This story by Lindsey Toomer appeared on Colorado Newsline on January 3, 2023. We are sharing it in two installments.
High job vacancy rates have plagued many industries since the onset of the pandemic almost three years ago, but for those working in corrections, being understaffed can quickly lead to being overworked in a stressful and potentially dangerous environment.
At both federal and state prisons in Colorado, recruiting and retaining staff across the board has been difficult for several years. Because of the vacancies, those assigned to work other posts throughout the prisons often get forced into security shifts simply out of necessity. Most staff also ends up working mandatory overtime because prisons must meet a minimum staffing level to function.
Anyone who works in a prison is trained to work a security shift. This means behavioral health specialists, case managers, social workers and teachers can be pulled from their primary responsibilities to work as a correctional officer, leaving those who are incarcerated with less opportunities for activity and rehabilitation.
John Butkovich is president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1169, which represents about 640 members employed at the Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Florence. He said even when program staff are pulled to work a security shift, they still have other responsibilities for their primary job to tend to, which quickly leads to burnout.
A turning point in the staffing difficulties was the federal hiring freeze former President Donald Trump implemented in 2017. Butkovich said this stopped all of the applicants in the pipeline to work for the Bureau of Prisons, and it’s created a snowball effect since.
He said hiring has improved slightly under the Biden administration. FCC Florence had about 180 new hires in 2022, according to Butkovich, but it also saw about 100 employees leave. He said the Bureau of Prisons will remove positions that previously existed to make the vacancy rates look lower.
“Staffing was so bad that in the fiscal year 2022, Florence had a budget of $3.1 million for overtime and paid out $6.8 million,” Butkovich said. He said the federal prison in Englewood has the same staffing issues Florence does too.
A spokesperson with the BOP’s North Central Regional Office said improving the staffing situation at both FCC Florence and the Englewood Federal Correctional Institution is a top priority for the bureau.
“Despite continued recruitment efforts, 2022 hiring across the agency has been a challenge, as the BOP is faced with the same worker shortage experienced by employers throughout the country,” the spokesperson said in an email. “The BOP has implemented a robust national recruitment strategy to ensure constant recruitment efforts and to facilitate a pipeline of applicants throughout the year.”
The bureau also said that following ongoing work with an outside consultant, it is making changes to the overtime reporting process, focusing more on employee groups at a higher risk of leaving, and continuously evaluating opportunities for recruitment and retention incentives.
“The BOP is addressing the institutional climate and communications at both FCC Florence & FCI Englewood, providing additional training to staff, making security improvements at the facilities, and continuing to recruit additional high-quality staff,” the spokesperson said. “Working with the consultant allowed us to spend time as an agency thinking about how we see ourselves and how we want to project that image out into the world.”
Earlier in December, Colorado’s U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper called on the White House to increase wages and improve working conditions at FCC Florence. The senators helped secure a 25% retention bonus for correctional officers at the facility in July, but only a 10% retention bonus for non-custody staff like educators and counselors. This means that as soon as someone signs on to work for the BOP, they get that percentage of their salary up front. The two senators support the AFGE Local 1169’s goal of seeing this raised to 25% for all FCC Florence staff.
“This essential Bureau of Prisons workforce and their representative union have raised concerns about low pay, forced overtime, and dangerous working conditions that have exacerbated low morale, high attrition, and an inability to recruit and hire sufficient staff,” Bennet and Hickenlooper said in their letter.
Butkovich said pay is one of the biggest issues impacting poor retention, and the 10% retention bonus for non-custody staff has proved to be ineffective. At a federal facility in Thomson, Illinois, 25% bonuses were instituted for everyone, and the facility hasn’t seen the level of staffing issues Florence has, he said .
“When you’re starting out without these retentions, you’re making poverty level wages,” Butkovich said. “The pay dividends are just inconsistent across the board, and this retention is the only thing seeming to send that off.”
Another key issue for Florence, as is the case in many rural Colorado communities, is the cost of housing. Butkovich said southern Colorado is starting to approach Denver when it comes to housing prices, and without the extra incentive, qualified candidates can’t afford to relocate to Florence without a higher bonus.
John Holbrooks is a correctional counselor in Florence. He usually works to make sure inmates’ daily needs are met. This includes approving phone calls, arranging legal visits, calls and mail, and other basic operations that keep the incarcerated population connected to the outside world.
But, given the staffing issues, he regularly gets pulled to fill in as a correctional officer.
Prior to 2017, Holbrooks said people would only need to be pulled from their assigned position once in a while when officers had to leave for training. They also typically had a backlog of extra officers to fill in if someone took time off work. But Holbrooks said pulling non-custody staff has become “a year-round necessity.”
“The reason why the administration started doing this is they did not like to have to pay out the overtime,” Holbrooks said. “So why pay the overtime when you can just pull somebody out of their position and have them fill in as a correctional officer for the day?”
Recently, Holbrooks said an operational review found some discrepancies in his typical role as a counselor, so now he needs to go into work on a day off to make changes and fix the discrepancies. He’ll be paid time and a half for this, but he said the only reason these discrepancies exist is because he keeps getting pulled away from his desk to work correctional officer shifts.
“I don’t want to say it’s a dangerous thing to do because we’re all trained to do the (correctional officer) job,” Holbrooks said. “However, if we’re not doing the job every day, five days a week, we tend to not understand or know the inmates as well as a correctional officer does, so it makes it a little more challenging for those staff that are not in that position every day.”