“Too brutal, too disgusting”: Prison Guards Flee as Working Conditions Worsen
The nonprofit Marshall Project reported on January 10, 2024, that dire prison staffing shortages nationwide have left the number of people working in state prisons at the lowest level in over two decades. The resulting thinning of supervision directly increases a prisoner’s risk of assault by fellow prisoners. It also slows access to services and programming requiring a guard escort, including classes and medical appointments, time in an exercise yard or library—even visits to the shower. Overworked staffers are also more prone to use excessive force.
The numbers were reported from 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data. But the results are everywhere. Governors in Florida, New Hampshire and West Virginia have deployed National Guard units to pick up the slack. An unnamed Missouri prisoner tired of waiting for an escort to a dental appointment extracted his own teeth in 2021, while a lack of guards in Wisconsin has meant lockdowns now stretching for months, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2024, p.11.] When Anthony Joseph Zino, 71, died at Georgia’s Smith State Prison in April 2023, his body wasn’t found for five days because the decimated guard staff couldn’t make headcounts any more often. A guard at the prison, Andrew Phillips, despaired that staff numbers would never rebound because the environment had grown “too brutal, too disgusting.”
The Census Bureau found that state prison staffs have shrunk 10% over the past five years, even as prisoner populations rebounded after the COVID-19 pandemic. While some states attempt to justify reduced staff by pointing to prison closures or privatization, the reality is that nearly every state has witnessed a decline in “corrections” personnel.
Most prison systems have responded with mandatory overtime, but that undermines guards’ emotional health, fueling burnout and resignations that only worsen the problem. Attempts to address the staffing crisis vary from adjusting the minimum age for guards to beefing up pay and recruitment efforts. However, the problem persists, underscoring the need to address root causes, including mandated overtime, inadequate mental health support and pervasive violence within prisons.
The most obvious way to ease staffing pressures is to decrease the prisoner population. Early release of elderly and sick prisoners, as well as those incarcerated for technical parole violations, poses little threat to public safety. With a growing recognition that the current trajectory is unsustainable, alternative courses must be explored to ensure the safety and well-being of staffers and those incarcerated.
Source: The Marshall Project
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