U.S. prisons are miserable places to work

Inmates at a federal correctional institution in Thomson, Ill., sexually harassed and exposed themselves to female staff over 1,600 times between 2019 and 2023, according to Jonathan Zumkehr, the president of the facility’s union. He said the federal Bureau of Prisons did little to investigate the reports.

“We had people quit. It affected their marriage, it affected their home life,” Zumkehr said. “I had many emails from staff saying, ‘I don’t want to go in to work. I don’t want to see the things that [we are] seeing.’”

Thomson is a 146-acre federal prison just across the border from Iowa. When Zumkehr transferred there in 2019, it already had the most vacancies of any of the 122 facilities in the federal prison system—167 empty positions out of about 470. When Thomson staff brought concerns about rampant harassment to the BOP, Zumkehr said agency leaders brushed it off: “We had the leadership at the time say, ‘It’s just part of the job.’”

Zumkehr joined forces with Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, to demand answers from the bureau. In December 2022, Ernst asked the agency about its plans to address the incidents. “Not only does this sexual misconduct create a hostile workplace, it is also exacerbating BOP’s staffing crisis,” she wrote in a letter. In October 2023, Ernst again expressed her frustration: “I am dismayed by BOP’s slow response to this situation and apparent lack of corrective action in preparation for future similar situations.”

Zumkehr hopes a bipartisan bill establishing independent oversight of the prisons bureau will increase the agency’s transparency and force leaders to address a nationwide recruitment and retention crisis. Criminal justice experts and prison ministry leaders say the bill is an essential first step toward increasing rehabilitation opportunities for inmates and protecting the staff who guard them.

President Joe Biden is expected to sign the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which the Senate passed unanimously last week after the House of Representatives approved the measure in May 2024. The bill, spearheaded by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., directs the U.S. attorney general to establish a third-party ombudsman responsible for investigating reports of rampant sexual abuse, staffing shortages, and civil rights violations in federal prisons, along with accusations that staff are supplying prisoners with drugs and weapons in exchange for cash.

“We want transparency,” said Zumkehr. “We’re federal employees. We need to be transparent to the public about the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

In 2023, the Government Accountability Office added the Bureau of Prisons to its high-risk list of areas of the federal government that are vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.

Kate Trammell, vice president of advocacy for Prison Fellowship, praised the passage of the Federal Prison Oversight Act. Trammell said the remote locations of prisons make oversight especially essential: “Prisons often are far from our communities. They are in rural areas, off to the side. It is so easy for average Americans to forget people who are incarcerated.”

Earlier this year, the bureau shut down a women’s prison in Dublin, Calif., after repeated attempts at reform in response to allegations of sexual abuse and staff misconduct toward inmates. Inmates and staff referred to the prison as “a rape club.” The FBI raided the facility in March, confiscating computers and documents. In April, officials hurriedly transferred about 600 women to other prisons across the country, and eight correctional officers were charged with sex abuse.

Overcrowding and understaffing at prisons is a systemic problem that endangers inmates and correctional officers, said Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. He pointed to high rates of suicide and a lack of mental health care for inmates struggling with substance abuse, often resulting in overdoses on contraband drugs.

A Department of Justice watchdog report examined 344 nonmedical deaths in federal prisons spanning an eight-year period between 2014 and 2021. The vast majority—187 inmates—committed suicide, while homicides accounted for 89 deaths, and 56 were ruled accidents. The manner of death in 12 cases remains unclear.

The newly passed oversight act would require the DOJ inspector general to conduct scheduled risk assessments and assign each prison a score based on confinement conditions, working conditions for staff, and whether inmates have access to rehabilitation programs. Prisons with high risk scores would receive more frequent inspections, and the inspector general would issue recommendations to address safety concerns and substandard conditions.

Johnson, who is also an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University, said that while the bill is a critical first step, staffing shortages and a lack of funding could make implementing reforms difficult.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are struggling with a staffing crisis made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-police sentiments in the nation. In his early years of teaching, when Johnson asked his students if they were planning on going into law enforcement, almost half the class of about 70 students would raise their hand. But over the past couple of years, that number has dwindled. “We’re not recruiting … this generation,” he said.

At Thomson, union president Zumkehr worked with lawmakers to obtain a 25 percent retention bonus for staff in 2021, equivalent to about $16,000 annually. “The reason we did that is because of the remote location, there’s no childcare,” he said. “We have a lot of single parents that work at Thomson.”

But the prisons bureau ended the bonus after Dec. 31 of last year. About 60 staff have left since January, and 124 positions are currently empty, Zumkehr said.

In 2021, the Associated Press reported nearly one-third of federal corrections jobs were vacant, with some prisons turning to cooks and teachers to guard inmates. That number is even higher at the state level.

Staffing shortages have prevented federal prisons from fully implementing the First Step Act, a bipartisan measure signed by former President Donald Trump in 2018. The act aims to reduce recidivism by granting inmates time off of their sentences if they participate in rehabilitative programs.

Prison understaffing also affects ministries to inmates. “Staffing issues are preventing faith-based volunteers from being allowed to come in,” said Michael Hallett, a professor of criminology at the University of North Florida who has researched religious programs in several of the United States’ largest maximum security prisons. “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.”

Fewer outside volunteers also decreases transparency, Hallett said. “Religious volunteers get to know their prisoners over months and years,” he noted. “They report back to outside authorities about what’s going on in the prison.”

Trammell with Prison Fellowship said the ministry operates predominantly in state prisons, though it has a small amount of programming available in a discrete number of federal facilities. The organization hopes to work with the Bureau of Prisons to expand operations in federal prisons.

“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,” Trammell said. “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 while they’re inside to take hold of a new life, to practice new behaviors, is going to be so helpful in setting them up for success.”