Inmates At US Prisons Guarded By Cooks & Nurses With Number Of Correctional Officers Down 6K

CBS Dallas/Fort Worth

May 21, 2021

Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs in Texas and across the United States are vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates.

At a federal penitentiary in Texas, prisoners are locked in their cells on weekends because there are not enough guards to watch them. Elsewhere in the system, fights are breaking out, several inmates have escaped in recent months and, in Illinois, at one of the most understaffed prisons in the country, five inmates have died in homicides or suicides since March 2020.

The Justice Department budgeted for 20,446 full-time correctional officer positions in 2020, but the agency that runs federal prisons said it currently employs 13,762 officers. The Bureau of Prisons insists that many of its facilities still have a full complement of officers who focus solely on maintaining order.

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