After years of struggling to find enough workers to staff some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing new challenges. The idea is that prison workers are jumping on board for higher-paying jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This is one unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. ICE has been recruiting for months, offering a $50,000 starting salary and tuition reimbursement to the agency, which has offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many prison officials, it was an easy sell.
Officials at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted the number of colleagues who had left or were in the process of leaving for ICE. One lockup in Texas had six people and another had eight. A facility in California has a dozen people, and a larger facility has more than 40 people. The agency lost at least 1,400 more employees through early November of this year through retirements and other attrition, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.
“We are bankrupt and being taken over by ICE,” a prison workers union official told ProPublica. “I can’t believe it. People are leaving in droves.”
The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene products, and threatens to worsen already dire conditions in federal prisons. Fewer correctional officers would mean more lockdowns, fewer inmate programs, fewer medical services, increased risks to staff, and more grueling overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are regularly forced to work as correctional officers.
And in some facilities, officials said authorities had even stopped providing basic hygiene products such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper to staff.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in 25 years,” one Texas police officer told ProPublica. “You literally have to carry your own toilet paper around. There’s no paper towels, you have to bring your own. There’s no soap either. We also ordered little sheets to put in envelopes, but we didn’t have any soap, so that turned into soap.”
The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Secretary Josh Smith said the agency had been “left in disrepair by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. He said staffing levels were “catastrophic” and prisons were becoming less secure, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption.
Smith and Secretary William Marshall III said they were empowered by the Trump administration to “meet these challenges head-on.” “Transparency and accountability are cornerstones of our mission to Make the BOP Great Again, and we will expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”
Meanwhile, ICE forwarded a press release in response to a request for comment, but did not answer specific questions, but noted that the agency had issued a total of more than 18,000 job offers as of mid-September.
The BOP has long faced challenges, from sexual abuse scandals and contraband issues to crumbling infrastructure and inadequate health care. It has been repeatedly rated the worst workplace in the commonwealth in an analysis of annual employee surveys, and about 40% of correctional officer positions will remain vacant in 2023, union officials said.
The staffing shortage put the prison system on the government’s list of critically vulnerable, high-risk institutions and drew the attention of watchdogs, who blamed chronic understaffing for contributing to the deaths of at least 30 inmates.
The department sought to address the issue with a long-term recruitment drive that included signing bonuses, retention benefits, and an expedited hiring process. By early this year, the efforts appeared to be paying off.
Kathleen Toomey, the department’s deputy director at the time, told lawmakers in February that the department was at its best hiring rate in a decade, adding more than 1,200 positions in 2024.
“Improved staffing levels will make our facilities safer,” he told the House Appropriations subcommittee.
But the costly effort to hire more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched to its limits. Toomey told Congress that the department has not seen an increase in funding since 2023, despite absorbing millions of dollars in pay increases and retention incentives. Inflation and rising labor costs have forced the department to cut its operating budget by 20%, Toomey said.
Although there were some improvements, staffing problems persisted. Mr. Toomey acknowledged in February testimony that there are still at least 4,000 vacancies and that the agency is so short-staffed that prison teachers, nurses, electricians and others are regularly asked to abandon their regular duties to fill the ranks of correctional officers.
ICE then began recruiting.
“It didn’t seem like a big deal at first, but in the past week or so we’ve already lost five people and have another 10 to 15 left in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us, that represents almost 20% of our custodial staff.”
Like most prison staff and union leaders who spoke to ProPublica, he requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, but his concerns have been heightened since the department terminated its union contract in September under an executive order. Now, union leaders say they have been warned that speaking to the media could be punished without union protection.
After the contract was terminated, many of the current staff members who had originally spoken on the record asked that their names be withheld. Those who nevertheless agreed to identify themselves asked ProPublica to specify that their interviews took place before the agency broke union agreements.
Earlier this year, Brandi Moore White, national president of the Prison Workers Union, said it is not unheard of for prison workers to leave prisons in droves, often in response to changes that significantly impact working conditions. Previous government shutdowns, leadership changes and pandemics have all displaced workers, but typically those who leave government en masse tend to be near the end of their careers, she said. That’s not the case now.
“This is the biggest exodus of young staff, staff who are not eligible for retirement, as far as I can remember,” she said. “And that’s very concerning to me.”
ICE’s expansion even took a toll on the BOP’s regular training program for new recruits. Normally, new police officers are required to take a three-week introductory correctional technology course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia within 60 days of starting their job, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. FLETC announced in August that it would focus only on “surge-related training” and suspend programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to internal emails obtained by ProPublica. FLETC subsequently said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner institutions,” but it is not clear whether these solutions have since been implemented. The center did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
At the same time, the effects of tight budgets began to appear. In recent months, more than 40 staff and inmates at facilities across the country have reported cuts that are even worse than normal prison shortages.
In September, Moore-White told ProPublica that some prisons are behind on utility and garbage bills. She said a prison facility in Oakdale, Louisiana, was running out of food for inmates for days before the union, concerned that hungry inmates would be more susceptible to rioting, intervened and lobbied senior officials to address the issue. Two other prison officials also confirmed that account. (Officials at the prison facility declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and inmates were reporting shortages. The California facility had no eggs, and the Texas camp had no beef. Officials said they are handing out small portions at meals.
Earlier this year, defense attorneys complained that the Los Angeles Detention Center was running out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement. In solitary confinement, people without telephone or electronic messaging privileges rely on mail to communicate with the outside world. One of his clients “was rationing ink to write letters to his family,” the lawyer said. The center did not respond to requests for comment.
Personal hygiene products are also in short supply. Multiple inmates said the facility was stingier with toilet paper than usual, and women incarcerated in Carswell, Texas, reported running out of tampons. “They told me to put on socks,” one said. The facility did not respond to questions from ProPublica about conditions at the facility.
In some cases, the reduction in staff means that inmates are unable to receive care. Employees at a prison facility in Victorville, California, filed a written complaint alleging that the warden is skimping on the number of staff allocated to hospital visits for inmates in order to cut down on overtime. (The facility did not respond to requests for comment.) In some cases, so few officers remained at the hospital that they missed procedures that would have brought sick inmates to the hospital first.
Sian Bratcher, an inmate at Carswell Medical Center in Texas, said she missed her rectal surgery appointment, which she had been waiting for for two years. The reason was that there weren’t enough staff to take her there. Despite another cancellation, she was able to undergo surgery almost two months later.
To save money, some facilities have begun holding periodic “blackout” days in which employees are prohibited from working overtime, officials said. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “reinforcement,” instructing teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in the ranks of correctional officers.
“That’s why I quit,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from a federal prison in Beijing, Illinois, where he worked for 29 years. “My job was to resolve EEO complaints, so when someone alleged discrimination against an agency, it was my job to investigate and try to resolve it.”
When he learned earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts a week as a correctional officer, he decided to retire instead.
“I’ve been an apartment complex employee since about 2001, so it’s been about 24 years,” he said. “I had no idea how to do it anymore.”
Augmentation is not new, but staff and inmates at some facilities say they are using it more frequently. It also means fewer medical staff are available to attend to inmates’ needs. Brian Casper, an inmate at a federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year that “all of his PT appointments would have been canceled because he had a physical therapist on duty today.” “Yesterday, one of the other units had a head of radiology instead of a unit officer, so there was one less person to perform X-rays and CT scans.” The prison did not respond to emailed questions.
The situation worsened further when the government shutdown occurred in October, further exacerbating the talent shortage and increasing the appeal of leaving government. ICE agents and correctional officers took their paychecks home, but thousands of prison teachers, plumbers, and nurses didn’t.
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy mega-bill that President Trump signed into law on July 4, could provide some financial relief to the Bureau of Prisons’ staffing woes by injecting an additional $5 billion over four years into the Bureau of Prisons, with $3 billion earmarked specifically for improving retention, hiring and training. But it remains to be seen exactly what the effect of that cash injection will be. Although the funding bill was passed more than four months ago, in November the department declined to answer questions about when it would receive the money or how it would be used.
