The federal prison system has a significant shortage of psychologists, and longtime bureau employees say the effect is catastrophic. According to the Bureau of Prisons, more than one-third of psychologist positions are unfilled, the highest vacancy rate in at least a decade.
This problem got worse when, in early 2025, prison leaders began routinely tapping psychologists to act as prison guards, according to interviews with psychologists and incarcerated people and confirmed by the Bureau of Prisons. Psychologists are, by policy, exempted from this practice, “except in emergency situations” such as escapes or riots. They say being repeatedly pulled away from their jobs puts the agency’s core mission — preparing people to be successful when they leave prison — at risk, and threatens the foundation of their therapeutic relationship with their patients.
When “there's nobody to deal with crises because we're all working correctional posts, that's a problem,” said one psychologist who resigned in September.
The practice, called “augmentation,” conscripts staff in non-security positions, like cooks and teachers, to work as correctional officers in case of staff shortages or emergencies. Almost everyone who works for the federal prison system is trained and certified as a law enforcement officer for this reason.
“Augmentation is the abuse of that system,” said Alix McLearen, a psychologist who retired from the bureau in 2024 after running programs including reentry services. “Now we’re not talking about, ‘Holy shit, we just had a massive fight. Can you help us interview people?’ We're talking about, ‘You have to go stand on the rec yard. You have to go work this housing unit.’”
Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Emery Nelson said in an emailed statement that calling on psychologists to work as guards did not violate bureau policy because the last fiscal year constituted an emergency “due to the budget crisis our agency was placed under by the Biden administration,” and that the agency had recently stopped diverting psychologists to other duties.
For years, the federal prison system has been mired in an understaffing crisis, with so few officers in some prisons that safety and security are compromised, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Forty percent of federal correctional officer positions were not filled in 2023, according to congressional testimony by federal employee union President Brandy Moore White (Trump has since eliminated union protections for federal prison employees). Staffing numbers have hit new lows since then, according to the Office of Personnel Management, amid the Trump administration’s slashing of retention bonuses, eliminating union protections and luring correctional staff to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with big bonuses and other aggressive hiring tactics.
Ayana Satyagrahi, a transgender woman currently serving time at a men’s facility in Texas, said whenever there is a fight or other incident in the prison, all the staff — including psychologists — come running to act as officers. “They will arrive, and they will put you in handcuffs. It’s very difficult for me to tell my personal things when I’m feeling unsafe, for any of us to confide in psychology,” she said. “It makes us feel like we have nobody to talk to.”
In a system where about a quarter of prisoners have mental health problems, psychologists argue that they are an essential part of running prisons safely and effectively. Psychologists can step in to help when incarcerated people are suicidal or at risk of harming themselves. They offer one-on-one and group therapy and programs — like drug treatment and sex offender treatment — that help people address problems that may have led to their incarceration.
“When there’s robust mental health services at an institution, you have an inmate population more stable, less prone to act impulsively, less prone to act out of anger. Then you have staff that are safer,” said Cathy Thompson, who retired in 2023 as a top psychologist at the bureau. “The purpose of a prison — BOP’s mission — is not just to house people, but to help them develop the skills to return successfully to the community.”
A report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General identified two deaths of incarcerated people between 2014 and 2021 where psychologist understaffing and augmentation were at least partly to blame. In the case of one suicide, “the institution where the death occurred had reassigned psychologists and treatment specialists to correctional posts via augmentation on a daily basis for over two months, which significantly hampered the ability of the Psychology Services Department to meet its vital functions,” the report said.
The psychologist who left her job in the fall said she knew when she was hired that she would at times act as a guard. But in a decade at the bureau she had never had to do it routinely until last year. “The biggest issue for me was when I had to pat down people. It felt like an invasion of personal space. In no other setting do I touch my clients in that way. That always felt icky to me.”
Another psychologist, who was working a shift as an officer once per week before she resigned in August, said that meant she only had time to treat patients with the most severe mental illnesses. She said she could not treat the many people incarcerated at her facility who “were never taught appropriate ways to cope with things, and therefore used drugs, used sex, that has resulted in prison time.”
According to internal agency numbers obtained by The Marshall Project, in April 2025, dozens of federal prisons nationwide had fewer than half the psychologists needed. At more than 10 prisons, there was one psychologist, or none. Just one in five federal prisons had a fully staffed psychology department. The numbers have only worsened since then.
“Those are catastrophic numbers,” said Jill Roth, a psychologist who retired in 2021 as the Bureau of Prisons’ national coordinator for the prison rape elimination program. Every prison has a certain number of psychologist positions allocated based on how many people are housed there, what programs are offered and the concentration of people with serious mental illness.
At prisons with no staff psychologists, the bureau rotates psychologists from other facilities for a few weeks at a time to fill in temporarily. But that brings its own problems.
“There’s no continuity of care,” Roth said. Roth worked a number of temporary duty assignments during her career; these now tend to be done via video visits or over the phone, but the problems are the same, she said. “You were trying to maintain group therapy, and every week or two, you have a new [psychologist] in there. Therapy was nonexistent. It was awful.”
The bureau spokesperson said in his statement that the agency “has implemented an aggressive, targeted recruitment campaign and retention incentive to strengthen our ability to attract, hire, and retain qualified psychologists nationwide.”
The psychology program in the federal prison system used to be the envy of other correctional systems, according to psychologists who worked for the agency for decades. “BOP was a place psychologists were excited to work,” Roth said. “It has changed.”
Another psychologist said he left a facility on the West Coast in May after he was the only staff psychologist for more than 700 people. He loved his job, but he feared that the care he could provide under those circumstances did not meet basic professional standards. “At some point it becomes unethical to continue to participate in that,” he said. “Can we provide this group of humans the care they’re entitled to? The answer is no. One person cannot ethically do that.”
He still thinks about a person who died by suicide in one of the solitary confinement cells at his prison. “This man was not on our radar, and he showed no signs of mental health problems before that,” he said. Because the psychologist and his colleagues were spread so thin, they didn’t prioritize therapy for anything less than emergency situations. “With more staff, we may have been able to catch these types of things.”
