Prisons face officer shortage; court order to boost numbers

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Last year John Chandler, 33, made the decision to step away from his job as a correctional officer at Limestone Correctional Facility after eight years with the state prison system.

Too few officers trying to control too many inmates, he said, were creating dangerous conditions for both, and he saw no hope that the situation was going to get better anytime soon.

“Officers are getting stabbed. Inmates are getting extorted,” Chandler said. “There’s no control. It’s not that the officers don’t want to do the job. It’s that there are no officers to do the job,” Chandler said.

Faced with a court order to improve conditions inside state prisons, Alabama is trying to address a shortage of correctional officers.

As of June 2018, the Alabama Department of Corrections said it has 2,070 correctional officers, but said that includes supervisors, part-time correctional officers and trainees.

Alabama Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn said estimates filed with the court show the state needs to add between 1,800 and 2,000 officers — almost doubling current staffing levels.

The court directive to boost officer staffing came out of a lawsuit filed over prison health care.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson last year ruled mental health care was “horrendously inadequate” in state prisons and said that low staffing and overcrowding are the “overarching issues.”

The officer shortage is intertwined with overcrowding and violence. As prison populations ballooned in the 1990s and early 2000s so did incidents of violence inside prison walls.

“I think you can associate the rise in our prison population and the slow decline in our staff inside the prisons initially with our violence rates,” Dunn said.

Corrections Officer Kenneth Bettis died in 2016 after being stabbed by an inmate at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.