Tag Archives: staffing

Who Wants to Be A Prison Guard? – Update for February 25, 2026

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

BOP SHORT STAFFING WAS A HOT TOPIC LAST WEEK

In a finding that rivals Newton’s conclusion that gravity makes apples fall to the ground, a Congressional Research Service report last week determined that non-competitive pay and difficult working conditions are main causes of longstanding understaffing at the Bureau of Prisons, a problem that has persisted despite paying recruitment and retention incentives, using shortcut “direct hire” authority, and promising student loan repayments for employees.

The BOP had always run vacancy rates in the 10-12% range, but that jumped to the 17-18% range over 2018-2021, and then again to the 22-25% range after the pandemic. Over the six years ending in 2002, overtime costs more than doubled to $275 million even while the number of correctional officers fell 22% from about 19,000 to about 15,600.

“There are questions about whether pay for federal COs is competitive with other federal law enforcement agencies and the private sector,” the report said. “Candidates for CO positions who have college degrees might also consider seeking entry-level law enforcement officer positions for which they qualify with other federal agencies, which might pay more.”

The differences have grown greater recently, CRS said, as agencies – including CBP and ICE – have offered larger incentives while the BOP has “paused offering new recruitment incentives and have ended some retention incentives due to budgetary constraints.”

Last Friday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded details on BOP plans to address these “major and long-time staffing shortages,” Federal News Network reported.

In a letter sent to BOP Director William K. Marshall III from top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee warned that workforce issues have reached a “crisis point,” leading to operational challenges and unsafe conditions in the federal prison system.

“By far, the most significant challenge to BOP’s ability to fulfill its public safety mission is its pervasive shortage of critical staff — particularly of correctional officers, healthcare professionals and mental health specialists,” the letter stated.

While the BOP inmate population fell slightly last year, “it still exceeds BOP’s capacity,” the letter asserted. “Moreover, any population reduction likely is offset by the influx of thousands of immigrant detainees BOP agreed to accept. Despite the obvious need to retain its workforce, in March 2025, BOP cut pay to frontline officers by as much as 25% [and] institute[ed] a hiring freeze in May 2025.”

Although the BOP received $3 billion in additional funding in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill, “it appears that BOP only recently posted open correctional officer positions to the public. Further, reporting revealed that the Bureau has lost more than 1,400 staff members as a result of heavy recruitment for positions that come with generous salaries and signing bonuses from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One BOP official told ProPublica, “We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE.”

The letter asks the BOP to report the efforts it has undertaken to attract and recruit qualified candidates and retain current employees. The Democrats are especially interested in the number of BOP COs lost to higher-paying ICE jobs.

Unsurprisingly, BOP employee unions last week endorsed H.R. 7033, the bipartisan Federal Correctional Officer Paycheck Protection Act of 2026 introduced last month. The bill aims to boost BOP staff recruitment and retention by raising pay for BOP employees working in custodial settings with direct inmate contact by up to 35%.

Sam Metcalf, president of AFGE Local 0701, told Corrections1 last week that higher pay is needed to reduce the heavy use of augmentation — a practice in which non-custody staff are reassigned to cover correctional officer posts. 

FEDWeek, Report Lays Out Causes, Effects of Bureau Understaffing (February 19, 2026)

Federal News Network, House Democrats Press Bureau of Prisons leadership on staffing ‘crisis’ (February 20, 2026)

Letter from Jamie Raskin to William K. Marshall III, February 20, 2026

HR 7033, Federal Correctional Officer Paycheck Protection Act of 2026

Corrections1, Union backs bill proposing 35 pct base pay increase for federal correctional officers (February 20, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root 

Shrinks Do A Runner And Other BOP Headaches – Update for February 3, 2026

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

ROUGH WEEK FOR THE BOP

Last week began with The Marshall Project reporting that as of last spring, “just one in five federal prisons had a fully staffed psychology department… “[d]ozens of federal prisons nationwide had fewer than half the psychologists needed[and] at more than 10 prisons, there was one psychologist, or none.”

“Those are catastrophic numbers,” retired Bureau of Prisons psychologist Jill Roth, who served as national coordinator for the BOP’s prison rape elimination program until 2021, told TMP.  The report said that the BOP’s psychology program “used to be the envy of other correctional systems, according to psychologists who worked for the agency for decades. ‘BOP was a place psychologists were excited to work,’ Roth said. ‘It has changed.’”

TMP recounted that one BOP psychologist said he left a West Coast prison in May after he was the only staff psychologist for more than 700 people, saying that he feared that the care he could provide under those circumstances did not meet basic professional standards. “At some point it becomes unethical to continue to participate in that,” he was quoted as saying. “Can we provide this group of humans the care they’re entitled to? The answer is no. One person cannot ethically do that.”

The same day, the Dept of Justice Office of Inspector General issued its annual Top Management and Performance Challenges report to Congress, noting that the BOP “continues to face persistent challenges, most critically those presented by staffing shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, and the introduction of contraband. In recent years, deficiencies in the provision of healthcare to inmates and sexual abuse of inmates by BOP staff have emerged as additional significant challenges.”

Writing in Forbes, Walter Pavlo said, “Over the past two decades, the OIG has issued more than 100 reports documenting systemic problems at the BOP, and many of the same deficiencies appear year after year… Staffing shortages, deteriorating facilities, contraband, misconduct, and weak oversight have become familiar themes in the OIG’s annual Top Management and Performance Challenges reports. The latest report reiterates what oversight bodies have said repeatedly: the BOP’s problems are systemic, long-standing, and largely unresolved.”

The Government Accountability Office piled on the next day, reporting that for its study period of March through December 2024, the BOP has been failing in its First Step Act obligation to conduct needs assessments within required time frames, to use uniform methods to record when inmates decline to participate in a recommended program, and to keep program participation data. Most concerning, GAO found that as of the ends of 2024, the BOP had failed to apply all FSA credits to 70% of eligible inmates, and 54% of inmates received no prerelease custody credit for their earned FSA time.

GAO found that BOP generally applied all time credits toward supervised release but not for prerelease custody.

The report noted that BOP had implemented new planning tools in 2024 and 2025 to help staff anticipate upcoming transfers to prerelease custody and ensure incarcerated people receive their FSA time credits, and that GAO is currently examining BOP’s efforts to forecast capacity needs and provide sufficient halfway house and home confinement resources.

The Dept of Justice was required to issue annual FSA reports to Congress for five years after the Act passed. The last one was issued in June 2024. GAO recommended that Congress amend the law to require continued reports, because “without such information, Congress may be hindered in its decision making regarding the FSA.”

The Marshall Project, Amid ‘Catastrophic’ Shortage, Psychologists Flee Federal Prisons in Droves (January 26, 2026)

DOJ Inspector General, Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Department of Justice | 2025 (January 26, 2026) 

Forbes, The Bureau Of Prisons: When OIG Warnings Meet GAO Reality (January 28, 2026)

GAO, Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to the System Used to Assess and Mitigate Incarcerated People’s Recidivism Risk, GAO-26-107268 (January 27, 2026)

~ Thomas L. Root

BOP Hiring Woes Continue – Update for May 15, 2025

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

BOP TOLD TO DO MORE WITH LESS

hiringfreezeB250515The Trump administration is halting some hiring at the Bureau of Prisons despite chronic understaffing has led to long overtime shifts, augmentation by nurses, teachers, cooks and other workers as corrections officers, lockdowns and loss of programs.

Shane Fausey, former National President of the Council of Prison Locals, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2022 that staffing at BOP fell from 43,369 employees in January 2016 to 35,000 employees in September 2022. Currently, the BOP reports having 35,925 employees.

The Bureau of Prisons will maintain current staffing levels at least through September 30, Marshall wrote in an email to staff entitled “Staffing and Hiring Decisions.”

Meanwhile, Representatives Glenn Grothman (R-WI) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) reintroduced the BOP Direct-Hire Authority Act, legislation intended to alleviate BOP staffing shortages by circumventing Office of Personnel Management procedures that can prolong the onboarding process for new hires to over six months.

understaffed220929“One of the main hurdles in President Trump’s effort to reopen Alcatraz will be the ability to quickly hire Correctional Officers,” Grothman said in a press release. “That is why Congress needs to quickly pass this legislation to help the federal prison system which has been understaffed and overwhelmed for years.”

A prior version of the bill was introduced last December as H.R. 6628 but died when the 118th Congress expired at the end of 2024.

Stefanik is chair of the House Republican Leadership Committee.

Associated Press, Cash-strapped Bureau of Prisons freezes some hiring to ‘avoid more extreme measures,’ director says (May 8, 2025)

The Sun, Stefanik supports reintroduction of BOP Direct-Hire Authority Act (May 14, 2025)

– Thomas L. Root

Scandalous Content About the BOP – Update for October 12, 2023

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

LAST WEEK AT THE BOP

Now for BOP news from the prior week that is so scandalous that the administration at one unnamed federal prison (we’ll call it “FCI Englewood” for easy reference) banned the LISA Newsletter this week as a threat to institutional security.

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Hotline for Hazelton: The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia has set up a hotline for information related to civil rights abuses occurring at FCC Hazelton. The USAO is looking for information from witnesses or victims of physical assault while incarcerated at Hazelton.

The hotline number 1-855-WVA-FEDS and the email address is wvafeds@usdoj.gov.

shocked180619One inmate – a Hazelton alum but now at another facility – complained to me in an email on Monday that the domain “@usdoj.gov” is blocked on BOP mail servers. At his request, I forwarded his message to the ND West Virginia U.S. Attorney’s Office. An Assistant U.S. Attorney responded yesterday to tell me the issue was being looked into.

U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia, Civil rights hotline created for federal prison in West Virginia (October 3, 2023)

National Alert Bags Phones: Cellphones held by prisoners in state and federal facilities were caught last week when a National Emergency Alert System test set off loud buzzing in the unlawfully possessed sets.

cellphone231012On Wednesday, cellphone users across the country received a loud alert from FEMA and the FCC to test the exchange of emergency messages at a national level. TMZ reports that COs at a New York State prison and FCI Coleman Low found cellphones buzzing from the emergency test.

The Daily Mail reported that “the test was conducted over a 30-minute window, meaning prisoners would have gotten the message if they turned their phones back on within the next 30 minutes.

Complex, Prisoners Across the United States Caught With Cell Phones During National Emergency Alert System Test (October 7, 2023)

Daily Mail, National emergency alert system ‘outed prisoners hiding phones and made them easy targets for guards’ after millions received message across the U.S. (October 7, 2023)

Take This Job… BOP COs are hoping the recent approval of retention bonuses will offer some relief to a workforce that’s been struggling for years.

Moneyspigot200220The Office of Personnel Management has approved pay bonuses amounting to 25% of annual for COs working in several BOP facilities nationwide. The retention incentive amounts to 25% of an employee’s base salary.

Brandy Moore White, president of Council 33 of the American Federation of Government Employees (representing over 30,000 BOP employees), welcomed the one-time bonuses, but warned that “the pay incentives won’t be enough to stave off massive, ongoing staffing challenges across the entire agency,” the Federal News Network reported. “I will be brutally honest,” she said. “I think they’re Band-Aids.”

Federal News Network, New 25% retention bonuses at Bureau of Prisons only a ‘Band-Aid’ for larger staffing issues (October 4, 2023)

Ernst Critical of BOP Sex Abuse Nonresponse: Sen Joni Ernst (R-IA) blasted BOP Director Colette Peters last week for failing to address prolonged safety and staffing concerns voiced by staff.

Last December, Ernst queried the agency about what it was doing to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against staff at USP Thomson. In a follow-up letter sent October 4th, Ernst said “Last year, my letter sought numerous answers regarding your bureau’s plan to properly respond to the ongoing criminal activity occurring at USP Thomson… I am dismayed by BOP’s slow response to this situation and apparent lack of corrective action in preparation for future similar situations.”

Press Release from Sen. Jodi Ernst, Ernst Demands Answers on Sexual Misconduct at USP Thomson (October 4, 2023)

– Thomas L. Root

BOP Staffing,MCC New York Conditions, Draw Media Scrutiny – Update for June 27, 2018

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

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BOP STAFFING, PRISON CONDITIONS TAKE IT ON THE CHIN

Last week was a bad one, publicity-wise, for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. First, The New York Times reported that a shortage of correctional officers has grown chronic under President Trump, leading to an increase in assaults on staff and contraband. Then, a New York City magazine ran a hard-hitting story on the deplorable conditions at MCC New York.

punchinface180423The Times said correctional officer vacancies has ballooned to over 2,100 (about 12% of the CO workforce). As a result, the paper said, “the practice of drawing upon other workers has become routine — many prisons have been operating in a perpetual state of staffing turmoil, leaving some workers feeling ill-equipped and unsafe on the job.”

In Obama’s last two years, the BOP hired 2,644 new Cos in 2016. Last year, the number dropped to 372, with the BOP eliminating about 5,000 unfilled jobs, including about 1,500 CO positions.

Cuts are occurring even though Congress increased the BOP budget for salaries and expenses by $106 million this year, and lawmakers have called for hiring more COs. As of March, there were 15,927 officers in federal prisons.

A BOP press officer said the cuts “will not have a negative impact on public safety or on our ability to maintain a safe environment for staff and inmates.” But assaults on prison staff have risen more than 8% last year over the previous year.

dungeon180627Meanwhile, The Gothamist (a magazine published by public radio station WNYC) last week savaged conditions at MCC New York. The article described “a rat-infested, high-rise hell just yards from the federal courts… That could be exactly the way jailers and prosecutors want it. Pre-trial detention, which often lasts years, can become not only unsafe, but coercive; as a result, individuals are pressured to provide information to prosecutors or accept plea deals in their desperation to be released, say former prisoners.” 

“You want to plead guilty and get out of this dump to a prison,” one former inmate told the magazine. “The feds have a 98% conviction rate for a reason,”, another former prisoner said. “They mentally break you… There are certain things that go on in these places that the government covers so the public would never know.”

The New York Times, Safety Concerns Grow as Inmates Are Guarded by Teachers and Secretaries (June 17, 2018)

The Gothamist, Prisoners Endure A Nightmare ‘Gulag’ In Lower Manhattan, Hidden In Plain Sight (June 19, 2018)

– Thomas L. Root

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