DENVER — Prison secretaries, case managers, maintenance workers and counselors are picking up shifts to guard terrorists, cartel bosses and spies at the nation's most secure prison because of short staffing, the leader of the local correctional officers' union said.
Behind the fence of FCC Florence's supermax prison are the country's most notorious criminals: household names like Eric Rudolph, Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and El Chapo. Colorado's Democratic senators want the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to increase pay in an effort to recruit and retain more workers to guard them.
"Even though we're all trained that way, that's not my primary duty," said John Holbrooks, a correctional counselor at the super maximum security prison. "I don't get to learn the inmates as well as [regular correctional officers] do, so a lot of things are missed and overlooked."
Holbrooks said he works a shift as correctional officer "about once a week," which he said is less than his counterparts at other, lesser-security units within the Florence complex.
In a statement, a BOP spokesperson said staffing at the prison in Florence is one of the agency's top priorities. The statement emphasized that all staff members are trained as professional law enforcement officers and the practice of asking workers to fill in is not new.
"Despite continued recruitment efforts, 2022 hiring across the agency has been a challenge, as the BOP is faced with the same worker shortage experienced by employers throughout the country," the spokesperson said.
Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet said inmates have assaulted staff six times and killed other inmates twice in the past year.
"This understaffing has placed employees and the inmate population in an unsustainable environment and created a reliance on mandatory overtime and the reassignment of non-custody staff," the senators wrote in a letter to the head of BOP.
"Every one of our institutions has a very, very high potential of violence. You never know what you're walking into," Holbrooks said.
BOP provided an increased 25% retention bonus to correctional officers in July. In March, non-custody officers received a 10% bonus. The union, AFGE Local 1169, wants to extend the increased bonus to all staff.
"We’re hemorrhaging staff. They’re running out the back as fast as they’re coming in the front," said correctional officer and union president John Butkovich.
He said the facility is safe and that the staffing levels have improved to only 125 vacancies in recent months, but that it still falls far short of an ideal situation if non-custody staff are having to routinely take shifts as correctional officers.
Butkovich said he and other guards are required to work mandatory double shifts of 16 hours about once a week. "It wears on you physically and mentally," he said.
He and Holbrooks both said they enjoy their jobs and described FCC Florence as "a great place to work." But Butkovich emphasized "a staffed prison is a safe prison."
Holbrooks said inmates themselves have begun to complain about the short staffing and the weariness of the guards. "They’re worried about their safety," he said. "Even though we’re on two different sides of the line, they want us to protect them."
The full statement from a BOP spokesperson is below:
The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional staff and the community. We make every effort to ensure the physical safety of inmates confined to our facilities through a controlled environment that is secure and humane.
Agency leadership has been transparent as it pertains to staffing levels and its hiring initiatives at all of our institutions. The Hiring Initiative has been a huge success in increasing our staffing level and number of correctional officers. There are, however, institutions that still need our focus to increase their on-board numbers while the rest maintain their gains. Staffing at FCC Florence remains one of the agency’s top priorities.
The BOP is addressing the institutional climate and communications at FCC Florence providing additional training to staff, making security improvements at the facilities, and continuing to recruit additional high-quality staff.
Despite continued recruitment efforts, 2022 hiring across the agency has been a challenge, as the BOP is faced with the same worker shortage experienced by employers throughout the country. The BOP has implemented a robust national recruitment strategy to ensure constant recruitment efforts and to facilitate a pipeline of applicants throughout the year.
We use a number of incentives to recruit harder to fill positions and at harder to fill institutions.
Based on feedback and ongoing work with an outside consultant, we are making changes to our overtime reporting process, focusing on employee groups at higher risk of leaving the Bureau, and conduct an ongoing and continuous evaluation process of available recruitment and retention incentives to attract and retain top talent.
Working with the consultant allowed us to spend time as an agency thinking about how we see ourselves and how we want to project that image out into the world.
Our on-going branding and marketing campaign uses strategies that promote agency awareness, increase candidate engagement, and drive quality individuals to apply for targeted roles nationwide. Prior year data and analytics show a significant increase in public engagement and an increase in applicant numbers in priority regions.
With respect to augmentation, when an insufficient number of correctional officers are available to cover an institution’s critical custody posts on any given shift, institutions rely on overtime and the reassignment of other institution staff, who are professional law enforcement officers who receive law enforcement pay and/or other benefits that other federal employees do not regularly receive, to cover such posts. This is not a new practice. It is important to note 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 non-routine situations.
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