The efficiency and functionality of every enterprise rests largely upon the staff put in place to carry out its operations. But at the heart of the most dysfunctional prisons PLN has reported on over the last 35 years is one common denominator: Understaffing. Nationwide, there are an estimated 31,000 vacant guard positions each year. Employment outlooks forecast that the understaffing crisis will continue over the next decade. In other words, it can be expected that many prisons will continue or increase their level of dysfunction.

Because of the restrictive and regulated environment inside prisons, their operations are highly dependent on guard supervision. In the prison environment, there is a regulation for everything. The higher the security level of a prison, the greater the degree of restrictions and supervision that is required and imposed upon the prisoner population.

For instance, the activity of serving three meals a day requires guards to supervise the single file lines of prisoners as they walk to the chow hall. Then there are guards posted to the chow hall to register each prisoner seeking a meal and to supervise the serving, eating, and returning of trays and utensils. Yet another guard is posted to supervise the cooking and serving of the meals. A similar process ensues for daily callouts to medical, dental, or job assignments. Recreation and visitation areas require the same rigid supervision as the chow hall. Each program requires supervision from staff.

Every prison uses post orders to standardize operations, which mandate— among other things—the number of guards required to effectively staff each post. An insufficient number of guards on duty often results in pulling them from one post to fill another, leaving the initial post abandoned or insufficiently supervised.

Andrew Philips was desperate for a job in 2021 when he took a guard position at Georgia’s Smith State Prison (SSP), but he quit his job due to the effects of understaffing. It did not take long for Phillips to notice the dangers inherent in understaffing. SSP housed about 1,500 men, and each shift was supposed to have 30 guards to supervise them. Yet according to Phillips, only half that many guards were on duty on most days. As a result, prison officials forced Phillips and his colleagues to work 16-hour days, five days a week.

Georgia prison records show that in 2024 half of its guard positions were vacant. The mandatory overtime and constant violence against guards and prisoners led many guards to quit. “We just had no energy; we didn’t have the ability to care,” Phillips said. “The place was too brutal, too disgusting.”

Recruitment and retention of guards is a high priority for prison officials. Understaffing is nothing new; it has been increasing inside prisons over the last three decades. The national labor shortage spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic also hit prisons—and especially hard. The close quarters and condensed population inside jails and prisons heightened the risk of COVID-19’s spread. Prisons and jails responded to the pandemic by decreasing their populations, but with the pandemic in the rearview mirror and courts getting back to business, prison and jail populations have rebounded since. [See: PLN, June 2022, p.44.]

That rebound never happened for guard staff. Between 2013 and 2023, state prisons lost 12% of their full-time workforce. Some 93% of the decline coincided with the pandemic, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) reported. Over the last decade, local jails suffered a 7% decline in their workforce. Since 2020, the workforce in state prisons declined 11% and local jails suffered a 7% decline. It was forecast that those agencies will average a 6% workforce decline between 2023 and 2033. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projected about 31,000 openings for guards and bailiffs will be vacant over that period.

The H and P Law Firm in Las Vegas analyzed 2023 data from the BLS and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to assess the ratio of guards to prisoners in each state. The five most understaffed prison systems were found to include: Oklahoma, with 5.87 prisoners per guard; Alabama (5.46); Idaho (5.06); Georgia (4.82); and Florida (4.48). By contrast, the five best staffed prison systems included: Massachusetts (1.01); New York (1.19); New Jersey (1.48); New Mexico (1.54); and Maine (1.69).

In the 10 most understaffed prison systems, annual wages ranged from a low of $42,000 to a high of $51,610. By contrast, nine of ten best staffed prisons offered annual wages that ranged from $48,480 to $81,900. New Mexico was the outlier at $42,600 annually, which is the sixth lowest in the nation.

Guard retention and recruitment is a serious problem. According to PPI, nearly half of all jails and prisons report that 20 to 30% of their workers leave each year. Of those who quit, 38% leave within a year and 48% leave within one to five years. For example, in the last six months of 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) hired 700 staffers. At the same time, many staffers quit, leaving the state DOC with only a net gain of about 250 filled vacancies.

Recruitment Incentives and Costs

In the effort to recruit guards, jail and prison officials have advocated for and taken measures to entice people to pursue a career as a guard. Several states—including New York, Maine, and Texas—have lowered the hiring age to 18. In the last two decades, the Florida DOC successfully lobbied lawmakers to lower its minimum hiring age from 21 to 19 and then to 18 a few years later.

On the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) temporarily raised its maximum age for guards to 40 years old. According to the agency’s employment and wage statistics, the median guard salary grew 35% between 2013 and 2023, and it has risen 12.5% just since 2020.

At least 32 states have increased guard pay, sometimes dramatically so. Since 2021, the Florida DOC increased pay for its prison guards from $33,500 to $41,600. The Missouri DOC saw a growth in applications after it “invested more than $175 million for increases in staff pay since 2017, boosting salaries for most positions by over 40%,” according to Karen Pojmann, a state
DOC spokesperson. The Colorado DOC spent $192 million to increase employee pay.

The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook reported that the median annual wage for prison and jail guards was $53,300 in 2023. “The lowest 10 percent earned less than $38,340,” the report found, “and the highest 10 percent earned more than $87,250.” Those employed by the federal government earned the most, with a median annual wage of $69,180. But those employed by state or local governments earned $55,080 or $51,880, respectively. Those wages exclude premium or overtime pay, which can be significant and have skyrocketed in recent years.

It’s important to note that these pay figures represent hourly rates of $19.17 to $43.75, far in excess of most jobs available to workers with only a high school diploma. That so many still remain vacant says a great deal about the value even low skill workers place on workplace conditions, which in prisons and jails often includes exposures to extreme indoor temperatures on top of the risk of physical assault by those incarcerated.

The short-staffing is most often and most quickly addressed with overtime. Between 2019 and 2022, the Georgia DOC spent more than $4 million on overtime pay. That was more than 11 times as high as pre-pandemic levels. Guards with the Illinois DOC worked nearly 2 million hours of overtime in FY 2022, costing taxpayers $95.5 million. The Nebraska DOC paid staff $22 million in overtime in 2023.

Many states offer bonuses, too. Florida, for example, offers bonuses of up to $1,500 to lure new prison guards and retain current staff. Like many other states, every Florida DOC-run prison has a “NOW HIRING” billboard sign on the major road that leads to its facilities. Colorado has offered up to $7,000 in signing bonuses.

Some prisons have cheap housing available on prison property just outside the wire. In 2014, for example, a prison in South Texas offered guards on-site housing for as low as $25 a month in an effort to retain staff.

Another recruitment strategy prison systems will use is to offer law enforcement certification. The Florida DOC provides training and certification to all its new hire recruits at no cost if the recruit remains employed by the department for two years. While the national median pay is higher for state guards, most county jails in Florida offer 20 to 40% higher wages than the state DOC. The county jails actively recruit state DOC employees, and one of the incentives offered is payment of department-related training fees for leaving before two years.

Despite these perks, retention is low. According to a report by the American Correctional Association, “the physical work environment [in prisons,] [which] includes noise level, not being able to bring one’s cell phone into work, or limited access to natural lighting” are factors in the high guard turnover rates. The report added, “Environmental factors have been linked to increased sick leave, stress, and employee substance abuse.”

In some jurisdictions, officials argued that upgraded or new facilities would increase staff recruitment and retention. Based on that theory, Marion County, Indiana spent $570 million to build a brand new campus for its courts and jails. Denver, Colorado likewise spent millions to renovate its jail to improve working conditions. But both municipalities still struggle to fully staff their jails.

Florida experimented with a measure that it hoped would reduce the number of vacancies and provide staff more time with their families. In 2012, the state DOC eliminated an entire shift by moving from eight- to 12-hour shifts. Under this scheme, a guard would work three days one week and four days the next week, in an 84-hour two-week pay period. The scheme guaranteed that all guards would be off-duty every other weekend, which used to be a perk of seniority.

The state’s shift scheme was unpopular with veteran guards, however, and thousands of them retired or quit in short order. The result was more understaffing, causing forced overtime of four hours per shift—a 16-hour day, every shift worked. After 10 years, Florida concluded that the experiment was a failure due to a high attrition rate and an inability to recruit people willing to work 12- to 16-hour shifts for the entirety of their career. The state switched back to eight-hour shifts, spawning another round of retirements and resignations by those who moved to other jobs. In 2022, Florida’s DOC had around a 24% employment vacancy rate.

The inability to recruit guards caused at least two states to take extreme 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,” PPI reported. “Meanwhile, Nevada has contemplated turning to drones and monitoring shackles.”

Florida began phasing out the use of the state national guard in jails and prisons in 2025, after guard vacancies fell from more than 5,000 to close to 1,000; the West Virginia National Guard was withdrawn in 2024.

A Toxic Environment

Most prisons are built in rural areas, so in many cases, the local prison is the community’s main economic driver. As a result, the career of prison guard became a tradition for many families. This author has seen three generations of the same family working within a prison. This led to a form of nepotism that created a tighter net for prisoners, but it also provided a steady workforce for the prison.

A prison guard’s job has never been glamorous, but it was considered by many rural folks as a desirable way to earn a living while providing a public service. Prisons, after all, were seen as recession-proof and provided very generous benefits that often included a pension.

Prisons have, and always will have, a dangerous aspect to them due to the nature of certain prisoners. Starting in the 1970s, prisons across the nation adopted rehabilitation as a model. Then, a few decades later, the tough-on-crime era again changed the prison model to one of retribution. The coddling of prisoners by providing education on compounds as pristine as a college campus was disrespectful to victims and society, politicians of the era proclaimed. In Florida, state law was changed to provide that the purpose of prison is punishment.

The entire prison culture changed. Instead of prisoners actively seeking to avoid trouble and to enter educational or workforce training programs in hopes of impressing parole boards or to avoid the loss of privileges, prisoners were warehoused with nothing to do as these programs were eliminated. It is said that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. With prisoner warehousing came increased drug use and violence. Gang membership and violence has significantly increased in recent decades.

It is into this environment that prison officials seek to recruit guards. The initial trainee tour of a prison occurs in a structured environment. Then the trainee is loosed on the compound to experience the reality of the situation they must oversee.

Two permanent maximum-security prisons that this author has been housed at over the last year illustrate the impacts of a prison’s culture on its ability to retain staff. The first is Hardee Correctional Institution (HCI), whose physical plant is located in rural south-central Florida; several large cities are within a 30-to-60-minute drive, and the facility is not the only source of job opportunities for local residents. The second, Cross City Correctional Institution (CCCI), is located in a very rural area of north central Florida. CCCI is one of the few employers in the area.

While at HCI, this author saw groups of six or more trainees tour the prison on a near weekly basis. Then, the next day that same group was posted to a dormitory, sometimes alone. By contrast, a trainee tour group at CCCI was rare and was at most a couple of recruits. HCI had a high staff turnover rate. It was rare to see a guard recruit stay for a whole year, and veteran staff regularly retired as soon as they achieved 10 years of service, which vests them with a state pension. Meanwhile, at CCCI, guards often stay 20 or more years, and recruits are hired more as a source to replace longer term employees.

Those who left HCI’s employ often went to a county jail, or they simply quit guard work altogether because of the stress and dangers of the prison. Half of HCI’s population is held on close management (CM), which is Florida’s version of the special housing unit. The other half contains open population with a heavy gang contingent. Stabbings and robberies occur several times a week—it was not rare for three or four stabbings to occur in a week.

On several occasions, stabbings and murders occurred in the most secure environment: CM. Administrative reaction to the stabbings was a search of the subject area, and often a 72-hour lockdown was imposed to dissuade future assaults. Recreation opportunities, as a result, were virtually nonexistent, and commissary was offered only every seven-to-10 days. Aside from basic education and religious programs, HCI provided little to no other activities. Drug use was rampant and often ignored by guards.

CCCI also has a large gang contingent. The institution, however, offers recreation to everyone two to three times daily. Commissary is also offered daily. In addition to basic education, the prison offers three vocational programs. Drug use is rampant, but swift punishment ensues if one appears under the influence. Fights are not uncommon, but stabbings are very rare.

The differences between HCI and CCCI lie in the stress levels and routine operations of the prison. CCCI offers the ability to burn off the anxiety of doing time by exercising or playing sports. At CCCI, prisoners act differently because of the knowledge that one is dealing with veteran staff who, through training or experience, spot suspicious behavior or abnormalities in routines. Where CCCI had regular, random searches, HCI rarely had the staff for such searches. As opposed to HCI, CCCI rarely went on lockdown status.

The John Howard Association, Illinois’ nonprofit prison watchdog, surveyed 8,616 prisoners in the state. The survey found that 67% said they “spend too long locked in their cells,” and around 26% disagreed with the statement that they have the “opportunity to go to yard at least twice a week.” The report further found that 86.5% of all lockdowns in fiscal year 2024 were due to understaffing. Between 2019 and 2024, lockdown days increased nearly 549%, from 242 to 1,570.

Prisoners who spend long stretches on lockdown are more likely to act out against guards and other prisoners. Lockdown creates stress and anxiety for which there is no release in the close quarters of a locked down dormitory housing 70-90 other people—which is especially true when the summer heat comes in.

About a year after he started at SSP in Georgia, former guard Andrew Phillips was assigned to oversee a wing with 600 incarcerated men. But for the entire shift, the power was out. To turn it on, Phillips would have to leave his post and go outside and flip a breaker. Tensions were running high on the wing, which had several prisoners with diagnosed mental illness. They lit a mattress on fire. Phillips went for a fire extinguisher, but it was empty, as was the next extinguisher he tried after that. As Phillips scrambled to put out the fire, prisoners threw feces at him.

“You can’t really blame them for losing their mind[s],” Phillips said, “and especially when they’re treated so poorly.” Just as Phillips found a working fire extinguisher and put out the flames, he was ordered to accompany a prisoner who was just stabbed to a hospital.

Because Phillips had been working for 11 days straight and had no clean clothes, another guard gave him the shirt off his back so he could make the hospital run. “Sixteen hours later, I got home,” Phillips said, “and then I was supposed to be back the next day.”

Like the failure to maintain working fire extinguishers, routine supervision often fails when a prison is severely understaffed with stressed-out or inexperienced guards. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, guards at one Georgia prison were stretched so thin that they did not discover a dead and decomposing prisoner’s body for five days.

For guards, the stress and violence of the prison environment make them question their career choice. Forced overtime or a violent incident naturally overtaxes people and puts them in serious fear for their safety. PPI reported that a 2013 study of nearly 3,600 prison guards estimated that 34% of them “have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while 31% have depression,” which is “much higher” than the “6% of the U.S. population who will have PTSD at some point in their lives.” According to a report from the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, 85% of prison guards “report having seen someone seriously injured or killed in the workplace.” Moreover, the report continued, conditions are “worsening as prisons struggle to keep enough staff to operate safely.”

As the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook declares, working in a prison “can be stressful and dangerous.” Guards “may become injured in confrontations with people in custody, leading to their having one of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations.”

PPI highlighted that “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, working as a prison guard “isn’t among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, but their median annual salary is still higher than those whose jobs are, such as loggers ($48,910), roofers ($50,030), delivery truck drivers (39,950), and construction workers ($44,310).”

Brian Dawe, national director of One Voice Uniting Corrections, an advocacy group for guards, said that overworked and sleep-deprived staffers are more likely to use excessive force on prisoners. “It’s a constant battle in your head every single time you walk in that door,” Dawe said. Both guards and prisoners are “all in the same toxic environment.” But guards, unlike prisoners, can avoid the dangers of prison by moving on to something else.

When a guard quits due to poor conditions, the conditions worsen, which leads to more guards quitting. “It becomes cyclical. You start getting mandatory overtime, which means you miss more and more time with your family,” said Dawe. “You are demanded more and more on the job, which burns you out and causes people to leave.”

Officials are also sometimes confronted with recruits who temporarily accept a prison guard job to take advantage of the incentives but have no intention of making it a career. This author has spoken to numerous recruits who desired to obtain the law enforcement certification, which allows them to avoid the cost of a community college while also earning a paycheck. Their plan was to obtain a few months or maybe a year of experience before accepting a higher paying position with a county jail, which will also usually pay any costs owed to the Florida DOC for training. The recruits also noted that the stress level is much lower in county jails because there is less contraband and violence.

Seeking a Lasting Solution

“It is time for our county to pay attention to what happens behind the walls,” read a joint statement from One Voice Uniting Corrections and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an organization representing the families of the imprisoned. “We are in the midst of a profound crisis in our nation’s correctional system. Prisons across the country are dangerously understaffed, overcrowded, and plagued by rapidly deteriorating conditions.”

As outlined herein, increased pay and bonuses, upgraded facilities, and the easing of age restrictions have failed to significantly boost recruitment and retention of prison guards. “One of the things I think people are starting to agree on now is that we’re not likely in the … foreseeable future to be able to fully staff,” said Terrica Redfield Ganzy, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “We’re incarcerating people at a high rate, and the staffing numbers are just not keeping up.”

Many prison reform advocates see understaffing as an opportunity to enact de-carceration measures. The United States has the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate. Proposed solutions to reduce that rate include lowering sentences and ending sentences of life without parole, reducing parole for older defendants, making parole practices more fair and using “second look” courts to determine if a prisoner is at a current risk of violating the law or can possibly be released early. As PLN has reported, the loss of hope among prisoners with no chance of early release or parole results in increased violence. [See: PLN, Oct. 2023, p.1.]

Each de-carceration method has its merits, but the real question is whether any of them are politically palatable. A major problem with any proposal to release prisoners is that it clashes with the incentives driving the prison industrial complex. As PLN has reported, prison profiteers make billions of dollars annually off prisons, so they funnel funds into political coffers, and they hire lobbyists to advocate for pro-prison policies. Even outside of the private prison industry, PLN has also reported on local and state officials who raised a political ruckus because of a proposal to close a prison in their jurisdiction. [See: PLN, Sept. 2024, p.13].

Regardless, our question focuses on the real cause of guard shortages. Understaffing “is directly tied to the living conditions of incarcerated people,” PPI asserted. In assessing that proposition, one must consider the prisoner population and the conditions they live under.

Many prisoners come from communities plagued with crime and drugs. The vast majority have mental health issues, substance abuse problems, or were abused emotionally or physically as children. Most prisoners not only lack a high school diploma, but they have no job skills or experience. Doing whatever it takes to survive was—and is—fair game to them. When we take that population and toss them into a human warehouse, what do we expect will be the outcome?

It is unrealistic that this class of persons will change on their own; absent intervention and education, they are more likely to simply languish on their hard, metal bunk beds in an overcrowded and overheated dormitory. Many outside prison may speak about rehabilitation, but for most prisoners the focus remains squarely on habilitation, because they were pushed away from being able to live a responsible and law-abiding life.

This author has been housed at 18 permanent prisons over his 37-year prison career. The most functional and least violent prisons offered hope and programming. Prisoners at those prisons were exposed to programs that helped them recognize their character flaws and equipped them with the skills to become productive citizens. On the other hand, the dysfunctional warehouses that I have also been assigned to offered nothing but idleness and few opportunities for growth, resulting in violence, rampant drug abuse, and high stress for all concerned.

No single cause exists for prison understaffing. Prisons are, and always will be, dangerous places due to the nature of certain prisoners. Yet well-trained and well- paid staff who make a career out of being prison guards can result in reduced violence and greater cooperation among the prisoner population. In creating a punishment environment that prisoners do not want to return to, policy makers have also created an environment that pushes prison guards to find other job options or to choose another career altogether. Therefore, until the conditions inside prisons change, the current cycle of understaffing will only endure.

Sources: The Marshall Project, Prison Policy Initiative, courtroomproven.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Vera Institute of Justice

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