How to Investigate the Trend of Declining Prison Staff and Deteriorating Conditions Behind Bars

Start here: Learn about the toolkit

No state-level government sector has seen a greater loss in staffing than prison employees in recent years — even as the number of incarcerated people is creeping back up after major declines. This story toolkit contains data and resources about prison staffing across the country based on this Marshall Project story.

Every state and facility has its own story to tell about prison staffing, the amount of incarcerated people, and how these numbers affect each other. That’s where you come in. A team of journalists at The Marshall Project researched and analyzed a survey of public sector employment going back two decades. Our story addresses not only the effects of the declining number of prison staff on the national level, but ways states could reduce the incarcerated population so that fewer staff members are needed. We need your help localizing this story for your audience.

The topic is not as polarized as other criminal justice issues, but political will and cost to taxpayers are points of conflict. That means local coverage has the potential to spur accountability and drive evidence-based policy decisions. There are many local and state-level angles that will engage robust audiences, like families of the incarcerated and people who care about fiscal responsibility.

Our goal is to jump-start valuable criminal justice reporting by saving you time and resources on some of the more laborious steps in the reporting process and offering ideas for angles and questions to explore. If you have any questions along the way or would like to chat about ways to scale this reporting for your resources and needs, email Michelle Billman at investigatethis@themarshallproject.org or grab 30 minutes on her calendar. And if you do write a story, please review our Terms of Use, cite The Marshall Project, and link back to us in your reporting.

Help! What can you do with limited resources?

This toolkit is meant to be a flexible starter kit so your newsroom can scale your approach to this story depending on resources and your audience’s needs. You can produce many formats on this topic, from a lengthy local investigation on the impacts of staffing and population-level trends in your state prisons to a 1-minute newscast breaking down any local corrections staff labor challenges.

Another option is republishing the original story as a way to start offering this coverage to your audience and producing additional localized stories, if and when resources allow. If you publish our story, you can add a callout for local sources to see who in your community has been impacted by this issue.

Email Michelle Billman at investigatethis@themarshallproject.org if you would like to:

• Brainstorm how to scale this project for your needs and resources
• Ask questions about the data, potential sourcing or anything else that will help move your story forward
• Interview a Marshall Project journalist about this data and trends they’ve identified in their research
• Discuss airing audio related to this story, such as a newscast spot or sound bites

If you produce a local story inspired by this toolkit, please let us know.

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Reporting resources

Pitch this story

Reporting on this topic requires some time and editorial approval. Here is a pitch form you can adapt for your newsroom. We know the pitch process varies among newsrooms, and that, often, a pitch starts with a conversation. So below, we’re also providing context, talking points, potential story angles and important questions to help you prepare for those conversations.

Learn why this story matters

Many state prisons have struggled to hire and retain corrections officers and other workers. The pay isn’t competitive, the hours are long and the conditions are dangerous. At the same time, incarcerated populations are rising in many states, despite long-term declines that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

When a prison is not properly staffed, every aspect of the system is affected, including security and access to rehabilitation services, family visits, various forms of correspondence and medical appointments. These issues can disrupt a guard’s ability to do anything other than work, and often lead to dangerous working conditions.

To make up for the lack of guards, some prisons are starting to rely more regularly on facility lockdowns, which resemble the conditions of solitary confinement. These lockdowns can seriously affect mental health, and can trigger more violence against both staff and incarcerated people.

Even if some may not be interested in prison conditions, the financial aspect of this story is relevant to everyone. When prisons don’t have enough staff members, they require mandatory overtime, a stopgap that is costly to the state and taxpayers.

However, hiring more guards isn’t the only solution. Both guards and people behind bars have voiced their support for releasing more incarcerated people, especially older ones, who pose minimal threats to society and require more resources as they age. It’s unusual that both some corrections officers and incarcerated people agree that the decline in staffing is problematic and that one solution is to shrink population numbers. Instead of the partisan or ideological divisions typical of other issues within the criminal justice system, the challenge here is lack of political will.

Elevator pitch + potential story angles

Here is a potential elevator pitch for discussing with your editor:

Staffing levels at state prisons have been declining for years, while incarcerated populations are rising. This crisis affects every aspect of life behind bars and can lead to many ripple effects, including violence, facility lockdowns and expensive mandatory overtime. In our state/region/community… [your angle].

Here are some potential angles:

• My [state/region/community] was [above/below] the [national/state] trend. We found out why.
• My state’s prison population increased while staffing decreased. Are there safe ways to release people so fewer staff are needed? Or are there ways to hire (and retain) more staff?
• My state’s prison population decreased but staffing increased. Is the staffing necessary? Could facilities be shut down?
• Are staffing declines in my state’s prisons causing overcrowding in county and city jails because people remain stuck in their local facilities for extended periods? And are those local facilities equipped to house the number of people who get stuck there?
• How much is overtime costing my state and me as a taxpayer? Could the state increase staffing or decrease the prison population to save money?

Questions to jump-start your reporting

Most of these reporting questions should be directed at your state agency in charge of administering prisons, the facilities themselves, groups like labor unions and people affected by the system. They could necessitate research, interviews or records requests to understand.

• How many prison staff members and how many incarcerated people are there at every facility in your state? It’s important to get this data for each facility instead of just asking for statewide data, so you can assess the unique conditions of every prison.
• When collecting data on prison staff, be sure to ask: How many staff members are guards and how many are in various support roles, such as front office staff, accountants, public information officers and medical unit employees?
• Does your state have a union for corrections officers or another association that advocates on their behalf? How strong is the union or labor association in your state? How strong are the labor contracts for corrections officers in your state when it comes to protections against mandatory overtime shifts, low wages and dangerous working conditions?
• Are guards in your region required to work double or even triple shifts? If so, how many hours does that entail?
• How much money is your state or region spending on mandatory overtime for corrections officers, and how has that changed over the past several years?
• How often are prisons being put on lockdown, and what are the specific impacts of those lockdowns regarding access to medical visits, hygiene products, medicine, educational courses, reentry programs, outdoor time and other services essential to physical and emotional well-being?
• How many reports of use of force by guards have there been in recent years? How many assaults have there been on staff members? Did these incidents occur during or soon after a lockdown?
• What has the response time been like for medical and security emergencies inside prison walls? Are appropriate staff able to arrive on scene quickly, or have there been delays?
• When were the prisons in your area constructed? Is their design outdated, requiring more boots on the ground to patrol a sprawling campus?
• Locking up people for minor parole violations, such as missing appointments, can cause additional strain on staff. Does your state have strict parole policies that are increasing prison counts?
• Is the decline in staffing in your state prisons causing overcrowding in county and city jails because people don’t have anywhere else to go? And are those local facilities equipped to house the number of people who get stuck there?

State-specific story ideas

• From 2019 to 2022, the number of people who worked in state correctional systems declined by 10%, but some states saw much bigger drops, including Georgia (29%) and Arkansas (20%). In the 2023 fiscal year, Georgia’s prisons recorded 40 homicides and 38 suicides. It would be worth comparing those rates of violence in Georgia’s prisons with those of previous years when staffing levels were higher, since physical altercations and depression can be indicators of poor prison conditions due to staffing problems. For both states, how does this affect prison conditions and day-to-day operations?
• Louisiana adopted legislation in 2024 that eliminates parole for most people moving forward. How might this change affect Louisiana’s prison population at a time when the state has seen a decrease in prison staff of more than 14% from 2019 to 2022?
• North Carolina saw a 10% increase of correctional employees while the national trend is downward, and its prison population isn’t increasing as quickly as others. What is the state doing to recruit and retain prison staff?
• California has seen a significant, sustained drop in its prison population since 2020. Unlike a lot of other states, California has maintained its lowered population. What changes — such as abolishing private facilities and funneling people from prison to reentry programs — have contributed to this downward trend?
• Mississippi is having trouble hiring corrections officers, whose numbers have been on a steady decline for more than a decade. The state has perhaps the highest ratio of incarcerated people to prison staff. What are lawmakers doing to address this problem, which has contributed to assaults against officers?
• South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona have changed their age requirement for guards, lowering it to 18. Has this helped with recruitment? Does this change pose safety risks?
• Missouri has invested more than $175 million since 2017 for prison staff pay increases. Is that investment paying off in terms of recruitment and retention?
• In recent years, West Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire have had to call in the National Guard to support their prison operations. What’s being done in those states to prevent that from happening again?

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Work with the data: Methodology + downloads

Each year, the Census Bureau compiles government payroll data through the Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll.

This survey contains information on how many people work in different state and local government sectors, from air transportation to the corrections system to policing. The Marshall Project compiled the state-level government employment data from 2000 to 2022 by sector, and joined it with yearly prison populations from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Download the data here, along with links to detailed documentation from the Census Bureau and caveats we discovered while reporting.

This data is useful for understanding yearly changes in state-level government staffing across job sector, defined by the Census in its survey of public employment and payroll. For example, this data can be used to track and report on employment by state university systems as well as state prison systems. Trends in other sectors can also be compared against correctional staffing.

In addition to government employee data, we also merged in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ state-level prison population data by year. We considered using the state-level prison population data with the staffing data to calculate the ratio of prisoners to prison staff and how it has changed over the years, but decided not to go with that approach for our national analysis. However, the population figures are still included for reference.

Experts told us about the problems with comparing ratios across states. Depending on how a prison is designed, it can require more or fewer staff, and using ratios to generalize these experiences can be unfair. Similarly, the total number of corrections officers on staff does not mean they are all at the correctional facilities at the same time — which facilities they are deployed to, sick leaves, time off and no-shows all play a role that’s not captured by the employment data.

If you can investigate and understand these factors in your state, the ratio of prisoners to prison staff and/or correctional officers could be a powerful way of understanding the trends within the state.

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Embed our graphics: Charts by state

Here is code that can be copied and pasted into most web content management systems to display the trends in corrections staffing and prison population in your state from 2000 to 2022.

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Plug + play assets

Use this original illustration

You are welcome to republish the provided illustration within any stories derived from the materials in this toolkit, along with any related social media and newsletter promotion of those stories. Dion MBD must be credited in all uses. The illustration should not be published in unrelated stories. The illustrations should not be cropped or altered in any way. Please reach out with any questions.

Dion MBD For The Marshall Project

Interview a Marshall Project reporter for a story

Please email us at investigatethis@themarshallproject.org if you would like to schedule an interview with a Marshall Project reporter who can break down the data for your state compared with the national landscape.

Contact us about radio spots

We’re creating voiced newscast spots with sound bites that radio stations can adapt with data relevant to your audience! If you want to explore this option, email us at investigatethis@themarshallproject.org.

Republish The Marshall Project's original story

You are welcome to republish our original story on prison staffing trends as a way to start offering this coverage, and then produce additional localized stories if and when resources allow. If you publish our story, you can add a callout for local sources to see who in your community has been impacted by this issue.

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Sourcing considerations

Stories about staffing declines in prison benefit from a mix of sources. Incarcerated people and their families can help distill the harm of declining staff and overpopulation in prisons. Institutional sources such as prison union representatives and prison officials can shed light on the policy failures that led to a decline in staffing, while also exposing the consequences for people employed in the facilities.

How to work with the data set

• Put the data in context. Staffing numbers only tell part of the story, and sometimes the Census data we rely on to analyze staffing trends is slightly different from the department’s own numbers. This is often because the Census data includes everyone working in state prisons, including administrative staff. To understand how the numbers translate to what is happening on the ground, we recommend reaching out to the corrections department in your state. Show them the stats and ask them to confirm and explain the numbers using their own records.
• Ask the Census staff. To help you parse the data in your state, consider reaching out to the Census Bureau’s press office. They are a good resource if you have questions about specific numbers included in the bureau’s Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP). Census Bureau public information officers can be reached at pio@census.gov
• Consider consent decrees. If your state correction department is under any federal oversight because of a consent decree stemming from staffing issues or mismanagement of the prisons, you can review the annual reports from a court monitor that can provide key information and additional data.

Reaching institutional sources

Staff who are currently employed in a prison are often barred from giving interviews without approval from the administration. These interviews may be necessary and even fruitful. But to get a more nuanced picture, you’ll want to reach officers who can speak openly. We recommend several approaches.

• Contact your local officers’ union. Many states have an official union that represents corrections officers. To learn more about the union in your state, you can read industry reporting by Corrections 1 or visit our corrections officer union tag page in The Record.
• Request the staff list. Another way to find prison employees is to officially request the staff list and cold call people. However, waiting on a records request can be time-consuming and there’s no guarantee people will talk. If speaking with former staff would be beneficial, you may be able to request a list of staff who recently vacated their positions.
• Use LinkedIn. If you are looking into a specific prison, look for officers on LinkedIn using the prison name. We have found that these sources are often higher-ranking than the staff who work directly with incarcerated people. Still, these interviews can be illuminating. If you find past employees, that can be useful, too, as they may have more latitude to give an official interview.

Reaching incarcerated people

Editor’s Note: There are some important things to consider when interviewing incarcerated people. For starters, people in prison can sometimes face consequences for speaking to the press. Before you reach out, read the entries on informed consent, people-first language and building trust on our resources page.

• Family first. Family members of the incarcerated can be great sources of information about prison conditions. They can also help you connect directly with their loved ones behind bars. We recommend searching for family member Facebook groups in your state, using names of specific prisons. Many of these groups are private, but you can friend and message the moderators and let them know what you’re looking for.
• Consult the lawsuits. Sometimes lawsuits about harm as a result of declining staffing make their way to court. You can find federal lawsuits in your state by using PACER and CourtListener to look for people who have sued over this issue. You can also reach out to local civil rights lawyers or advocacy groups and see if they’ll connect you to their clients in prison.
• Connect with people coming home. People coming home from prison are often able to speak more freely than people behind bars. Consider reaching out to reentry facilities near you to see if staff would connect you to someone who was recently released. Some states publish lists of parolees, which can provide a good starting point for identifying people.

Connect with relevant organizations

As you think through your reporting plan, here is a list of organizations to consider calling first. These organizations can help add national context to your story and may be able to help you connect to expert sources as well as sources who are or have been incarcerated.

If you want to connect with lawyers working on improving prison conditions, or learn more about ongoing human rights lawsuits behind bars, contact the ACLU National Prison Project.

Consider reaching out to the National Institute of Corrections to speak with prison staff and administrative officials to learn more about prison policy and training.

For data and research on prisons in your state, you can contact the Vera Institute of Justice.

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Style and standards guidance

Here are a few of the thorny issues that could arise during the reporting process, and guidance on how to resolve them. For a more general overview of our styles and standards, please review our resources page.

• Complex Solutions. Understaffing in prisons is a systemic issue that does not have an easy solution. Your reporting with official sources, advocates in your state, and people behind bars will reveal the angle for your story. These pieces are at their best when exploring the nuance.
• People First Language. If you include interviews with people in prison or staff working behind bars, please review our resources page where you can find language and style guidance.
• Staff Ratios. The Marshall Project reviewed staffing data that included parole, probation, and administrative staff. However, if your state provides data solely on the number of prison guards, using ratios would provide an even clearer picture of the issue. Staffing ratios often reflect needs based on specific prison layouts. And the number of guards on staff doesn’t indicate how many are working each shift.

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For your editor: Audience + impact

Who is your potential audience?

Here are key groups who are affected by the issues with prison guard declines and overpopulation or have the influence to change them:

• Incarcerated people who are directly affected by prison overcrowding and declining staffing and its ripple effects, including the loss of family visits and educational and therapeutic programming, along with the trauma of living through a lockdown.
• Families of incarcerated people who can tell you about their inability to write and call their loved ones due to staffing issues.
• Corrections officers required to work mandatory overtime who may be losing sleep or time with their families, along with working in increasingly dangerous conditions due to having fewer employees available to keep their facility secure.
• Unions or associations representing corrections officers, union members, and former guards who are voicing their concerns about declining staff and overpopulation, including the suggestion that prisons release elderly and sick people who are resource-intensive. On some issues, prison employees and incarcerated people are in opposition to each other, but in this case, there’s a lot of common ground to explore because people in both positions want this issue to be addressed.
• Community leaders who are concerned about working conditions and labor rights for all industries, including corrections.
• Lawmakers and taxpayers who want to see fewer dollars spent on overtime for corrections employees.
• Researchers, academics, policymakers, faith leaders, public health professionals and others who are concerned about prison lockdowns becoming more routine.
• Mental health professionals and other care providers who serve incarcerated people and their families.

What impact could your work have?

The issue of prison staffing is fertile ground for coverage with broad appeal because both corrections staff and incarcerated people agree that something needs to be done. At the same time, many lawmakers have an interest in improving labor conditions and decreasing bloated overtime budgets. It’s possible that your local coverage of this issue could lead a state legislature to more closely consider its prison release policies, even if prison conditions haven’t been prioritized historically.

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Share your work

Please (please!) share your localized reporting with The Marshall Project

Thank you for using this toolkit to create your own local criminal justice reporting! Please help us track your work and potentially share it in our newsletter by emailing us a link to your reporting.