Most prisons throughout the U.S. are understaffed. At least that’s what the conventional wisdom is. The consequences of understaffing are negative for everyone involved. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has attempted to solve the problem by increasing notoriously low wages. What they have thus far refused to do is to look at the prison culture and how a system focused on security and punishment is missing a lot of the real needs of adults in custody. A closer look reveals that the problem is more than about people who don’t want to work in prisons without climate control. where violence is pervasive, and where many aspects of the system are out of alignment with the stated mission of promoting positive behavior change and helping reintegration in society after release. A closer look reveals that prosecutors are sending too many people to prison who could do quite well in the community given access to appropriate resources and supervision. In addition the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is very conservative when granting parole and frequently set-off parole release based solely on “the nature of the crime” rather than what the adult in custody has demonstrated during incarceration. Add to that the unwillingness of the Governor to consider granting clemency or sentence commutation to those sentenced to prison and one has the perfect combination of factors that contribute to understaffed prisons.
One thing is perfectly clear: the conservative mantra of “prisons are for people we’re afraid of, not the ones we’re mad at” has never been implemented. If it were, there would be far fewer individuals locked up and far more community options fort prosecutors and judges to consider. Focusing on understaffing ignores the more complex subject of over-population and does nothing at all to address root causes.
Desmond Tutu saud it well when he noted that “We need to do more than just pull people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.”
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/01/10/prison-correctional-officer-shortage-overtime-data