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.
Hilary Glasgow is the executive director of Colorado Workers for Innovative and New Solutions — better known as Colorado WINS, the union that represents more than 24,000 state employees. This includes 4,526 state Department of Corrections employees such as correctional officers, case managers, teachers and administrative assistants. The state is also short-staffed within corrections, which Glasgow said is common throughout the industry.
How the short staffing plays out at the state level is similar to Colorado’s federal prisons: forced overtime and staff being pulled from other positions to fill in as a correctional officer.
“When we have people working multiple overtime shifts, we have people getting into car accidents and getting killed or paralyzed on their way home from those double shifts,” Glasgow said. “So it affects people not just in the facility, but when they leave the facility too.”
In November, a state correctional officer died after driving home from an overnight shift at the Limon Correctional Facility. The officer’s family is now suing the Department of Corrections, saying his work schedule contributed to his death.
In speaking with a mental health organization specifically for correctional officers, Glasgow said she’s learned about correctional officer exhaustion and how much the job impacts an officer’s personality. She said this only gets worse when working conditions are poor and everyone is burned out from forced overtime.
“Corrections has an impact on people that I don’t think they expect when they’re going in,” Glasgow said. “If you think about it, it’s not just the incarcerated population that has the gate closed behind them when they walk in.”
According to a DOC spokesperson, there are 1,675 vacancies across the department, which includes all positions, not just correctional staff. The spokesperson said facility safety, hiring and retention are top priorities — but the current job market has made it “incredibly challenging to recruit and retain staff.”
“The Department is utilizing every option within our power, including recruiting people from other parts of the U.S. and holding fast track hiring events where people receive a job offer the same day, as well as other strategies including reducing the hiring age from 21 to 18, and adjusting operations where possible,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The department also is using retention incentives for current staff, new hires, staff who make referrals leading to a new hire, and those who relocate throughout Colorado to improve staffing. The incentive programs the state currently uses will be in place through June. But, as with the federal jobs, incentives at the state are also higher for correctional officer positions compared to non-correctional officer roles.
Newly hired correctional officers receive a $4,500 incentive bonus, while all other positions that regularly report to a facility get $3,250. The current staff retention bonus is $4,000 for correctional officers, as well as non-custody staff like teachers and case managers who get moved to a long-term correctional officer role. Everyone else gets a $1,000 bonus.
Carla Woods is a state correctional officer in the Denver metro area and has worked with the DOC for over seven years and is active with Colorado WINS. She said the staffing situation within the department has only worsened since she started, and the forced overtime has “shattered a lot of people’s lives.” She said the DOC “doesn’t take care of its people” and that they’re deceptive when bringing in new staff members about what it’s actually like to work in the department.
“What they’re doing is playing Russian roulette with our lives, and the offenders are not getting what they need to progress and be productive citizens and be able to function out here in the world because the teachers and everything else, they’re not teaching,” Woods said.
Woods said she doesn’t see how the DOC is fulfilling its mission of keeping citizens safe if its employees are half asleep on the job. She said she’s seen coworkers who are exhausted with bloodshot eyes be held for additional shifts. Woods said she sees older people who have been with the DOC for years retiring, while the younger staffers don’t tolerate the conditions for long and leave.
“We keep telling them if you pay somebody enough money, you will get good, solid people that will stay on the job,” Woods said. “You won’t have all these people going in and out of the door. There’s so many new people, I don’t know a fraction of them.”
Glasgow said she sees the situation improving, though, especially since Colorado WINS negotiated the first ever collective bargaining agreement with the state in 2021. She is also confident the new interim director of the DOC will work with her members to improve the quality of jobs and services provided in prisons.
The union is starting conversations with the state Legislature about increasing wages, and Glasgow said legislators understand how dire the need is for more staff and increased pay. She also wants to see a longevity pay step plan put in place.
“Employees receive no additional income for having spent 20 years at the state, and so we’re dealing with a fair amount of compression,” Glasgow said. “Because we have to recruit people, they come in at a rate that ends up being sometimes higher, or equal to, or right below someone who has been there 10 years … It’s really demoralizing. Why plan out a career with a place when you can’t calculate what you’re going to make in 10 years?”
While those employed at the prisons are first to feel the effects of forced overtime and low staffing, those living within prisons in Colorado don’t get opportunities for services, rehabilitation and programming when these employees are constantly being moved around.
Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, said she’s concerned about the quality of life for people inside correctional facilities because of the limited staffing. She said this is a chronic problem rather than a situational one, impacting corrections departments across the U.S.
“Have we gotten to a place where people aren’t getting the care they need and we’re just warehousing them because there’s no staff to do the programming?” Donner said. “What impact does that have on the staff that work in prisons with the intention of providing programs who are now no longer doing that?”
With the prison population also rising again following the peak of the pandemic, Donner said the negative impacts will only continue to get worse. One potential option she sees for improvement is to downsize the prison population so the ratio fits the available staffing, given the amount of inmates eligible for parole.
American Federation of Government Employees Local 1169 president, John Butkovich, said that in a prison consistency is key, and that’s hard to achieve when there are new faces in the correctional officer positions every day. Educational and recreational opportunities for inmates are severely limited when these staff members get pulled from their post to fill in as a correctional officer.
“You want to see the inmates get out, have access to programs, keep their minds occupied and keep them doing something, and sometimes it’s just not available,” Butkovich said.
Holbrooks also said the dynamic staffing situation means programming requirements under the First Step Act — which allows eligible inmates to earn reduced sentences for participation in recidivism reduction programs and activities — aren’t being met, with people being pulled from their roles every day.
“We’re trying to get these guys rehabilitated and released, but we’re pulling everybody out of these positions to back those officers, so we can actually get them their programming.”
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