Staff Shortages in Colorado Prisons Leave Basic Needs Unmet

This story by Lindsey Toomer appeared on Colorado Newsline on January 22, 2024.

A recent report highlights the continued problems that Colorado prison staff shortages create for the state’s incarcerated population.

The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, a Denver-based nonprofit, interviewed 400 people who are incarcerated in Colorado to determine how ongoing staff shortages affect them. The survey found that 93% of respondents said their facility is understaffed, with 85% calling the shortage significant or moderate.

“This shortage is creating an untenable and moral crisis,” Jason Vitello, CCJRC’s manager of equity and community development, said in a statement. “The mission of the (Department of Corrections) is to cultivate ‘transformative opportunities for those under our supervision.’ Sadly, this data reveals a system that is unable to adequately meet the basic medical, mental health, and safety needs of the inmate population — let alone provide educational, rehabilitative or other transformative opportunities to help people successfully reenter society.”

A common practice of the Colorado Department of Corrections is to reassign program staff to work security shifts when there is an insufficient number of correctional officers to meet minimum staffing requirements. Of those who took the survey, 88% said staff like teachers and case managers are frequently or very frequently reassigned to a correctional officer post in their prisons. This leads to less services being accessible to incarcerated people, and the quality of those services are lessened because of staff burnout.

The majority of respondents attributed their difficulties in accessing programming to the ongoing staff shortages. Case managers in particular, who play a “vital role in an inmate’s life and success,” provide subpar service in part due to staffing shortages, respondents said.

“I have been incarcerated for 25 years and have never seen prison this bad,” one person said in the survey. “We are basically being warehoused. There are very few programs or educational classes… no one wants to work here.”

The report includes recommendations for the Colorado Legislature that CCJRC leadership presented to the Joint Judiciary Committee earlier this month. Recommendations include safely reducing the prison population; creating an oversight commission for the DOC; expanding training opportunities for the incarcerated population to increase peer-led programming; partnering with organizations that can help with rehabilitative and reentry programs; and requesting an internal staffing analysis from the DOC as well as an economic study.

“Despite increasing the DOC budget by more than $192 million in just the past two years to close the staff vacancy gap, the increase in the prison population is outpacing the increase in net new hires in DOC,” the report concludes. “Little tangible progress has been made. Efforts to reduce the prison population must also be part of the strategies utilized to bring the number of staff, prison beds, inmates, and services/programs into alignment.”

CDOC spokesperson Alondra Gonzalez said in a statement to Newsline that the department will review the report and continue to address staff shortages. While at this time last year the department’s vacancy rate was about 24%, it dropped to just over 16% after implementation of new financial incentives to improve recruitment and retention.

Department data shows Colorado has just over 13,000 people incarcerated in its state prisons. The DOC lowered the minimum age to be a corrections officer to 18 and started recruiting staff out of Puerto Rico in an attempt to remedy the staff shortages.

“The CDOC recognizes the impact staffing shortages may have on our operations and understands the importance of addressing these issues,” Gonzalez said. “We continue to actively work on assessing our staffing needs, implementing thoughtful solutions, and exploring innovative ways to attract and retain qualified professionals.”

The report includes a letter from One Voice United, an advocacy group that works with unions to support correctional officers and non-custody staff in prisons.

“​​No one knows better the failure of the current system than the men and women who witness those failures firsthand every day,” One Voice United founder Andy Potter wrote in the letter. “We believe that it is those same professionals and the unions that represent them that have the greatest potential to be the drivers of reform. We also believe that absent their voices, meaningful, sustainable, reform will remain illusionary.”

Potter said better pay, benefits, training and increased hiring standards are temporary solutions that don’t address the core issues in corrections. He also said reducing the prison population should be considered during efforts to address the state of corrections.

Hilary Glasgow, the executive director of Colorado Workers for Innovative and New Solutions — better known as Colorado WINS, the union that represents more than 24,000 state employees, including those within corrections — said that if someone sent the same survey questions asked in the CCJRC report to corrections staff, she’d expect the same results.

“One of the things we’re trying to wrap our heads around at WINS is how do we ensure that we have enough security safety staff, but that we also hold programming sacred,” Glasgow said. “Sure, we can depopulate, we can reduce the number of inmates. But we’re sending people out into the streets that haven’t had programming in four years, because we’ve had to suspend classes and counseling so that those workers can go serve on security.”

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