16 March 2026
There is a crisis unfolding in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The government agency responsible for managing the U.S. federal prison system is experiencing an extreme shortage of correctional officers, which poses a major safety and security risk to everyone in the system.
This shortage is not a new phenomenon. For years, watchdogs from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have been tracking prison staffing issues in their reports.
But recently, the shortage has hit a troubling new phase. The number of corrections officers has now dipped to just around 11,800—down from a peak of about 20,000 in the mid-2010s, according to tracking from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council of Prison Locals C-33—the largest union representing federal corrections staff.
Going from 20,000 to under 12,000 officers constitutes a “staffing crisis,” says an AFGE representative who spoke to Security Management but asked not to be named in this article to avoid retaliation. “It is disastrous.”
Understaffing is one of the top challenges that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) continues to face going into 2026, according to an annual OIG report published in January. OIG also highlighted the BOP’s deficiency in providing healthcare to inmates and its struggles to address sexual abuse of inmates by BOP staff.
“These issues detract from the BOP’s mission to ‘foster a humane and secure environment and ensure public safety by preparing individuals for successful reentry into our communities,’ and they put inmates, employees, and the public at risk,” OIG assessed.
Understaffing
Although it’s difficult to determine when today’s significant BOP understaffing problem began, it was first mentioned in publicly available OIG annual reports on the most pressing challenges at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2008.
OIG noted a rising problem of overcrowding and significant incidents of inmate violence at BOP institutions in 2007 and into 2008, as the inmate population rose from 172,499 in 2003 to 201,214 in 2008. BOP staff that OIG spoke with said staffing shortages and prison overcrowding, complicated by gang rivalries, led to the surge in violence. At that time, 13 percent of BOP staff positions—including more than 8 percent of corrections officer positions—were unfilled.
Five years later in its 2013 report, OIG wrote that the BOP had been operating for more than a decade with a ratio of 10 inmates per single correctional officer, compared to large U.S. state correctional systems that had ratios of six inmates to one officer. OIG said that the growth of the inmate population, along with DOJ tightening its budget, had prevented the department from adding correctional officers.
As the BOP struggled to lower its correctional officer-to-inmate ratio, OIG noted that the agency was turning to noncorrectional staff in 2015 to assist in covering security posts—a process called augmentation. This process allows the BOP to use staff cooks, nurses, teachers, and other personnel to fill the role of a correctional officer during periods of short staffing. The OIG’s 2017 report also found that staffing is a “constant challenge” at the BOP, and assessed in 2018 that the elimination of 5,000 unfilled BOP positions would likely exacerbate the need to have noncorrectional staff perform correctional officer duties to maintain security.
Those concerns were validated from 2019 onward when the OIG found that insufficient staffing was posing safety and security concerns at BOP facilities. Inspections and audits revealed problems both with security screening procedures, which allowed prison staff to bring contraband into the facilities, and a recurring issue of prison staff sexually assaulting inmates. Understaffing also meant that the BOP was requiring its employees to work significant overtime hours—6.71 million hours in 2020 alone, enough to cover 3,107 full-time positions.
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“Indeed, the OIG has observed and reported on how, over the past few years, even as the inmate population has declined from approximately 219,000 in 2013 to about 159,000 in October 2022, the many long-standing challenges facing the BOP, including physical safety, insufficient staffing, and healthcare costs, have resulted in serious organization failures and resulted in crises at far too many institutions,” OIG reported in 2022.
The next year, OIG created a new inspection program for unannounced visits of BOP sites. Those visits continued to reveal serious staffing and security issues, including that the BOP employed just 12,484 correctional officers and had 2,393 vacancies—a 16 percent vacancy rate. Further operational reviews also revealed that BOP executive staff had not adequately assessed actual staffing needs at the agency’s facilities and continued to use augmentation and overtime practices to fill gaps. Using these approaches reduced morale and staff attentiveness, which the OIG said were resulting in “decreasing the overall safety of the institution.”
Also in 2023, GAO added strengthening management of the federal prison system to its High-Risk List—a list of U.S. federal government programs and operations with serious vulnerabilities to waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or in need of transformation.
“We designated this area to be high-risk in 2023 because leadership changes and long-standing staffing challenges represent a serious threat to the safety of staff and incarcerated people,” according to GAO.
The decision to add the BOP to the high-risk list came after GAO completed an audit on the BOP’s staffing levels in 2021. It found that the BOP had not assessed the associated risks of using overtime to address staffing challenges to staff and inmate safety, including officer fatigue and decreased observation skills.
“Overtime expenditures, without adjusting for inflation, have increased 102 percent from 2015 through 2019,” GAO wrote. “Conducting a risk assessment of its overtime use would better position BOP to identify the potential risks of overtime and respond, as appropriate.”
The review raised concerns about the BOP’s inability to set appropriate levels of staffing, as well as its use of overtime and augmentation, says Gretta Goodwin, the director of homeland security and justice, at GAO.
Similar concerns were echoed in 2024, with OIG writing that correctional officer staffing shortages have a “cascading effect on institution operations,” with the substantial use of overtime and augmentation to perform security roles. This in turn “overburdened existing staff and potentially contributed to staff fatigue, sleep deprivation, decreased vigilance, and inattentiveness to duty.”
In its reviews, GAO assessed that the BOP lacked the ability to determine what an adequate level of staff at its sites would be, Goodwin adds. GAO and OIG both recommended that the BOP create a process to determine adequate staffing levels, to better understand where additional support is needed.
Although the BOP had hired a contractor to create a new staffing tool in 2023 to better determine how many staff were needed at each of its institutions, OIG said it had expressed concern about the numbers the tool provided. OIG found “significant variations” between institutions’ currently authorized staffing levels supplemented by overtime and the projected staffing levels provided by the staffing tool. The numbers were especially misaligned when it came to determining the appropriate number of corrections officers.
Prison staffing shortages “overburdened existing staff and potentially contributed to staff fatigue, sleep deprivation, decreased vigilance, and inattentiveness to duty,” according to a 2024 government watchdog report.
Federal prison management remains on GAO’s high-risk list. GAO has also published numerous reports since 2023 on how staffing mismanagement has affected safety and security at BOP sites, including a September 2025 report on the limited ability the BOP has to hold correctional officers accountable for misconduct.
The bureau receives thousands of misconduct allegations each year, including criminal misconduct by way of sexual and physical abuse of inmates and bringing in contraband. Yet, due to staffing shortages and leadership instability—the BOP recently had six directors in seven years—the agency has struggled to hold employees accountable for wrongdoing.
For instance, the BOP had about 12,150 employee misconduct cases open as of February 2025, and 37 percent of those cases had been unresolved for at least three years. BOP officials attributed the large caseload to a result of understaffing of its Office of Investigative Affairs and a failure of wardens to prioritize employee misconduct cases.
Union officials who spoke with GAO said that employees who are the focus of a misconduct complaint may be placed on administrative leave or assigned to other duties while under investigation.
“This impacts the facility’s staffing levels because those employees are unable to fulfill their normal duties,” according to GAO’s report. “Finally, these [union] officials stated that lengthy processing times can cause employees to question whether BOP takes misconduct seriously.”
The length of time involved to address staff misconduct also poses risks to inmates. OIG cited untimely staff disciplinary processes, along with staffing shortages, failures to follow BOP policies and procedures, and outdated security camera systems as long-standing operational challenges that impair the BOP’s ability to reduce the risk of inmate deaths.
“These challenges continue to present a significant and critical threat to the BOP’s safe and humane management of the inmates in its care and custody,” OIG assessed.
Staff Perspectives
OIG and GAO’s findings on understaffing align with the experience of the AFGE union representative and many of its members.
The representative says their BOP facility that houses roughly 4,000 inmates began occasionally using augmentation—a “fancy name for ‘we are understaffed and we’re going to borrow noncustody people to work custody posts’”—in 2005. Around that time, there were about 300 correctional officers at the facility. Now that number has dropped to 120 to 150, depending on the year, but the site still has the same number of inmates.
The facility routinely turns to augmentation to make up the difference, since the BOP asserts that everyone who works in a prison is a corrections officer. Regardless of their assigned role, all staff members go through a two-week standard training program for correctional officers that covers policy and procedure. After that initial training, staff are sent to the BOP’s national training facility in Georgia to complete basic training on policy and firearms.
“Correctional officers for the most part do not get additional training,” the union representative says. “But what they do get is just the day-to-day experience.”
Correctional officers are immersed in the prison environment and become used to working directly with inmates, so they are best positioned to understand the day-to-day dynamic between inmates and officers. The union representative likens it to a substitute teacher compared to a staff teacher in the classroom every day. Substitutes are trained and qualified personnel, but they don’t know every student’s name in the classroom, what their learning advantages and challenges are, or what they might be experiencing at home that is affecting their ability to engage positively in class.
“I don’t know the details. I don’t know the daily interactions,” the union representative says of the experience of administrative staff working with inmates through augmentation. “So that just puts [staff] at a bit of a disadvantage.”
One of those disadvantages is often working alone as a corrections officer. On daytime shifts, it’s common for one officer to be responsible for a unit that houses about 60 inmates, the representative adds. This isolation creates a risky situation where, if there is an altercation or incident, the officer likely is on his or her own until additional staff can arrive on the scene.
To mitigate this risk, corrections officers are provided with stab-resistant vests, pepper spray, Narcan, and keys to lock doors. Some officers also have man-down radios, which alert to a central station to request help if the radio is tilted for more than 15 seconds. The union pushed for Congress to require that these radios be distributed to corrections officers, but so far not everyone on duty has one, the union representative says.
Correctional officers for the most part do not get additional training. But what they do get is just the day-to-day experience.
The AFGE union attempted to track how often its members are augmented, but the representative says the number quickly became “astronomical.” Now it focuses on logging the amount of money that the BOP spends on the practice, which was $58.4 million for individual paychecks for augmentation in fiscal year 2024—separately from paychecks for staff in their normal roles. Add to that the BOP’s spending $437.5 million on overtime—both mandated and voluntary—for fiscal year 2024 to address staffing shortages.
Corrections officers who are supposed to only be working 40 hours per week are often being mandated to complete overtime work three times a week, the union representative says. Now, instead of working an eight-hour shift, those officers are regularly required to work a 16-hour shift.
This uptick in work hours just adds to the stress load that corrections officers experience, which is already high, and morale reaches new lows. This residual stress can impact staff members’ lives outside of work, including increasing the likelihood of divorce and depression.
The Vera Institute of Justice analyzed recent research on prison staff, which found that corrections officers experience depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at a significantly higher level than the national average. Correctional officers also die by suicide at a much higher rate than the working age U.S. population and have a shorter life expectancy than the national average—just 59 years compared to 75 years.
Researchers identified three main aspects of working in a prison environment that are related to the emotional weight of the job: a mundane routine interrupted by violence at work, escalating job stress, and poor working conditions with a lack of public trust.
“Although corrections work is often physically and emotionally demanding, stressful, and dangerous, it is all too frequently characterized by low pay (the average hourly rate for a corrections officer is $16.65 per hour), insufficient training, little emotional support, and a dearth of other rewards,” the Vera Institute assessed. “These problems, while substantial, are exacerbated by understaffing in many facilities. Corrections officers in jurisdictions as diverse as Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina, and West Virginia are working ‘six or seven days a week, 10- to 12- and sometimes 16-hour shifts.’”
The union has advocated for the BOP to increase wellness efforts for correctional officers, but the representative tells Security Management that the bureau continues to rely heavily on referring officers to its employee assistance program (EAP). Staff are often hesitant to reach out and use the EAP’s counseling resources, the union representative says, because doing so could initiate a process whereby the bureau finds an individual unfit for duty and fires that person.
The union representative says that low pay for correctional officers is also a contributing factor that makes it difficult to recruit and retain people in the role. The U.S. Congress authorized $5 billion in funding in July 2025 for the BOP to address its staffing and infrastructure issues. Of that total, $3 billion is meant to go toward hiring and training new employees, as well as to fund salaries and benefits for the BOP’s current workforce.
The BOP declined to comment for this article. But a spokesperson did provide a copy of a message that BOP Director William K. Marshall III shared with BOP staff on its intranet about a 2.8 percent increase in pay for correctional officers that would go into effect in February 2026. Lieutenants at all locations received a 10 percent retention incentive, as well as correctional officers at Tier 1 institutions. Correctional officers at Tier 2 institutions received a 5 percent retention incentive.
“These retention incentives are about keeping the experience in our institutions while we throw everything we have to deliver reinforcements and bring relief to an exhausted workforce,” Marshall wrote. “This is about taking care of our people now without losing sight of where we are headed.”
Open positions as of 20 February on USAjobs.gov list correctional officer starting pay at $51,632 per year, with 4,501 open positions at 94 locations. That pay rate falls below the median annual salary for correctional officers and jailers at the U.S. state level, which is $57,970.
The union representative says that without adjusting the pay of federal correctional officers, the BOP will never solve its staffing shortage and will continue to lose staff to other law enforcement agencies that are offering more competitive salaries and signing bonuses.
In a February 20 letter to Marshall, members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary wrote that that the BOP had lost 1,400 staff members as a result of “heavy recruitment for positions that come with generous salaries and signing bonuses from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
The members wrote the letter after receiving whistleblower complaints about short staffing at BOP facilities that is leading to heightened tension among inmates and the use of prison lockdowns due to having only one correctional officer per unit on duty—disrupting the ability to provide emergency response.
“For example, we have learned that one inmate had a heart attack in his unit, but understaffing prevented staff from rendering emergency medical care for an hour,” according to the letter.
To force some movement on the salary issue, the union has worked with members of Congress to introduce legislation that would authorize a 35 percent increase of base pay rates for BOP correctional officers and frontline agency employees.
U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and David McCormick (R-PA) introduced the Federal Correctional Officer Paycheck Protection Act in the U.S. Senate. U.S. Representatives Dan Goldman (D-NY), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), and Maggie Goodlander (D-NH) introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Persistent and often dangerous staffing shortages at federal prisons nationwide cause safety concerns for BOP personnel and incarcerated individuals alike,” Shaheen said in a statement. “Our bill will help to ensure that staff within our federal prisons are paid adequately for the critical work they do across this country.”
As written, the bill would create a special rate of pay for federal correctional officers to address chronic recruitment and retention issues, as well as establish a 35 percent increase to the general schedule pay scale for correctional officers. It also includes a provision requiring OIG to conduct a review that determines if the BOP has demonstrated “measurable progress” in eliminating augmentation and reducing excessive mandatory overtime for correctional officers.
“If progress has been made, the special salary rate remains in place,” according to Shaheen’s statement. “A report on the review will be submitted to Congress.”
Each of the respective bills had been referred to committee, but no further action had been taken as of Security Management’s press time. The union representative says the legislation was two years in the making and its introduction is a way to show AFGE membership that they do have support.
“I’m hopeful, but I’m not naïve,” the union representative adds. “We’re in hard times. We’re in an era where everyone is being fiscally conservative, and a lot of money is going to ICE and border patrol.”
Megan Gates is senior editor at Security Management. Connect with her at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.