Prison staff calling it quits

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Holding prisons… accountable.

Last week, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing independent oversight of the Bureau of Prisons. That’s the federal agency responsible for 122 correctional facilities across the United States.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The bill is called the Federal Prison Oversight Act. It aims to combat rampant sexual abuse, staffing shortages, escapes, and civil rights violations.

What’s it like to work in a federal prison? And how might this law change that?

MAST: WORLD’s Addie Offereins wrote this report. WORLD correspondent Anna Johansen Brown brings it to us now.

ZUMKEHR: Thomson is in the middle of nowhere.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: Jon Zumkehr [ZUM-KER] is a corrections officer at a federal prison in Thomson, Illinois—just across the border from Iowa. He’s also the president of the facility’s union.

ZUMKEHR: We’ve lost 60 staff since January. The whole country is facing a law enforcement shortage. It's a recruitment and retention crisis

Thomson is missing almost 30 percent of its staff—and Zumkehr says the Bureau of Prisons is doing little to address the shortages.

Instead of finding ways to retain officers and attract new ones, the prison regularly asks other prison employees serving as nurses, cooks, and teachers to guard prisoners.

ZUMKEHR: They'll take that teacher out of the classroom, and they'll put them in that correctional officer's job. Which, again, we say is making the prison less safe because if it requires 100 people to run that prison, and you take 10 of the people away and put them in officer positions, and that's the average we do a day at Thompson, you'd have 10 less staff at the prison, which makes it less safe.

Compounding the problem of staff shortages is a rise in inmates abusing staff members. Between 2019 and 2023, inmates at Thomson sexually assaulted female staff more than 1,600 times. But according to Zumkehr, staff members who raised concerns were brushed off.

ZUMKEHR: We made an allegation to say these are happening on a daily basis, that our staff come to work and inmates expose themselves to them, that it was an attempt to intimidate female staff. And we had the leadership at the time say, “Oh, it's just part of the job. You know, this is a male environment. Just deal with it.”

Because the Bureau won’t deal with this behavior, prisons bear the brunt of it.

ZUMKEHR: And the effects on the female staff? We have people quit. It affected their marriage, it affected their home life. I had many emails from staff saying I sit in my car every day prior to coming into work, and I don't want to go into work. I don't want to see, you know, the things that they were seeing ... .Your recruitment and retention issue just goes down the tubes.

Zumkehr hopes the new Federal Prison Oversight Act will change that.

ZUMKEHR: We're federal employees, you know, we need to be transparent to the public on the good, the bad and the ugly.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that the Bureau of Prisons is in desperate need of rehabilitation. Last year, the Government Accountability Office added the Bureau to its high-risk list—areas of the federal government that are vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.

The Senate passed the oversight measure unanimously.

Here’s the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia

AUDIO: It will require the inspector general of the Department of Justice to undertake ongoing and regular inspections of every single federal prison in the United States. It will establish an independent ombudsman at the Department of Justice to investigate the health safety welfare and rights of incarcerated people and staff.

Criminal justice experts and prison ministry leaders say the bill is also an essential first step toward increasing rehabilitation opportunities for inmates.

Michael Hallett is a professor of criminology at the University of North Florida. He researches religious programs in several of the United States’ largest maximum security prisons.

HALLETT: The American prison system is currently so understaffed, that they don't have enough staff even to make sure that volunteers who come in are safe enough to execute their programs.

He says this cuts prisons off from a vital source of accountability.

HALLETT: That creates a situation where prisoners become more isolated and prisons themselves become far less transparent. When outsiders are coming into the prison, especially religious volunteers, who get to know their prisoners over months and years, they could report back to outside authorities what's going on in the prison. As soon as you remove those volunteers, that makes prisons much more dangerous.

Kate Trammell [TRAM-ULL] is the vice president of advocacy for Prison Fellowship.

She agrees that staffing shortages do cut down on opportunities for rehabilitative programming. And she says that rehabilitation is vital.

TRAMMELL: We know that most of the men and women who are in federal prison will one day walk out those doors and be our neighbors. Many of them will walk straight back into parenthood. They will be looking for jobs, they will be looking for housing, and every opportunity that we can give them well inside to take hold of a new life, to practice new behaviors is going to be so helpful in setting them up for success.

That’s why Trammell hopes the new bill will encourage a healthier prison environment.

The bill will result in more inspections and reports…but it’s still up to the Bureau of Prisons to make the changes. After the Justice Department’s inspector general files a report to Congress and the public, the Bureau then has 60 days to respond with an action plan. And that’s where the rubber will meet the road. The Bureau’s director says it would need tens of millions of dollars in additional funding to make recommended changes.

Regardless of how effectively the act is enforced, Zumkehr says the conversations involved are essential for rebuilding trust.

ZUMKEHR: Anything to shine more light on the process is important right now. And I think we need to get the public support, you know, kind of behind us and trust. And I think we get that being transparent.

For WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown…with reporting from Addie Offereins.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.