms and limited modernization.” Even its in-house computer programs use an archaic language, COBOL, and much of its data is collected on paper. See: Sunset Advisory Comm’n Staff Report, Tex. Dep’t of Crim. Justice Corr. Managed Health Care Committee; Windham School District; Board of Pardons and Paroles (Sep. 2024).
Additional source: Texas Tribune
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