It has always been hard to recruit and retain prison staff in the United States. But the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that in 2022, the number of people working for state prisons hit its lowest mark in over two decades. Only four states were lower staffed than Wyoming, which oversees five state facilities.

The Marshall Project, a newsroom that investigates the criminal justice system, dug into these numbers to get a better understanding of how low staffing impacts safety and mental health for workers and inmates alike. Shannon Heffernan is a staff writer who worked on this project. She explained how they started digging into the numbers.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. 

Shannon Heffernan: A few months ago, we did this project looking at the number of staff at correctional facilities at prisons. We looked into that because it's something that we pretty much almost universally hear about prison facilities, that there's just not enough staff.

One of the interesting things about this topic is that it's a complaint that you hear both from staffers and from incarcerated people. Staffers don't want to work extra overtime. They don't want to be overstretched. They want to have enough people to make their jobs easy. But incarcerated people are also dependent on correctional officers for all kinds of things, like getting out of their cell to have yard time.

I will also say this varied state to state in the data that we looked at, but this data also includes non-security staff in some states, so it could be possibly healthcare staff or counselors or administrators who are providing all kinds of services that a person might need if they're incarcerated.

Kamila Kudelska: How is the prison system affected by staff losses?

SH: On the side of incarcerated people, almost everything that happens inside a prison requires staff. People are inside cells in these locked facilities, so anything that's coming in and out, or that you do, needs staffers. If there are not enough people on staff, you're not making your healthcare appointments. Your family can't visit you because there are not enough people to take people to the visiting rooms. You may not be leaving your cell to go outside or get a shower or get your food or medication on time. We're talking about really basic services that affect a person's quality of life.

For the staffers inside, people work really long hours when there are not enough staff. They get overtime, and this is not voluntary overtime in many cases. This is mandated over time. So you may do an eight or a 12-hour shift and turn around and have to do it back to back. People are losing sleep. That's gonna make them grumpy. That's gonna make them potentially more aggressive, which is not what you want in a corrections environment. And people miss their families, right? This is gonna have an effect that goes out into the community for both staffers and incarcerated people.

KK: How is the trend playing out in Wyoming?

SH: Wyoming is interesting because it had about a 20% decline from 2019 to 2024. That puts it in the top five [among states] in terms of declines we see in staffing in prisons. It did, towards the end of that, start to see an uptick.

There was a 3% increase from 2023 to 2024, and there have been some news articles covering that Wyoming's been recovering staff.

Wyoming was shipping some of its prisoners out of state because their staffing was so low and so troubled, and they've been able to bring some of those people back.

KK: How do incarceration numbers play into all of this? My understanding is that there's a national trend of those numbers increasing in the past couple of years, as prison staffing is decreasing.

SH: I think this is super important that whenever you talk about staffing, you're also talking about the number of people who are incarcerated. I think there are two reasons you think about that.

The first is that the more people you have, the more care they need. We're starting to see numbers increase, so if that's happening at the same time that you're losing staff, it's gonna make the situation worse. This is something I really want to emphasize. It's important we talk about that, because when people hear about there not being enough staff, the immediate solution people think of is, ‘We need to hire more prison staff. We need to hire more correctional officers.’

That is one lever, but there's another lever, which is you can let more people out. There is a lot of data showing that people in prison are growing older. We know from data that people age out of committing serious crimes in a lot of cases, so there are opportunities to release people in a way that data shows us doesn't cause an increase in crime.

So you can talk about both those levers as a solution to the problem, and I think it's important to look at that whole picture.

KK: When we mentioned Wyoming numbers, there was that small uptick, and you talked about how Wyoming was sending prisoners outside of the state. Are you aware of why that's kind of going in a better direction?

SH: In terms of the staffers, what I can say is there was a pay increase, which is one way that states work to recruit officers. You did see that. I will say in talking to officers, pay is super important and something people talk about, but the number one thing I heard from folks is this mandated overtime and the high stress being an issue. That creates a troubling problem because the more people that leave, the more mandated overtime that you get, the more people leave and it creates a sort of spiral. So while pay is something that states can do, I think by itself, there's reason to be skeptical that that can do the job.

You also need to look at two pieces if you're talking about increasing staffing. You need to look at hiring – how do we get more people in the door? But also, how do we retain them once they're here? What's happening that makes people not want to stay in the job?

KK: Are you aware of this trend of prison staffing decreasing, if it's impacting rural states differently?

SH: I'm not aware of anything that shows that rural states particularly have this issue, although I will say in terms of the top states, you have Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, New Jersey and Wyoming. That's a mix of rural and urban.

But one thing is, even in states that have more urban areas, like where I live in Illinois, you have Chicago, right? But most of the prisons aren't near Chicago. They're six, seven hours away in some cases, in deeply rural areas, and that is a struggle for hiring staff because there's not enough population.

It's especially hard when you're talking about hiring staff on the medical side, because medical resources are already thin in terms of people who are there. Then you're trying to recruit them into this particularly difficult environment to practice medicine in. So I definitely do think the urban and rural divide affects things.