{"id":255824,"date":"2021-05-21T20:34:49","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T17:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/cooks-nurses-guard-inmates-with-us-prisons-down-6k-officers\/"},"modified":"2021-05-21T20:34:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T17:34:49","slug":"cooks-nurses-guard-inmates-with-us-prisons-down-6k-officers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/cooks-nurses-guard-inmates-with-us-prisons-down-6k-officers\/","title":{"rendered":"#Cooks, nurses guard inmates with US prisons down 6K officers"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Cooks, nurses guard inmates with US prisons down 6K officers<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs in the United States are vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0several inmates have escaped in recent months<\/a>\u00a0and, in Illinois, at one of the most understaffed prisons in the country, five inmates have died in homicides or suicides since March 2020.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department\u00a0budgeted for 20,446 full-time correctional officer<\/a>\u00a0positions 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.<\/p>\n

Decisions to use other staff as guards are based on a facility\u2019s needs and are made to ensure critical positions are covered, the agency said. Staff members also may be pressed into duty as correctional officers \u201cduring irregular periods such as a pandemic,\u201d the agency told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

For years, the Bureau of Prisons has been plagued by systematic failures, from chronic violence to high-profile deaths. But the staffing crisis is reaching a breaking point, and\u00a0the pandemic hasn\u2019t helped<\/a>. Nearly 7,000 employees were sickened with COVID-19. Officers were sent to hospitals to guard inmates being treated for the virus. Four staff members and 235 inmates died.<\/p>\n

Overworked employees are burning out quickly and violent encounters are being reported on a near-daily basis. At a prison in Illinois, there are so few staff that officers are sometimes forced to work 60 hours of overtime in a week. At a facility in California, a fight broke out among inmates soon after a teacher was sent to fill in as an officer.<\/p>\n

The expanded use of that practice, known as augmentation, is raising questions about whether the agency can carry out its required duties to ensure the safety of prisoners and staff members while also putting in place programs and classes such as those under the First Step Act,\u00a0a criminal justice overhaul<\/a>\u00a0that received wide bipartisan support in Congress.<\/p>\n

\"Mayor
Mayor Rolando Castro, far right, holds a protest sign with a photo of Douglas K. White, warden at the Federal Correctional Institution at Mendota, as fellow protester Paul Millan, dressed as a clown, looks on during a demonstration against staffing shortages, near the prison entrance in Mendota, Calif., Monday, May 17, 2021.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t do programming, you can\u2019t have safety, you can\u2019t have a lot of things that make prisons operate without proper staffing,\u201d said Kevin Ring, the president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.<\/p>\n

The bureau insists everyone working at its facilities is a trained, sworn correctional worker, regardless of position or job title. All 35,000 employees are told when they are hired that they should expect to perform law enforcement functions, the agency said, even if they are signing on as counselors or teachers.<\/p>\n

But pulling employees away from other duties up to twice a week means they have less time to do their regular jobs such as teaching classes, reviewing release paperwork and providing vital inmate services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they augment you, you\u2019re not doing your job that you\u2019re hired for,\u201d said Jonathan Zumkehr, the union president at the federal penitentiary in Thomson. \u201cIf you\u2019re a counselor, you\u2019re not able to counsel the inmates. If you\u2019re a case manager, you\u2019re not able to do the First Step Act. Those are two days that you\u2019re not going to get back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issue came up when wealth financier\u00a0Jeffrey Epstein took his own life<\/a>\u00a0while in one of the most secure jails in the country, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. One of the two prison workers assigned to guard Epstein the night he killed himself was a warehouse worker who was augmented to work as a correctional officer. Both were working overtime because of staffing shortages.<\/p>\n

Union officials have raised the alarm about staffing problems, even holding a rally this week outside a medium-security prison in Mendota, California. But federal efforts to attract more workers with 25% recruitment bonuses have, so far, barely made a dent. Starting salary is just under $43,500, with some promises of making up to $62,615. But that\u2019s much less than what even some other federal agencies are offering, not to mention competition from police departments, state prisons, oil refineries, factories and warehouses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re tired of the agency putting a price tag on our lives,\u201d said Aaron McGlothin, the union president at FCI Mendota in California. \u201cWe\u2019ve had staff members killed in the line of duty. We\u2019ve had staff members injured in the line of duty. At what point do they realize they\u2019ve got a problem to fix, and quit putting a Band-Aid over it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"From
From left to right, George McCubbin, Nancy Rangel, Paul Millan, dressed as a clown, Mayor Rolando Castro, union president Aaron McGlothin and correctional Officer Steve Gardea protest staffing shortages near the entrance to the Federal Correctional Institution at Mendota, in Mendota, Calif.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The bureau says it hired nearly 4,000 new staff members in 2020 \u2014 more than in prior years \u2014 and that more than 500 additional hires are on the way. The agency said it is offering retention incentives for hard-to-fill positions and to keep around employees who are eligible to retire, and holding recruiting events regularly.<\/p>\n

The situation could become even more dire as federal prisons brace for an influx of inmates. Right now there are 152,376 prisoners in 122 facilities.<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Prisons is\u00a0ending contracts with private lockups<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the Mendota prison was set to receive 400 inmates from a for-profit facility in Texas \u2014 and is likely to seek the return of nearly 5,000 people who were released\u00a0on home confinement during the pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the high-security penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois, where\u00a0several inmates have been killed or killed themselves in recent months<\/a>, about 20 nonofficer workers are augmented each day and officers are forced to work overtime in 16-hour days that sometimes add up to 60 hours or more of overtime per week.<\/p>\n

Last week, the agency suddenly recalled correctional officers who had been temporarily reassigned to help out at some of the system\u2019s most understaffed facilities. Bureau officials said those employees were sent to \u201clocations experiencing staff shortages, for training purposes, and to provide additional security as needed\u201d and the jobs were never meant to be permanent.<\/p>\n

People familiar with the matter said the decision to recall the staffers was driven by cost-cutting and came after a blistering internal financial review. The people were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Prisons would not say how much money was spent on augmentation in the past few years. Records reviewed by the AP show skyrocketing costs from both augmentation and overtime. At the federal prison in Beaumont Texas, officials spent $8.1 million on overtime last year. The overall agency annual budget is close to $7.8 billion.<\/p>\n

\"Noni
Noni Ahulau, from Honolulu, holding a sign of Warden Douglas K. White, protests staffing shortages at the Federal Correctional Institution at Mendota, Monday, May 17, 2021, near the facility, in Mendota, Calif.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The bureau said it must rely on overtime and reassigning other staff members \u201cwhen an insufficient number of correctional officers are available to cover an institution\u2019s critical custody posts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a new practice,\u201d the agency said in a statement. \u201cIt is important to note that staff assigned to our institutions are professional law enforcement officers first, regardless of their occupation. All staff are trained accordingly and are expected to perform law enforcement functions during routine and nonroutine situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

But correctional officers say there\u2019s a difference between patrolling the same cell blocks each day \u2014 keeping skills and senses up \u2014 and moonlighting there periodically.<\/p>\n

The staffing situation in Beaumont is so severe that prison officials have turned to just locking inmates in their cells on weekends because officials do not have enough officers to guard the prisoners. Visiting at the prison has been suspended until further notice.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more News<\/a> articles, you can visit our News category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Cooks, nurses guard inmates with US prisons down 6K officers” Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs in 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/05\/prisons-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[106675,1545,71049,73110,5070,70514,25542],"class_list":["post-255824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-5-21-21","tag-coronavirus","tag-corrections-officers","tag-inmates","tag-jobs","tag-justice-department","tag-prisons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}