[Senate Hearing 118-531]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 118-531
THE NATION'S CORRECTIONAL STAFFING CRISIS:
ASSESSING THE TOLL ON CORRECTIONAL
OFFICERS AND INCARCERATED PERSONS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND COUNTERTERRORISM
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
----------
FEBRUARY 28, 2024
----------
Serial No. J-118-55
----------
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
S. Hrg. 118-531
THE NATION'S CORRECTIONAL STAFFING CRISIS:
ASSESSING THE TOLL ON CORRECTIONAL
OFFICERS AND INCARCERATED PERSONS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND COUNTERTERRORISM
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 28, 2024
__________
Serial No. J-118-55
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
www.judiciary.senate.gov
www.govinfo.gov
_______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
57-957 WASHINGTON : 2025
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois, Chair
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina,
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota Ranking Member
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut JOHN CORNYN, Texas
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey TED CRUZ, Texas
ALEX PADILLA, California JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
JON OSSOFF, Georgia TOM COTTON, Arkansas
PETER WELCH, Vermont JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
LAPHONZA BUTLER, California THOM TILLIS, North Carolina
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
Joseph Zogby, Majority Staff Director
Katherine Nikas, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism
CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey, Chair
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island TOM COTTON, Arkansas, Ranking
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota Member
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
PADILLA, ALEX, California JOHN CORNYN, Texas
OSSOFF, JON, Georgia MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
LAPHONZA BUTLER, California TED CRUZ, Texas
JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
Lynda Garcia, Democratic Chief Counsel
Drew Hudson, Republican Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
OPENING STATEMENTS
Page
Booker, Hon. Cory A.............................................. 1
Cotton, Hon. Tom................................................. 3
WITNESSES
Mangual, Rafael A................................................ 14
Prepared statement........................................... 40
Nance, Santia.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 45
Responses to written questions............................... 76
Walker, Stephen B................................................ 12
Prepared statement........................................... 48
Responses to written questions............................... 78
Wetzel, John..................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 60
Responses to written questions............................... 79
White, Brandy Moore.............................................. 10
Prepared statement........................................... 69
Responses to written questions............................... 81
APPENDIX
Items submitted for the record................................... 39
THE NATION'S CORRECTIONAL
STAFFING CRISIS: ASSESSING THE
TOLL ON CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS
AND INCARCERATED PERSONS
----------
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2024
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice
and Counterterrorism,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice at 2:30 p.m., in
Room 226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Cory A. Booker,
Chair of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Booker [presiding], Whitehouse, Padilla,
Ossoff, Butler, Cotton.
Also present: Senator Welch.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CORY A. BOOKER,
A. U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY
Chair Booker. We are officially gaveled in. And I just want
to say good afternoon, everybody. It means a lot that everyone
is here for an important hearing in this discussion. And I just
want to give a lot of gratitude to folks making time out of
their schedule to be a part of this. I want to welcome our
witnesses, many in whom journeyed really far to be a part of
this Subcommittee hearing.
And I'm also particularly grateful to have Tom Cotton as my
Ranking Member in this work, that his staff and he has done to
make this hearing successful. We face a stark reality today.
Our national correctional system, I think it's fair to say, is
in crisis.
The Bureau of Prisons is undergoing a well-documented
staffing shortage with 21 percent of correctional positions
vacant, BOP has imposed more and more mandatory overtime
forcing officers to work 10, 12, 15 and we heard earlier today,
18-hour shifts.
This disrupts their lives, makes it harder for them to find
childcare or simply just to be with their families. The BOP has
also relied on staff augmentation, pulling case managers,
teachers, psychologists, away from their work to perform duties
they aren't often fully trained for.
Our State's prisons are also functioning with dangerously
low levels of staff in a way that I think we'll elucidate
today. Over the last few years, we've seen an increase in the
prison--in the population of incarcerated individuals, which
has now led to overcrowding.
Correctional officers and their staffs are really
struggling with this. These are some extraordinarily dedicated
law enforcement Americans, yet they are overworked and
underpaid and struggling with the resultant mental health
challenges.
I was stunned to find out how undercompensated they were
when I sat down with Mrs. Brandy Moore White. It just did not
compute to me how little we are paying them. And this, I want
to say leads to chronic stress. It doesn't just dissipate once
officers leave the facility, it really follows them home.
Devastatingly it is estimated that 156 active-duty
correctional officers take their own lives each year. That's
three individuals a week. The Nation's correctional
infrastructure is also in despair and more susceptible to
extreme heat and cold, flooding, and other weather events.
In Texas, more than two-thirds of the Texas prisons have no
air conditioning, even after 10 incarcerated individuals have
died from heat related illness in the month-long heat wave back
in 2011. This crisis has a profound human toll.
In Georgia, it took 5 days for correctional staff to
discover an incarcerated person's decomposing body after their
death. In Missouri, despite multiple complaints and requests to
see a dentist, an incarcerated individual pulled out his own
teeth because he never received adequate dental care.
Earlier today, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing about
the Inspector General's disturbing findings that staff
shortages were a contributor to deaths of incarcerated people
in the Bureau of Prisons, not to mention the challenges and
hardships placed upon our correctional officers.
Our prisons have a weighty mandate to promote public safety
by maintaining a humane and secure correctional environment and
preparing incarcerated individuals to reenter society. Plainly,
it is not possible to accomplish this mandate with an
overworked workforce laboring in unsafe and even undignified
conditions.
Look, the Ranking Member, and I have areas of agreement and
areas of not, but one thing he and I feel fiercely about--I've
heard him speak about it--is this importance of public safety,
safe neighborhoods, safe communities, a safe country.
If you look at our Founding Documents, so much of them, the
establishment of our government was about keeping people safe,
about public safety. Well, there's a direct connection between
what happens in our prisons and the safety of our community
because 95 percent, roughly of the people who go into prison
come back out.
An estimated 65 percent of the people incarcerated in the
United States have a substance abuse disorder. But instead of
providing services, we see that they're not getting basic
medical care, which again, has a direct correlation to how they
behave outside of prison as well.
The proven way to lower recidivism rates is to ensure
access to medical care, including mental health and substance
use treatment, which empower individuals through programming to
ensure that incarcerated individuals are able to be successful
when they're released.
We even know there's a connection between incarcerated
individuals being connected to their children and their
families and their recidivism rates. What we need is common
sense, evidence-based policies that promote proven methods to
lower recidivism rates, and empower people to succeed.
Our correctional officers are public safety officials. They
are critical to the safety of our Nation. They are law
enforcement individuals, yet to deny them the resources or
support we give to other members of law enforcement or to have
them disproportionately underpaid, relative to the work of
other law enforcement individuals, it's not just disrespect, it
actually undermines their mission of public safety.
This crisis is a public safety issue, and it is a moral
issue. If you want to see the character of a country, don't
look in our places of business, our fields of science and
education alone, look within our prisons. The condition of our
prisons says so much about the character of who we are as a
country.
The people that work there, the people incarcerated there,
do their conditions, do their work environment, do the
conditions of their incarceration reflect the highest standards
of a Nation of our greatness. We should be setting the global
example of incarceration and remediation, repair, and
restoration.
I look forward to this productive conversation with this
extraordinary panel. I'm grateful again for everybody being
that. And with that, I turn it over to the Ranking Member of
this Subcommittee, my colleague from Arkansas, Senator Tom
Cotton.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. TOM COTTON,
A. U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ARKANSAS
Senator Cotton. Thank you, Senator Booker. This hearing
touches on an important topic. I think we can all agree that
our prisons are understaffed. In the Federal system alone, we
have about 40 percent of our prison correctional officer
positions unfilled, even though Congress has already
appropriated money to fill those positions, and crime is
increasing in the country, in part because we've been too eager
to empty out our prisons and let violent, dangerous criminals
back into our communities far too early.
The revolving door of poorly resourced prisons and
increasingly weak sentences is worsening crime nationwide. We
need to reverse that trend. In 1992, as the Nation faced an
epidemic of homicides and violent crime with people scared to
leave their homes in some cities, then Attorney General Bill
Barr released a report called The Case for More Incarceration.
In that report, he argued that the failure to incarcerate
leads to more crime and costs much more than spending on
prisons. He was right then, and he's right now. And as Congress
spent more on getting tougher on crime and setting up
sufficient prison space, crime rates dropped dramatically.
Unfortunately, too many would soon forget that success. You
might even say that we were a victim of our success. A decade
ago, when our prison population peaked, many argued that the
high crime days of the 1990's were in the past, and we spent
too much money on our prisons. If we had just let criminals
out, they argued we could save money on prisons.
After all, why would we need prisons anymore if crime has
decreased by so much. It's astounding that anyone ever believed
that. But the idea that increased prison populations were
somehow unconnected to a declining crime was repeated over and
over.
The New York Times was especially fond of this line of
argument. In August, 1998, they ran an article entitled Prison
Population Growing, Although Crime Rate Drops. Almost exactly 2
years later, the same reporter at the New York Times published
an article entitled Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime
Reduction. And in 2004, that very same reporter published yet
another article in the New York Times. The headline was,
Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates.
Now, maybe the New York Times was not getting its money's
worth from that particular reporter, but eventually people
started believing that prison populations were too high if
crime rates weren't so bad. And over the past decade, the total
State and Federal prison population in the United States has
dropped by more than 20 percent.
In the Federal system alone, it's decreased by 30 percent,
and as prison started to empty in 2014, not surprisingly,
violent crime rates shot up nationwide by more than 10 percent,
in just 2 years. In big cities, the change has been even more
dramatic as reduced prison populations combined with de
policing, and so-called criminal justice reform measures, to
weaken penalties for committing crimes were adopted.
A study from Iowa State University researchers in the early
2000's ran the numbers to find out how much crime cost our
society. Each armed robbery, every single one cost society more
than $335,000. The University of Chicago study similarly found
that an armed robbery cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to
society.
These aren't just the immediate costs to the victim, like
replacing stolen property and getting medical treatment after
an assault or paying for the funeral if someone dies. It also
includes other costs of crimes such as higher insurance costs,
shuttered businesses and laid off employees, behavioral
changes, from avoiding places and activities where you might
become a crime victim. As well as the cost of increased police
patrols in the high crime areas.
The University of Chicago study put the total cost of crime
in the United States at around $5.76 trillion per year, which
means that the State and Federal prison costs only about 1
percent of the total cost of crime.
So, we should be spending more, not less because we have a
under incarceration problem in this country. We need to cut
government spending in many areas. But criminal justice and
national security are two of the main areas where government
needs to spend, has to spend whatever it takes to keep our
people safe.
The title of today's hearing is not exactly what I would've
chosen. It mentions assessing the toll of understaffed prisons
on correctional officers and incarcerated persons. The right
word there would be criminals or inmates.
But one group we can't forget is the victims of those
crimes. Fully funding and staffing our criminal justice system
and our prison leads to less crime, and it creates an
environment where criminals have their best shot at
rehabilitation.
So maybe today's hearing should have instead borrowed from
that old report from Attorney General Barr and been entitled,
The Case for More Incarceration. We have a great panel of
witnesses here, and I thank you all for your appearance. I look
forward to hearing from you about how we can make our prisons
safe, secure, and functional again.
Chair Booker. All right. We have a distinguished panel of
witnesses today. We will now introduce each of them and then
after the introductions, we're going to have you guys stand,
raise your right hand and we'll administer the oath.
Our first witness is John E. Wetzel. Mr. Wetzel is the
founder and board chair of Keystone Restituere Justice Center,
KRJC. A nonprofit organization dedicated to providing
assessable and translatable data-driven solutions in the fields
of corrections and criminal justice. A strategic management
policy and research organization.
KRJC seeks to elevate institutions and agencies to new
heights, to better serve communities. Mr. Wetzel served as a
former Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections from 2011 to 2021
under both Republican and Democratic Governors, and began his
career as a correctional officer. Mr. Wetzel is a graduate of
Bloomsburg University.
Our next witness is Santia Nance, co-founder of Sistas in
Prison Reform. Ms. Nance has been a criminal justice reform
advocate in Virginia since 2019. After reconnecting with a
loved one, her fiance Quadaire Patterson, focused on
decarceration and second chances. She centers her work around
oversight of the Virginia Department of Corrections and ending
mandatory minimums in Virginia. Ms. Nance is also the editor of
brilliancebehindbars.com, A website that aims to humanize and
uplift currently incarcerated individuals. Ms. Nance graduated
from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BS in mass
communication and is a senior advertising professional at a
major agency.
Next, we have Stephen B. Walker, National Wellness director
of One Voice United. Mr. Walker is a California resident--we'll
forgive him for that--and lifelong activist in the area of
child protection and crime prevention. Along with his role at
One Voice United, he's also the director of Governmental
Affairs for the California Correctional Peace Officers
Association. Mr. Walker previously worked within the California
Youth Authority for 26 years as a youth correctional officer.
And Senator Butler will have a moment for a rebuttal later on
to that California comment.
[Laughter.]
Chair Booker. We also have two other witnesses that Ranking
Member Senator Tom Cotton will introduce. I am pleased though
to see that Brandy Moore White is here sending--sitting in the
Center Square. The president of the Council of Prison Locals 33
on this panel.
Ms. White, I want to thank you and my staff actually wants
to thank you for meeting with us a few weeks ago. It was
enlightening to me and even more so in the longer conversation
you had with my team, and we're looking forward to your
testimony.
But for the other introductions, I'm going to turn it over
to Ranking Member Tom Cotton to introduce the final witnesses.
Senator Cotton. Thank you. I'm pleased to introduce Brandy
Moore White. Mrs. White is a highly qualified person to speak
on prison staffing issues. She has been a career official at
the Federal Bureau of Prisons for the past 2 decades. She's
seen all of this firsthand and is still on the front lines
today. She was elected last year as National President of the
Council of Prison Locals, the union representing our Federal
corrections officers.
She has previously served in leadership roles in the
Council of Prison Locals for virtually her entire career. Maybe
most importantly, she is from the great State of Arkansas where
she was born and raised, and where she has spent the entirety
of her corrections career. Brandy, thank you for joining us
today and welcome.
I'm also pleased to introduce Ralph Mangual, Mr. Mangual is
the Nick Ohnell Fellow and Head of Research for Policing and
Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research----
Chair Booker. That's right next to New Jersey.
Senator Cotton [continuing]. He's also an accomplished
author and a contributing editor of City Journal. And his work
has been featured in a wide array of major publications. He's
well known to us. He's also testified several times for this
Subcommittee and other Committees.
He currently serves on the New York State Advisory
Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He holds a BA
from City University of New York, and a JD from DePaul
University College of Law in Chicago. Ralph, welcome back and
thank you for joining us today.
Chair Booker. Will the witnesses please rise and raise your
right hand.
[Witnesses are sworn in.]
Chair Booker. Let the record show that all of them said I
do, as if they were getting married. Get down please.
[Laughter.]
Chair Booker. And appreciate your affirmative responses.
You're each going to have 5 minutes for an opening statement.
Mr. Wetzel, we'll start with you, please.
STATEMENT OF JOHN E. WETZEL, FOUNDER AND BOARD CHAIR, KEYSTONE
RESTITUERE JUSTICE CENTER,
FORMER PENNSYLVANIA SECRETARY OF CORRECTIONS, HARRISBURG,
PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. Wetzel. Thank you, and, thanks for the opportunity to
once again talk about corrections, a field I spent my entire
life doing. Part-time correctional officer at age 20, while at
Bloomsburg University. Nine years as a correctional officer,
counselor, head of the counseling department at a large county
jail in Pennsylvania. Head of the training academy, county
warden, longest serving corrections secretary in the history of
Pennsylvania.
This field means everything to me. And you know, I can't
imagine any of the centers in here have been in a hearing in
the last 2 years that hasn't been about a crisis. I mean, it
may be the most over overused word in our vocabulary right now
as it comes to the public sector because everything's in
crisis. But I think we need to use accurate language. We have a
system on a brink of failure, and it's a system we all need.
It doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on, what
you want out of your correction system, whether you think it's
underused or overused. What we need--what our mandate is, what
our covenant is, and as it relates to corrections, is that we
do something to impact the trajectory of people who couldn't
follow the rules.
So, in--I mean, you don't, you know, to many people's
point, you don't get sent to a State prison or Federal prison
for jaywalking. All right. So implicit in that is that someone
who comes to us, has not been--has not complied with what we
expect out of our citizenry, right?
So, if we want to make a good investment in our correction
system, we should do something to take them off that
trajectory, right? That no--that's not happening anywhere.
There may be a handful of systems, there may be a handful of
jails who are actually delivering this covenant of making
people--having people at least not get worse, if not come out
better and less likely to commit a crime.
You know, we talk about public safety. I would argue it's
actually broader. It's community safety, and our communities
are less safe because of this crisis, if you want to use that
term, this on the brink of failure correction system. I'm from
Pennsylvania, born, raised, will never live in another State.
And I will tell you that it's not just public safety in
Pennsylvania.
We spent a very nervous week in Pennsylvania because of a
jail escape. It closed down major events right outside of
Philadelphia. People who were not adjacent to the correction
system in Pennsylvania are adjacent to the correction system.
It's critical that we understand in America, we're all adjacent
to the correction system.
Nobody should feel good about the fact that we have
National Guard members, people who--and listen, I spent 11
years--all but 11 years, 3 months short of 11 years running the
sixth biggest prison system in America. All right. I've worked
a lot with the National Guard.
We had floods, we have major events, that's what they're
there for. They're covering the position of correctional
officers at a time where people who aren't in this city are
concerned about what's going on over the country, all over the
world. And we're using soldiers to man our jails and or prisons
because we don't--we have inadequate staff.
And the notion that some--we're going to push some idea to
this field that's going to now work, where we've been pushing
ideas forever, we have to think differently about this. And,
you know, we can look to history and I love looking to history,
especially when you're in this building.
You know, 50 years ago as a result of Attica, the National
Institute of Corrections was created. Some of you may not have
heard about that, and that's part of the indictment of the
divestment in the intellectual development of this field.
Listen, we're not going to fix problems if we don't have
our correctional staff, who are remarkable people who dedicate
their lives. You don't even hear about them, you don't know
about them. Heck, it--now you don't even wear your uniform home
because you don't know what someone's going to say to you at
the grocery store, all right.
But they're dedicating their life, and they don't have a
mechanism to develop professionally. Like, I would not be
sitting here if the National Institute of Corrections did not
offer what was called a clip course for some of your old
people, they used to have to send you a course and you'd
actually fill it out and send it back. It wasn't online. That's
how I learned how to staff, all right. That's not available
today.
So, the National Institute of Corrections, just to give you
a little history, was invented out of--came about after Attica,
right. And Attica was not at a Federal prison, right. But
Warren Berger, who was the Supreme Court Justice at the time,
as or Chief of the Supreme Court, as well as other--the
Attorney General, others were so bothered by what happened and
what led to it that they felt like we needed a different
approach.
So, they developed this National Institute of Corrections
that was not actually part of the Bureau of Prisons, which it
is now. It was adjacent, what it was designed to do was tap the
best and brightest from corrections, right. To solve these
problems, to sync through the--to advise you guys. So, you
actually made decisions on data that used to happen. Believe it
or not, it used to happen that you'd make decisions based on
actual data.
You can't even get data on one of your biggest
expenditures. You can't get accurate data and, you know, thank
God I'm not the director of Bureau of Prisons. I have a world
of respect for her stepping up in the system. But let me give
you context as somebody sits in, she's been a job maybe 2
years, a year and a half, I'm sure for her it probably feels
like 20 years.
And she's asked questions about data. You have mainframe
computers, haven't updated it, like you have old data systems.
So, you look at any other sector and you look at how you would
resolve problems. You would use technology, you would use
innovation. Look at the work of Clayton Christiansen Institute
of Disruptive Innovation. Look at the medical field, look at
poverty, attacking it by bringing technology to a field, right.
By identifying individuals in the field, like incarcerated
people, like correctional officers that are ignored by the
market, right.
There's no research and development. You don't see patents
flying out at how we address this issue.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wetzel appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. I'm going to hold you to 5 minutes.
Mr. Wetzel. Sorry.
Chair Booker. No, I'm sorry. It's a real 5 minutes, not a
senatorial 5 minutes.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Wetzel. Sorry.
Chair Booker. No, no worries. No, we really appreciate it.
We're looking forward to hearing more of your testimony, and
it's an insightful presentation. I'm going to move on to Ms.
Nance and for her actual 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF SANTIA NANCE, CO-FOUNDER, SISTAS IN PRISON REFORM,
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Ms. Nance. Don't worry, I'll give you 5 minutes. Chair
Booker, Ranking Member, Senator Cotton, and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you all for having me today. My name is
Santia Nance. I'm the mother of a middle schooler, a Virginia
voter, vice president of an advertising company and fiance to
Quadaire Patterson, who has served 15 years on a 20-year
sentence.
Quadaire made some poor decisions when he was a young
adult, only 20 years old, and he was homeless. He takes full
responsibility for the decisions that led to his current
incarceration. But spending all of his 20's and half of his
30's in prison, he's made the most of his time in prison and
seized every opportunity to prepare for his successful reentry.
He received his GED in 2012 and has taken college courses
through Ohio University and studying to be a paralegal. He has
a trade in brick masonry and assist with reentry efforts and
mentorship through Brilliance Behind Bars.
Quadaire is housed at Lawrenceville Correctional Center,
which has been facing a lot of staffing shortages since at
least 2018, and the Virginia Department of Corrections has
estimated that they need a number--almost 100 incarcerated
officer, or sorry, correctional officers.
While a partnership during incarceration is already hard
enough for me and my family, short staffing there has impacted
us tremendously. Quadaire was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2012,
and he needs his eye drop medication called latanoprost.
Without this medication, it's not only difficult for him to do
everyday tasks, but to keep up with his coursework and his
studies.
Quadaire has filed multiple grievances in the past couple
years and requests to see the eye doctor, and this eye doctor
only comes to the facility once a month. But he's only been met
with, you're on the waiting list. So, it's just been
ridiculously hard to get him in front of the eye doctor to get
his prescription renewed.
Because of short staffing, he's seen how--at firsthand--how
this has affected services and programming necessary for
rehabilitation. For example, religious gatherings like church
on Sunday, they get canceled at the last minute.
Now only one correctional officer runs the gym instead of
four. So, music, anger management, substance abuse programming,
those have all been interrupted, causing difficulty to
encourage rehabilitation for the people at Lawrenceville.
While prison does require physical separation, we stay in
contact through visitation a couple times a month, phone all
day when we can and email when we can. But short staffing has
interfered with our ability to maintain our family bond. My
visits on January 28 and February 4 of this year were canceled
due to staffing concerns.
And my recent 2-hour visit on February 18 was cut short by
45-50 minutes due to the wait time of the long line of visitors
and it was staffed by only one correctional officer where there
should have been four or five in the office processing us.
But she was the only one who knew how to do all five jobs
and was willing to step up. Whether there are lockdowns in the
prison or an extended count time due to lack of employees to
cover shifts, I suffer not knowing the reason why Quadaire is
not calling. I haven't heard from him since Sunday of this
week, and I often fear the worst when I'm unable to reach
anybody At Lawrenceville.
There's a trend of these events that happen during
holidays, bad weather, and evenings as people might be calling
out of work. Quadaire knows that he has to be held accountable
for the mistakes he made, but the issues caused by
understaffing go well beyond affecting those behind the prison
walls. It punishes me and my son as well.
After reconnecting with Quadaire 6 years ago, I co-founded
an organization called Sistas in Prison Reform. Our mission and
purpose is to bring humanization to those behind the walls and
collaborate with Virginia's lawmakers.
Through this work and my personal experience. I believe
that the answer to this crisis--if we're going to use that
word--to identify those who have received harsh sentences and
have rehabilitated themselves, and to release those who have
proven they're ready to come home and do not pose a public
safety risk.
Like many others in Virginia, Quadaire sentence includes 13
years of mandatory time, but this harsh mandatory sentence was
not necessary to protect the public or to prepare Quadaire to
reenter society. Quadaire is rehabilitated and ready to join
our communities. There are many mechanisms to identify what
rehabilitation looks like, good behavioral records while in
prison, educational milestones, safe environments to go home
to, secure jobs, and the list goes on.
There are people like Quadaire, my fiance, that our State
and Federal tax dollars are wasting money on when these
incarcerated people could be home and paying taxes and giving
back to their communities.
Reducing the population would lessen the burden of the
officers and allow them to maintain a manageable environment
that focuses on those who still need rehabilitation. Thank you
for your time and for the opportunity to share my story today.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Nance appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. Thank you, Ms. Nance. Mrs. Moore White.
STATEMENT OF BRANDY MOORE WHITE, PRESIDENT AFGE, COUNCIL OF
PRISON LOCALS 33, FOREST CITY, ARIZONA
Mrs. White. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chairman Booker,
Ranking Member Cotton, Members of the Subcommittee and
distinguished guests. I want to sincerely thank the
Subcommittee for the opportunity to present the perspective of
our Federal prison system and from the professional hardworking
men and women of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
For far too long, this conversation has been missing a key
element. That's the professional law enforcement officers who
have dedicated their lives to protecting their coworkers and
communities and safely housing inmates. The Council of Prison
Locals represents nearly 30,000 correctional professionals
across the country and 121 Federal prisons.
These professional law enforcement officers who work
tirelessly in some of the most violent, self-contained cities
in the country keep us all safe from some of the world's most
dangerous human beings.
Today I would like to discuss our primary concerns, which
are the current critical staffing levels and pay structure
within the Bureau of Prisons, both of which must be addressed
urgently.
Staffing levels in the Bureau of Prisons have reached
alarming levels. Over the past 7 years, the authorized
positions within the Bureau have decreased from 43,369 to the
current count of 34,470 staff members. This reduction of nearly
8,900 staff members not only compromises the safety and
security of both staff and inmates, but it also raises major
concern and hinders our ability to effectively carry out the
Bureau's mission and rehabilitate and reintegrate.
The impact of these staffing cuts is particularly evident
among our correctional officers. Despite the President's
request and subsequent legislation, the number of correctional
officer positions has drastically fallen short of what has been
appropriated by Congress.
At the close of 2023, we had approximately 12,300
correctional officers, which is more than 8,000 less or 40
percent below of the appropriated number of 20,446 officers.
This number follows a year of hiring initiatives enacted by our
agency. Within the current staffing levels, the Bureau of
Prison, the First Step Act cannot be successfully enacted.
Staff used for programming are often pulled from their
positions and used to backfill shortages of correctional
officers.
Augmentation, reduces inmate access to recidivism, reducing
activities like programming, recreation, and educational
initiatives. Additionally, because of the lack of staffing,
correctional officers are forced to do mandatory overtime.
Overtime officers are frequently mandated--at the last minute--
to stay in additional eight plus hours, often several times a
week.
This diminishes skills and awareness, it reduces acuity and
causes general fatigue, which greatly hinders supervision.
Augmentation, and mandatory overtime have become the norm. This
detracts from our programming. It compromises the safety and
security of the institutions, but it also greatly affects the
mental health and well-being of our employees.
The union believes that the staffing crisis can only be
resolved by addressing our insufficient pay band issues. The
current pay structure within the Bureau is significantly lower
than that of other Federal law enforcement agencies, including
the U.S. Marshals, Immigration and Customs, and Border Patrol.
The Bureau's pay scale is non-competitive with State and
local law enforcement and even the private sector market.
Without addressing these pay disparities, the Bureau will
continue to struggle and attract and retain employees. The
Bureau must be required to increase the pay bands to correct
the staffing crisis.
Because the Bureau is unable to solve its biggest problem,
it now requires the direct intervention of the administration,
OPM and the Legislative Authority of Congress to immediately
correct. The Council of Prison Locals has worked diligently
with Members of Congress to properly fund the Federal Bureau of
Prisons.
However, even with additional funding, there continues to
be a decline in correctional officers. Congress must now demand
oversight and accountability. The Bureau of Prison staffing has
graduated from a crisis to a catastrophe with real human
consequence. The Bureau must use the funding that has been
appropriated to fully hire the correctional officers needed to
safely house incarcerated inmates.
In order to achieve this, efforts must be made to raise the
pay bands and make our Federal law enforcement officers
competitive with other law enforcement agencies. Chairman
Booker, Ranking Member Cotton, and Members of the Subcommittee,
this concludes my formal statement, and I truly look forward to
answering any of your questions and providing additional
insight.
[The prepared statement of Mrs. White appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. I'm grateful for your testimony. Mr. Walker.
STATEMENT OF STEPHEN B. WALKER, NATIONAL WELLNESS DIRECTOR, ONE
VOICE UNITED, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
Mr. Walker. Thank you, sir, Chairman Booker, Ranking Member
Cotton and--that would help, wouldn't it? Chairman Booker,
Ranking Member Cotton, and esteemed Members of the Committee, I
would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you
today.
My name is Stephan Walker. I am a representative of One
Voice United, a national organization advocating for the
welfare of correctional officers and other frontline staff and
ensuring that our expertise and perspectives are included in
the national debate around criminal justice reform.
Before One Voice, I served as a youth correctional officer
for 35 years in the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitations. And currently serve as the director of
Correctional Health for the California Correctional Peace
Officers Association.
Today, I sit before you to address the existential staffing
crisis in America's prisons and jails, in hopes of advancing a
national nationally sanctioned dialog. This crisis has no
borders, is not one State's issue and cannot be solved by a
single department or entity.
It is a systemic, and a systemic issue and impacts every
aspect of corrections, by asking staff to do more with less and
often resulting in excessive work hours and multiple mandated
shifts leading to increased burnout, less job satisfaction, and
an inability to perform everyday security and rehabilitative
functions.
We are in full support of the position Mrs. Moore White
offered on augmentation. From experience, I can tell you that
it is not enough to just find a warm body to fill a vacant
position. To be a competent and professional correctional
officer takes time, supervision, and training.
Not to mention the fact that augmentation takes key
personnel and nurses, teachers, and administrators out of their
primary functions without replacement of the services loss. For
staff, personnel shortages lead to diminished observational
skills, less intelligence gathering, overtime surges, slow
response and strained family relationships and collective
wellness.
In fact, multiple studies indicate that correctional
officers suffer from PTSD, depression, suicide, heart disease,
and shortened lifespan and other physical and psychological
ailments at a rate well above the general public.
For those in our care personnel shortages mean programs are
slashed, visits are reduced. Time on lockdown is increased and
the patience of everyone behind the walls wears thin. The ratio
often surpasses 60 to 1, especially in yards and chow halls.
And unpredictable staffing patterns force policy mandated
prioritization of institutional safety, which limits
programming rehabilitative services, which are essential for
promoting positive behavior and reducing recidivism.
Addressing this staffing crisis is crucial for creating a
secure environment for both staff and incarcerated individuals.
To combat this reality, well-meaning attempts are being
initiated by agencies in various States, by lowering entrance
requirements for new recruits, shortening academy times, and
offering signing bonuses, none of which has successfully
addressed this crisis to scale of lasting impact.
Retaining staff is equally important and we must transform
employment conditions by moving beyond the traditional top-down
paramilitary administrative model. Research and studies done on
retention show overwhelmingly that it is not the incarcerated
that drive good employees away. It is a lack of communication,
recognition, and transparency along with outdated and
uninformed policies.
The expectation and demands of today's corrections have
outgrown the systemic administrative model, leading to a
profession where staff feel devalued and expendable. This has
resulted in a growing reluctance among officers to silently
endure this challenge, highlighting a clear misalignment
between the needs and values of new officers and the prevailing
culture and operations of corrections. Fortunately, there are
remedies and actions that can be taken to address these issues,
but they require thoughtful planning and input from all
stakeholders.
Addressing this crisis requires appealing to potential
employees by valuing their goals, integrating them into a
respected team from day one, providing empirical training,
better pay, lower healthcare costs, holistic wellness programs
and attractive incentives such as educational benefits,
pensions, and reducing vesting periods.
In concluding without achieving these--including the--
without achieving these objectives and including the voices and
experiences of those who will be impacted by their success or
failure, true rehabilitation is unrealistic and prisons will
continue to fall short of their primary mission of creating a
safe and humane atmosphere for successful reentry back into
society.
I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and
look forward to answering any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Walker appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. Thank you very much. Mr. Mangual, and you've
been so generous because you testify often and I pronouncing
that well, right, Mangual?
Mr. Mangual. Mangual. Yes.
Chair Booker. Mangual?
Mr. Mangual. Close enough.
Chair Booker. Thanks. I had a phonetic that's wrong. It
says
M-A-I-N. Mangu. Mangu.
Mr. Mangual. Mangu. Mangu.
Chair Booker. Mangual. Thank you, sir.
STATEMENT OF RAFAEL A. MANGUAL, NICK OHNELL FELLOW, MANHATTAN
INSTITUTE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Mr. Mangual. All right. Well, Chairman Booker, Ranking
Member Cotton, and other Members of the distinguished body, I'd
like to begin by thanking you for the opportunity to offer
remarks on this important topic. As was said earlier today, the
first duty of any government, whether local, State, or Federal,
is to keep its people and their property secure.
And one of the primary ways in which governments provide
that security is through criminal justice systems. The police
are the most visible elements of these systems, but they're
certainly not the only ones. Indeed, their effectiveness
depends in large part on other criminal justice actors.
Prosecutors still need to prosecute, judges still need to
adjudicate and sentence, and crucially, correctional
institutions need to secure and hopefully better the prisoners
that they take in. Effectively managing a correctional
population however, requires investment.
Unfortunately, we have seen throughout this country an
unwillingness to adequately invest in corrections, as
decarceration, the pursuit of correctional population declines,
has become both a policy priority in its own right and also the
preferred means of alleviating the pressures on correction
systems created by staffing shortages, facility maintenance
costs gross and overcrowding.
I'd like to use the remainder of my time to make three
points. First, decarceration where the pursuit is a public
policy good unto itself or as a means of cost saving is not a
cost-free endeavor.
Second, the potential cost saving effects of decarceration,
at least in the short and intermediate terms, are more limited
than they might appear to be based on average cost per inmate
figures.
And third, making the necessary investments in our criminal
justice system to address issues like understaffing
overcrowding and security concerns will not only help improve
correctional outcomes, but it will keep the government out of a
position in which budget constraints require it to make choices
that ultimately harm public safety.
On the first point, most of the public safety risk
associated with any significant scale decarceration effort
derives from the loss of incapacitation benefits. Those are the
beneficial effects of an active offender's removal from
society, which come in the form of crimes not committed as a
result of that offender being behind bars.
One study recently found that for the period of 1991 to
2004, proved each additional prison year served prevented
approximately eight index crimes. And that's an estimate that's
based on both Federal and State prisoner populations.
Now, the Federal prison population consists of inmates who
on average pose a somewhat lower risk of recidivism, but the
risk of recidivism posed by Federal offenders is far from zero.
An analysis of more than 25,000 offenders released in 2005
found that just under 50 percent were rearrested over an 8-year
observation period.
Now, some might be tempted to argue that the recidivism
data of those released pursuant to the First Step Act, or FSA,
strengthens the case for decarceration. But those data do just
the opposite. While it's true that only about 12 percent of FSA
beneficiaries have recidivated, according to the April, 2023
annual report, the recidivism data for FSA beneficiaries
nevertheless illustrates just how little low hanging fruit
there is in the Federal population.
According to that report, nearly 9 in 10, or 88.3 percent
of the more than 24,000 releasees who had a risk assessment
done were rated minimum risk or low risk. Moreover, the bulk of
those offenders, more than 20,000 of them in fact, had only
been released for a year prior to that report's publication,
meaning that their lack of rearrest may simply be a function of
the short observation period.
The much larger State prison population, more than two
thirds of which is in primarily for a violent or weapons
offense, poses an even more pronounced risk of recidivism with
9-and 10-year recidivism rates for releasees breaking 80
percent.
So, while it's certainly the case that some small subset of
the country's prison population consists of inmates whose
incarceration no longer serves a legitimate phenological end,
the vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. both State and
Federal pose a significant risk of re-offending.
As for the second point, the cost savings potential of
decarceration efforts may not be what they seem. It's often
noted that it costs an average of $42,000 a year to incarcerate
a single Federal prison inmate. However, the problem with using
this figure is that it might give you the impression that you
save $42,000 if you incarcerate one fewer inmate.
But the lion's share of the average cost per inmate is a
function of fixed costs. The marginal cost per inmate tends to
be a much lower figure, albeit more difficult to calculate.
Moreover, the potential savings associated with decarceration
are also going to be eaten into by the costs associated with
the additional crimes that might occur as a result.
Indeed, the estimated annual cost of crime in the U.S. is
in the trillions and a single homicide has been estimated to
cost nearly $9 million. While an assault can carry a societal
price tag of more than $107,000.
Third, and finally, despite the numbers that can be thrown
around with regard to the cost of doing criminal justice in the
United States, it remains the case that our criminal justice
system is underfunded and in need of an upgrade, that includes
staffing. It is almost certainly the case, that there are
measures on which the Federal and State correctional
authorities can perform better.
But it is also likely the case that boosting performance
and improving outcomes will depend on the degree to which
Congress and State legislatures are willing to direct resources
to these institutions in order to facilitate such improvement.
And that is a political choice, one with dire consequences
for those inside and ultimately, outside of our nation's,
prisons populations. We can and should choose wisely.
Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mangual appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. Mr. Mangual, thank you very much for that
testimony. I appreciate that. And if there's no objection, I'm
going to save my questions for the end and go straight to
Senator Butler for her California rebuttal.
[Laughter.]
Senator Butler. It's nothing like coming to a hearing with
Senator Booker in the Chair. Thank you, sir for your continued
generosity, Senator Cotton, bless you for serving with Senator
Booker.
[Laughter.]
Senator Butler. Yes. And thank you to the witnesses and all
of you, I am assuming that a number of you are correctional
officers yourself and I appreciate you being here and being
present in the work that you do.
A couple of questions and I'm going to take the privilege
of starting with my California resident, Mr. Walker. Good to
see you. Again, it was--I was excited to hear that you were
coming to today's panel because I know you as an advocate for
officers, and it is in our working together that I have really
seen your heart and indeed your legacy--your family's legacy
for doing this work.
Not just you, but as I understand, your father and your
son. Three generations in your family have contributed your
time and talent to public service in this way. And we're
grateful. Can you talk about the evolution of the profession
and the catastrophe or crisis or and fill in the blank of what
it is that officers are experiencing today, just from the lens
of that generational engagement?
Mr. Walker. Thank you, Senator. It is a pleasure to see you
again. Yes, my family has--we've literally given our lives to
this occupation. And unfortunately, it's taken more from us
than is advertised, your commitment is supposed to be.
And, it's not just my family. It's every one of these
people sitting behind me. It's taking from them silently. And
as far as the evolution of it, that it's hard to say because I
started in the 80's, where we were legitimately tasked with
rehabilitation, and we had the capacity to do that.
We had the staffing for it, we had the resources for it,
and the population was managed. And we went through that tough
on crime era where, we literally went from having single bunked
individuals to triple bunked, to unconventional sleeping
arrangements.
And that ability of rehabilitation, that ability of
engagement, of socializing, to understand what the needs were
of the individuals we were tasked with supervising and caring
for, went out the window. Unfortunately, my father didn't do a
good job of telling me what the job was and I came into the
agency. I didn't, likewise--didn't communicate with my family
what I was enduring. And my son came into the agency, and it
cost him his life.
We cannot keep operating the way we are. It is literally
killing people slowly. We are poisoning ourselves every time we
walk back into, and every time we introduce someone to this
environment, in the absence of having the services, resource,
and personnel to adequately manage the new mission. Because
society is asking for something different, and we're still
operating off of an antiquated model of incarceration. It's the
default. It's what we know best.
Helping people, serving people is the challenge that I
think that we're--society and this body actually wants to see.
They want to see people return to their communities better.
Senator Butler. Yes.
Mr. Walker. And if not, then we keep them.
Senator Butler. Yes. Mr. Chair, that response was worth my
entire 5 minutes.
Mr. Walker. I'm sorry.
Senator Butler. No, don't. Your family has given more than
5 minutes' worth. And so, I appreciate you sharing that. I
would love to, Mr. Chairman, submit questions to the panel
after the hearing.
Chair Booker. Of course. And before I defer to the Ranking
Member, Mr. Walker, I think I could speak for the whole entire
Subcommittee about our grief and our sorrow about your son's
loss. The story of dedication of your family through
generations in and of itself is extraordinary.
But the circumstances of your son's death, should not have
happened. And we're grateful for you sharing that, what has got
to be unimaginable grief with this Committee, so thank you. And
I'll now defer to the Ranking Member Tom Cotton.
Senator Cotton. Mr. Walker, I also express my condolences.
And your family's story is an important reminder for many
people that, like military service, law enforcement is often a
family affair in this country. And some families bear the brunt
of that service to keep our country and our people safe.
Ms. White, this morning, the director of the Bureau of
Prisons testified in front of the full Committee. She said that
the Bureau has only 14,899 correctional officer slots. Those
slots are 82 percent filled. In other words, the Bureau has
approximately 12,300 correctional officers, officers today. Is
she correct in your understanding that the Bureau is nearly
fully staffed?
Mrs. White. No, sir.
Senator Cotton. Could you explain a little bit more why?
Mrs. White. Sure. So, I have one of her staffing reports in
front of me. The agency is very protective of their numbers. As
you guys have seen in many hearings. As of pay period 26, which
was December 30 we are showing 12,306 officers. Typically, I
have to reach out to 121 institutions and get their staffing
reports to compile those, to get those numbers.
But that's the number I show, and that's why I testified to
those numbers. I did hear, she testified this morning to 14,000
and some change, and I have a hard time believing that since
December 30, she has brought on over 2000 officers.
Senator Cotton. Yes. As it happens, I just went on their
website and since the hearing, and I looked up any potential
openings, and they list openings and it says location, prisons
nationwide. And the number of openings is many vacancies.
Mrs. White. Correct.
Senator Cotton. Many is capitalized. Many vacancies to
what? I think I'll submit that screenshot for the record, Mr.
Chairman. While, I'm at that, I'm,----
Chair Booker. That might be the first time in Senate
history, a screenshot has been submitted, but no objection.
[The information appears as a submission for the record.]
Senator Cotton. Okay. And I think what happened this
morning, is that the director was speaking--only if you might
say--about frontline correctional officers, excluding things
like lieutenants or supervisory correctional officers. Is that
your understanding?
Mrs. White. Yes, sir.
Senator Cotton. So, it would be as if the Secretary of the
Army gave you only the number of privates he had, not the
number of NCOs and officers he had; is that right?
Mrs. White. Right. So many times we disagree on numbers,
and again, they're not very public with their numbers----
Senator Cotton. Okay.
Mrs. White [continuing]. But oftentimes when I've discussed
with them, there is a series, it's a 007, and there's other
individuals that are included in that series, counselors,
lieutenants, other individuals that are not primary
correctional officers.
So, I don't know if that's the confusion or the difference
in the numbers, but according to my records, we have----
Senator Cotton. Okay.
Mrs. White. Right around 12,000 officers.
Senator Cotton. And you believe that the number of Bureau
of Prison correctional officers over the last year has
decreased, not increased. Correct?
Mrs. White. Absolutely.
Senator Cotton. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Mangual, the total
Federal and State prison population has declined by more than
20 percent since it peaked in 2013. Has violent crime increased
or decreased as the prison population declined?
Mr. Mangual. It's gone up significantly.
Senator Cotton. That's right. All right. Would you say that
there's been at least some inmates in Federal and State prisons
who don't necessarily need to be there? At least maybe not as
long as they are, at least some?
Mr. Mangual. Sure.
Senator Cotton. Okay.
Mr. Mangual. But I think it's also important to recognize
that there is a significant number of individuals on the street
today who need to be inmates.
Senator Cotton. All right. My next question. At least some
criminals out on the streets who maybe should be in prisons
today?
Mr. Mangual. Quite a few more.
Senator Cotton. And which one is higher? The number of
people in prison who maybe don't need to be there, and the
number of people on the streets who maybe do need to be in
prison?
Mr. Mangual. I would say certainly it's the number of
people on the street who do need to be in prison. And one
indicator of that, it's just the clearance rate numbers in this
country.
If you look at the eight index felonies that are
consistently tracked by the Federal Government, the clearance
rate only hovers at about 50 percent for the violent ones and
about 20 percent for the nonviolent ones. Which indicates that
a vast majority of the crime--the serious felony crime goes
unanswered for. So that in and of itself should tell you.
Senator Cotton. Isn't it the case that the vast majority of
crimes are committed by a very small percentage of the
population?
Mr. Mangual. That's exactly right. I mean, the bulk of our
crime problem is and has long been driven by very, very
active--overactive offenders. And so, you can actually get a
lot of bang for your buck by, you know, targeting correctional
resources appropriately.
Senator Cotton. And I think you testified earlier that
something like eight crimes are avoided for every person in
prison.
Mr. Mangual. Per year. Yes. And that's a pretty
conservative estimate because it's an estimate derived from
official crime reports. And one of the other things that we
know is that most crime that occurs in this country does not
get reported, and that's evidenced----
Senator Cotton. Okay.
Mr. Mangual [continuing]. By the consistent disparity
between the National Crime Victimization Survey, and UCR.
Senator Cotton. Okay. My time's almost up, Mr. Chairman.
One more administrative matter. I have a letter dated yesterday
from the Major County Sheriffs of America urging Congress to
prioritize legislation that supports the recruitment and
retention of law enforcement in all areas to include
corrections.
Of course, the county sheriffs also have an important
correctional role of play as they run our county jails as well.
I ask for consent that this letter be added to the hearing
record.
[The information appears as a submission for the record.]
Chair Booker. I will add it with considerable alacrity. Is
that it?
Senator Cotton. That is all.
Chair Booker. I'm going to now defer to Senator Whitehouse.
Senator Whitehouse. Thanks very much. I'm sorry I had to
step out for a minute. I had a Federal agency in my office with
a project in Rhode Island that needs a little attention, and
that's what we do.
I'm delighted that you-all are here. Thank you very much.
My Rhode Island experience has been that we've been pretty
successful at being able to reduce prison populations. I think
the numbers are 23 percent reduction from 2008 to 2016, and
another 34 percent from 2017 to 2021.
A lot of that has been diverting people away at early
stages. I helped launch the drug court when I was attorney
general. We also now have a very well-run Veterans Court that
helps, again, divert people away from the criminal justice
system in a way that is very effective.
And if you've ever been to what they call a Veterans Court
graduation and compared that to the day of a district court
conviction, in one case, the guy's going out the back door in
Manacles and the family is crying, and in the other case, he's
coming back to a cheering family and their balloons.
And they've had very, very, very good results with reduced
re-offending and reincarceration. And we're launching a Mental
Health Court as well to try to manage better the interaction
between the mental health system and the criminal justice
system.
So, we have a relatively small population, so it helps
because there's quite a lot of direct hands-on care and all of
this. But I do want to express my appreciation to the Rhode
Island Brotherhood of Correction Officers who say that they
walk the toughest beat in the State. Mr. Wetzel, I'm sure you
appreciate that.
But we've worked on--earned time credits. We've reduced
mandatory sentencing. We've had the diversion programs that I
mentioned apart from just the attorney general's own regular
diversion. And it's had that result and it's been really
essential to do that.
Mrs. White, I'm sorry about these results with the First
Step Act. I was the author of the Reentry part of the First
Step Act, along with my colleague Senator Cornyn on this
Committee.
And it's frustrating that an act that bodes so well and has
produced quite good results and has reduced re-offending and
re-incarceration and has prepared people better for reentry,
particularly set them up to deal better with addiction issues
can't get the attention it needs to succeed because of all
these multiple demands on the staff to try to get there.
So, if there are specific recommendations that you have
from your closeup perch as to things we should be poking at the
Bureau over or things that we should be particularly focused on
funding, I guess my point here is that I have seen a lot of
stuff work in Rhode Island to dramatically reduce prison
populations and make it--the difficult job of the Brotherhood
of Correction Officers safer and easier.
And to me, the First Step Act was an effort to take some of
those lessons and move them into the Federal system. So, as I
said, it's irritating and frustrating that we are where we are
on that.
So, any comments that you have, and if you want to think
about it and get back to me with a more precise list.
Mrs. White. Sure.
Senator Whitehouse. Please take it also as a question for
the record.
Mrs. White. Absolutely. I can definitely speak on, we did
testify, one of my board members on the committee for First
Step Act. And, as we testified, we do think it's a, a
phenomenal program. And I think if we can get the staffing that
we need, it would be a much more successful program in the
Federal Bureau of Prisons. There is more detailed stuff that I
will submit to your office.
Senator Whitehouse. Okay. I'm assuming that there are sort
of mandatory staffing requirements at various posts in the
prison that require people to be pulled off to go and hit those
mandatory posting requirements that generally the problem?
Mrs. White. So, we do what we call augmentation. And so,
anyone who works, say education, health services, anywhere, if
there is a vacancy and we start our day every day in almost
every prison with vacancies.----
Senator Whitehouse. Yes.
Mrs. White--for the correctional roster, you get pulled or
augmented to a correctional officer post. And so that's part of
the issue. And that's why I said staffing. If we can get our
staffing to where it needs to be, those individuals would not
have to be pulled off with their post and they could provide
the class or the training, or the programming or whatever that
they should be doing instead of being a correctional officer
for the day.
Senator Whitehouse. Yes. Okay. Well, my time's up,
Chairman, thank you for the hearing. Thank you to this
distinguished panel, and Mr. Wetzel, thank you for your
service.
Chair Booker. Senator Whitehouse, I'm grateful. I'm told by
my staff the order of appearance and this is the order we'll go
in. And Senator Ossoff, Senator Padilla, and no disrespect to
the two aforementioned gentlemen, the best for last Senator
Welch.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for
bringing us together grateful also to Senator Cotton for
supporting this hearing. And thank you to our panelists for
your expertise and experience. Mrs. White, as you know, Senator
Braun, Chair Durbin, and I have introduced bipartisan
legislation to overhaul Federal prison oversight and
strengthened security at Federal prisons.
And the purpose of this bill is to help identify and
address threats to the safety and welfare of both incarcerated
people and the thousands of correctional officers and others
who work in our Federal prisons every day. And that's the
Federal Prison Oversight Act.
Mrs. White, the Council of Prison Locals, which represents
more than 30,000 correctional officers, worked with us to
develop this legislation, and has endorsed the legislation. Can
you speak to the Committee about why correctional officers
support our bill and what it would mean for your members who
are working in Federal prisons every day?
Mrs. White. Sure. So, as you said, we have been in support
and we have worked really hard to help get this. We have--for
years the Council Prison Locals, the union has gone to bar and
ask for additional funding. For years we thought funding was
our only issue, if we could get more money, we could fix the
problems.
And the union was very successful in doing so. But over the
years, we have come to know that funding is not the issue.
Sometimes it might be an oversight issue of where the funding
is going.
So, we have been strategic in where we ask for funding the
last couple of years. This year we probably will be a little
even more strategic. But as I said in my opening and in the
written statement, we welcome any oversight. We need
accountability. We need help. The Bureau, I think, is the
second largest in DOJ budget. And we're not sure where all of
that money is going. And so, any oversight from anyone I think
would be super helpful.
Senator Ossoff. Well, I'm grateful to you and your
organization for helping us to develop this legislation----
Mrs. White. Thank you.
Senator Ossoff [continuing]. And for the advocacy of the
correctional officers across the country who are urging
Congress to pass it. It's a bipartisan bill aimed at improving
oversight within BOP, strengthening the security of Federal
prisons.
It's got strong support from the Council of Prison Locals,
strong support from Reform Advocates, and look forward to
working with it to continue to urge it across the finish line
here in the Senate and in the House.
Mr. Wetzel you, I believe, are also familiar with the
legislation. And based upon your extensive experience working
in corrections, what impact do you believe it would have on
conditions and safety in Federal prisons, both for incarcerated
people and staff?
Mr. Wetzel. It's essential. I don't see how you make
progress in the Federal system without knowing--you can't even
lay out a data-driven, or problem Statement because you don't
have enough information. The very essence of fixing a problem
is being able to define it, and come up with a problem
statement, independent oversight. And that kind of forced
transparency, real time on a regular basis is essential to
moving the Bureau of Prisons and any agency forward.
Senator Ossoff. Well, I appreciate your input and your
support for the legislation as well. And I want to talk a
little bit about the impact of understaffing on some of these
specific safety issues. I led a PSI investigation a couple
years ago, found that female inmates in more than two thirds of
Federal prisons that housed female inmates, had faced sexual
abuse from BOP employees.
How do chronic understaffing issues lead to a higher
incidence of abuse? And again, just to clarify, make sure I
present the statistic correctly. In two thirds of Federal
prisons that housed female inmates, female inmates faced sexual
abuse from BOP employees, how is this linked to understaffing?
Mr. Wetzel. Yes. I think assault by a staff member, assault
by another incarcerated person, name any bad event, and the
very essence of stopping bad events is supervision. And you
design facilities and you design them with a staffing plan.
And so, when you have half the people to do that staffing
plan, and you have a hundred--let's say you have a hundred
housing units and you have 50 people to cover them, there's no
one on those housing units.
And at some point, the human beings on those housing units
who are locked in cells, have to come out of those cells. They
have to be fed, they have to get medication. There's a series
of things that happen, without people, it doesn't happen.
And so, when you get people out and there's nobody there,
there may be some folks who are among them who want to do harm
to them. So, it undermines supervision and that this--the
staffing shortages filter the whole way up.
One of the things that I think is a really good
illustration for you of what, how staffing impacts other things
is we heard about BOP issuing a memo about something, I forget
what it--what it was, but the memo was issued from the
director, and this is pre Collette, and you observed it,
several--the IG observed at several prisons that it wasn't
happening, right.
That communication has to happen through people. You're
talking about a 40 percent vacancy rate. These, I mean, these
guys need roller skates. I mean, if you've done a round, just a
round in a Federal prison, right, you think you can just walk
through and not get stopped by someone, or if something's going
on the, I mean, it--just, it's wide open for what can happen
when you have half the people you need. There's no kiosks in
corrections. It doesn't work like that.
Senator Ossoff. Well, thank you Mr. Wetzel, and thank you.
And one thing that's become very clear to me through the
oversight that I've worked on, on these issues is a shocking
statistic like that. It's not an indictment of the overall BOP
workforce. The overwhelming majority of correctional officers
are hardworking public servants who try to do the right thing
every day.
Failures by management, failures at headquarters, failures
at high levels of the Federal Government have put these teams
in impossible circumstances. And the Federal Prison Oversight
Act--a bipartisan bill with strong support across the board--is
vital to addressing these issues. Thank you all for your
testimony. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Booker. Thank you, Senator Ossoff, for your, not just
questions in this hearing, but for your work on these issues as
a senator and even before. And someone else who's worked with--
on these issues for a lot of his career. Senator Padilla you're
up for questioning.
Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to all the
panelists especially my friend Stephen Walker for being here
today. Come back to you in a minute. But we've--a lot of the
discussion I've tracked has dealt with the consequences of the
staffing shortages that has brought us to this point.
My first question is, in the spirit of a little bit of the
problem solving, you know, for years we know that BOP has been
experienced a staffing crisis with the consequences both for
correction staff as well as incarcerated individuals and know
that there's officers from California facilities who regularly
contact my office sharing what's going on in facilities
throughout the State and sharing the frustrations that they
face.
So, my question is actually for Mrs. White, what are the
greatest barriers in your opinion, not just to recruitment, and
not just to retention, but also to morale of correctional staff
and what recommendations you have for how they can be
addressed? You already started touching on it's more than just
funding, so.
Mrs. White. Correct. So, funding in my opinion, is the
biggest, compared to border patrol or ICE. Our officers make an
average of $37,000 a year less. That in itself would be a
morale booster to up their pay. But when we can address the pay
issue and bring more staff on board--I started 20 years ago and
it was a great place to work.
We had enough staff, we had enough staff to do the vast
majority of the duties that we needed to do. And that in
itself, having people, we had it--was more like a family than a
coworker. We had each other's back, we supported each other. If
I was running behind, my coworker would help.
We don't have that now because people are so frustrated. If
I call in sick, it leaves someone to get mandated and then
they're angry with me, it doesn't matter if I have a sick child
or anything like that. So, I think the staffing, the effect
it's had on the morale is huge. So, getting the staffing back
to where it could be is--would be my top priority.
Outside of that, we do absolutely have to focus on wellness
because as Mr. Walker was testifying to the PTSD rate of
correctional officers, our correctional staff is far above--
even studies show--even higher than military. Because we are
exposed to inmates or criminals who have been convicted day in
and day out.
None of them are happy to be in the location that they are.
They--not all of them--but a vast majority of them are not
pleasant to deal with. And we deal with that 5 to 7 days a
week, 8 to 16 hours a day, depending on--so if we can up our
wellness programs and get it back to more of a family, where we
support each other outside of the pay and increasing the
staffing. I think those are the biggest things on our plate
right now.
Senator Padilla. Thank you, both your comments and your
reference to Mr. Walker's. Good transition to my next question.
It's a--first is a comment for Mr. Walker and he can respond or
not respond is your choice. Because it's good to see you again.
The comment is this, I love you, brother. Thank you for being
here.
But let me tee up my question, you know, because I made
reference earlier that my office does hear from my officers
facilities throughout the State. Just most recently within the
last couple of weeks, FCI Victorville, FCI Mendota visited my
office to highlight how staffing shortages have compromised
their safety with specific examples, impeded their ability to
fulfill their responsibilities, and of course, negatively
impacts their lives outside of work, not just inside of work,
but outside of work, right.
They describe the emotional toll and strains on family that
it causes especially when it comes to you know, mandatory
overtime. Imagine those who are trying to make sure their young
children are taken care of, who we could give example after
example.
So, to address the staffing shortages, in addition to pay,
to your point Mrs. White, the Bureau must support its
corrections officers by ensuring they have that sufficient time
off and provide them with the necessary mental health and
wellness resources that they need.
So, Mr. Walker, you described some personal experience with
the Committee earlier in your testimony, whether it's specific
to the back-to-back mandatory shifts or anything else. Can you
give other examples of how the staffing shortages impacts
officers' lives and wellness and what are the suggestions you
have for the Senate?
Mr. Walker. Wow, that's a lot. First off, thank you Senator
and I love you too, sincerely, thank you for your friendship.
The problem of wellness within corrections is that they treat
it like it's a one off. This is not--it has to be something
preventative and it has to be comprehensive, ongoing,
continuous, because the environment that you're steeped in
every single day is relentless in its assault.
As Ms. White testified to, prisons are not happy places. No
one wants to be there. So, the ability to mitigate, to address
the impact that you are walking into a place where your
hypervigilance is continuously activated, and the amount of
dopamine and cortisol, and epinephrine and everything else is
continuously flooding you. And you have no idea that that's
happening. There has to be an education process to help you
understand and to help your family understand those--the
ramifications of that, so that you can create the preventative
measures internally, externally, and personally.
Because it--there's no way you get away from it. And, and I
know we're running over time, but there's a tremendous amount
of work that has to be done, and we can't simply believe it's
the blue pill and that we're just going to keep on in the
excitement of existence in the system.
Senator Padilla. Right. Mr. Chairman, I know my time is up.
I'll just end with this comment because based on Mr. Walker's
response and for consideration of the panelists and this
Committee, what is PTSD when there is no P? That's what you
just described.
Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chair Booker. Wow. Before I go to Mr. Welch, I just want to
warn Mr. Walker, given the power and potency of Senator Padilla
love, you've exceeded your amount of love you're allowed to
receive in a Senate hearing.
And for the sense of proportionality and balance, I just
want to let all the other witnesses know, that I love you, as
well.
[Laughter.]
Chair Booker. Senator Welch.
Senator Welch. I love you too.
[Laughter.]
Senator Welch. And it's nice to meet you.
[Laughter.]
Senator Welch. It is just a chill place when we got Senator
Booker in charge, right?
[Laughter.]
Senator Welch. But you know what, I really do--we do
appreciate you. I mean, it's incredible work you do. It's hard
work and dangerous work at times. And so, thank you. I just
want to express that gratitude to you. You know, I want to ask
you--a couple of you--on the basis of your experience,
something is relevant to us in Vermont. We don't have a
residential reentry facility. We're one of only two States, in
fact, I think we're really the only one. Hawaii had one, and
there were some issues there. They want to get another one.
But and I'm a former public defender, so I've dealt with a
lot of people that you deal with after the court process. But I
know Mr. Wetzel, you've had a lot of experience with this in
Pennsylvania, and I would like you to just explain why
residential reentry programs are really beneficial for the
criminal justice system, for public safety and of course for
the well-being of the person who's moving from the end of their
sentence in that last 12 months to the community. Could you do
that for us?
Mr. Wetzel. I could, and thank you. And I got to tell you,
let me pander a little bit in prepping and the work we're
doing, really----
Senator Welch. You know, you--my experience here, you don't
get resistance on pandering from U.S. Senators.
Mr. Wetzel. Well, I figured I felt all the love in the room
from the Chairman, so I figured I'd share it myself. But I got
to spend some time with your director Nick Demel----
Senator Welch. Right.
Mr. Wetzel [continuing]. And in several of your prisons
actually looking at national staffing with the Correctional
Leaders Association. And I think if you'd ask him or ask
anyone, imagine somebody being locked up for 1, 3, 5, 7 years,
10 years, imagine just the amount of technology that's been
developed----
Senator Welch. Right.
Mr. Wetzel [continuing]. To go from incarceration--and
incarceration right now--and I keep looking back to these guys
because it's never felt like this inside facilities before. I
mean, 30 years, 35 years, you know, even systems that didn't
put an emphasis on rehabilitation necessarily. There was a
relationship, like it was relational between correctional staff
and incarcerated people.
And some of that modeling modified behavior, that--so the--
and on top of just the need to give people tools to adjust to
society after being locked up, just decisionmaking.
Mr. Wetzel. Right. You don't make decisions when you're
incarcerated. You don't pick what to eat. So, just kind of
getting used to that in a world that's flying was always
important. There are no services inside prisons. You don't have
a 40 percent vacancy rate and think you're delivering high
quality programming and preparing people to get out.
So, I mean, right now I think it's even more important that
you have these--you guys call them residential reentry centers
at the Federal level or halfway houses where people can come up
first, take a breath, right?
Senator Welch. Right.
Mr. Wetzel. Get out, get used to it, and then start
plugging them into services, like in Pennsylvania, we have a
great career link network, right. That we can leverage off
other systems from the State to get people and help people get
back on their feet and become contributing members. So, it's a
really critical, really critical.
Senator Welch. Thank you. And I'll ask you, Mrs. Moore
White, as well to get your thoughts on that.
Mrs. White. I mean, I have to second what he said.
Typically, in prison, you don't have a cell phone. We do--we
now have tablets and stuff like that, but it--I can only
imagine it is life altering walking out of a prison into
society today.
And I flash back to Shawshank Redemption, and when they
released the guy from prison or whatever, he truly, like, he
asked his boss, can I go to the restroom boss? It's a different
world. And so, any transition time that they could have from
prison until fully outside without supervision, I think is
extremely helpful.
Senator Welch. Okay. I thank you very much. And I yield
back, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Booker. I'm very grateful. Ms. Nance, you have an
interesting perspective that I think is really valuable that
I'd like to pull out a little bit more. And I'd like to ask you
the question of understanding your--what the inmates are going
through and the lack of support from the understaffing.
How does that affect, in your opinion, the preparedness of
inmates to reenter society? Why is this conversation we're
having so vital, not just for the inmates being released, but
also the communities into which they're being released?
Ms. Nance. Thank you, Chair. I definitely want to echo
everything that has been said amongst the other witnesses. I do
think that there's a very high relationship that could happen
when it comes to the people who are working in facilities and
the incarcerated people.
So, I've seen personally, in my experience, the best
outcome when those relationships are strong. So, I talk a
little bit about my loved one, but one of the things that's
been very beneficial to him is when there is someone like a
unit manager who is in his building that is trying to have
their back and really trying to make sure that they do have
access to the resources that they need.
So, for instance, even paperwork. Like, I've been trying to
get this paperwork, get this request in so that I can go to the
law library and people aren't listening, they're not getting my
paperwork. I'm trying to request medicine.
There's a unit manager in my loved one's building that will
say, I got you. And it might take a week, it might take a
couple weeks, it might take a few days, but she always gets
back to them. And that really makes a difference.
And I do know that he's told me that she suffers from
burnout and depression because she might be one of the only
people who's willing to go there and give her all like a 100
percent, to her job just because she cares about the human
beings that are behind the walls.
So, it really does impact those individuals because at the
end of the day, like you said, 95, 90 percent, whatever that
figure is, people are going to come home. So, the better we can
make the environment for them, the better they're going to be
when they do reenter society.
Chair Booker. So, no, I really appreciate you testifying
to--really the fact that there are so many people that are
working in corrections that are trying to do the right thing by
their inmates, but are unable because they're stressed out,
they're overtaxed, they're unable to do the jobs that they were
designed to do.
But just to push a little bit more on the impact, not
specifically your loved one, individually, but on an issue, I
think Mr. Mangual explored really well in his testimony about
this idea of recidivism rates and how high they are.
Is it your experience that should inmates get the kind of
resources they were intended to get, not just for the First
Step Act, but even go back 10, 15 years ago, that these
recidivism rates could come down?
Ms. Nance. Absolutely, Senator. I think what's really,
really interesting about programming in prisons is it gets
talked about in a way that feels very, very frequent, right.
But what happens is there are people who have case plans, there
are people who also have interests.
So, the more that we can connect them to things that are
not necessarily them sitting inside a cell, the more likely
they're going to be to have hope, to have morale, to be able to
do something that's bigger than themselves and take their
journey on rehabilitation.
Like I heard Mr. Walker say that there was a time where
people were really trying to do their job of rehabilitation and
say, Okay, this is what I'm doing when I go to work. And I do
think that that mentality could really have an impact on our
system and have an impact on recidivism.
Chair Booker. And what I've found, I think every human has
found that when you apply yourself to some task that demands
discipline and hard work, and you begin to see the rewards of
that, whether it's advancing in your own education or in
programs to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, that that sort of
training you get from grit prepares you for other areas.
And when you're denied choices or the opportunity to
experience that, it has an impact on what your behavioral
patterns will be when you're released from incarceration,
correct?
Ms. Nance. Absolutely. So, I would say that even as a human
being, like all of us, we've all experienced accomplishments,
we've all experienced what that looks like to be able to say, I
did it. Like that pushes you forward, that makes you a better
person, that makes you a more productive member of society,
that makes you better in yourself.
And that is no different for incarcerated people. And they
need to have that opportunity to be able to do that and feel
accomplished and be better for when they come home.
Chair Booker. Right. And I live in a community that I would
consider being over incarceration, but I talk to young men that
come home, and if they haven't had exposure to opportunities to
develop these skills and often felt like they were treated like
an animal inside, that when they come back out, you often see
them not able to rehabilitate and going back to the same kind
of patterns and often coming with mental health conditions and
others that were worsened while they were there. That really
has an impact on the safety of communities. Would you agree?
Ms. Nance. Absolutely, Senator. There's so big of a hole in
mental health resources behind the walls. And I--my personal
therapist, she'll say, does he have access to mental health
services? And I'm like, no, he does not.
But I do think that really trying to shift that mindset,
from behind the walls and really being able to communicate with
people in a way that is not an institutionalized mindset would
definitely prepare them for reentering society.
Chair Booker. And so, when I was mayor of the city of
Newark and I started seeing the recidivism rates, I knew that I
could lower my crime rates in my community if I could do
something to lower those recidivism rates.
And we did a lot of things in partnership with the
Manhattan Institute, was which actually one of my best allies
when I was mayor and setting up programs to attack what I
thought was a source--one of the sources of crimes is these
populations coming out of prison that were not prepared to
reintegrate.
Mr. Walker and Mrs. White, my heart is really heavy about
knowing what correctional officers face every single day. I
thought the wise comment--he shouldn't just come in here and
drop wisdom and then just walk out like that.
But Senator Padilla, who talked about PTSD, not--the P is
really not there. One of my best experiences as mayor was
working with law enforcement and seeing the trials and
tribulations of my police officers, but yet they're also in
environments where they get to be a hero, they get the
approbation of communities, they get the support.
But I look at my correctional officers, and they're not in
those kind of environments. And they don't have the same,
unimaginable stressors. It's just a disproportionate amount of
that. And Mr. Walker, before I get to Mrs. White, I think you
can speak to that in a personal way about us as a society
creating these institutions that put so much stress and strain
on the correctional officers themselves.
And not only don't support our correctional officers, but
put them in environments where there has in been increased
deterioration of their well-being and what the consequences of
that are. And I'm wondering if you can speak to that for me
Mr. Walker. Mr. Chair, yes. Look, these systems were
designed to punish people. And the byproduct of it, of the not
fully continuing to consider it, is that the people that you
put into that environment are also being traumatized.
They are experiencing traumatic incidents every day, and
there's nothing in the hiring description or the job
description that forewarns you of what you're going to
experience, and how to not vicariously pass that on to your
loved ones, to your children. Because the thing that I'll--I'm
willing to bet you, any one of these officers sitting behind me
or Mrs. White will tell you that their significant other has
told them at some point, ``don't talk to me like I'm an
inmate''.
Because we flip this switch when we walk into this
environment. And it's not that anybody ever tells you that you
have to do it. It's so ingrained in the culture and the
institution that you pick it up as a survival mechanism. It's a
human that--it's one of the traits of,----
Chair Booker. So, under normal circumstances, Mr. Walker,
we should be doing more for the mental health and well-being of
our correctional officers. But that the added stressor of under
staffing to me, and again I----
Mr. Walker. Yes.
Chair Booker [continuing]. Talked to a lot of the Capitol
police officers, when we had our worst period post January 6,
where officers were being held over again and again and I would
talk to parents and things--I didn't even think through, not as
a parent myself, about what kind of chaos it throws your family
into----
Mr. Walker. Yes.
Chair Booker [continuing]. So now you have the stressors of
the job plus the stressors of understaffing and what that
means. It just seems to me almost like you're throwing your
correctional officers into a kind of punishment prison
environment in and of itself----
Mr. Walker. Yes.
Chair Booker [continuing]. Not to mention then being
underpaid and feeling the financial strains----
Mr. Walker. And the lack of public not--appreciation's not
the appropriate word, because nobody's doing it for the pat on
the back, but there's this stigma attached to being a
correctional officer and people just don't look at the job as
something of value to the--to society.
Chair Booker. And so, you said something Mrs. White in your
testimony, and I put it in quotes here because I just wanted to
come back to you on it. You talked about upping our wellness
programs.
Mrs. White. Correct.
Chair Booker. I really--and I've talked to FOP, I've talked
to a lot of law enforcement organizations, because they're all
concerned about suicide rates in law enforcement in general.
And I don't think Americans fully understand what--from our
border patrol agents all the way to our correctional officer
what it means to do this work.
But I just want that ``up our wellness programs.'' I just
want you to flash that out. Like, what would you want from
Congress if we were--if you had a chance to help mandate when
it comes to that kind of wellness, what would you tell us to
do?
Because I know in the last panel, I could see it in a
bipartisan way, it affecting people when they started hearing
these issues of mental health for our correctional officers.
Mrs. White. Sure. I think the list is extremely lengthy.
Something that I didn't get to hit on with Mr. Padilla, that I
think also would increase wellness and staff morale is support
from the top of our agency. We hear a lot of policy changes and
you going to get this and you going to get that. And, you know,
we're so busy dotting our i's and crossing our t's with
paperwork that we don't truly see the human aspect anymore.
And that's what I was trying to hit on 20 years ago. It
felt more like a family. We had bonfires together. We would go
get a drink together or, or hang out. For birthdays we would,
you know, I started in health services, we would take an after-
hours trip and go to a restaurant and celebrate. And people
were so burned out that they don't even do that.
My husband is a former combat veteran and correctional
officer. So, we, you know, just activities outside of our
house, we don't typically do because of the PTSD and the stress
and the, things that we take home. I think there's a ton of
things, exercise programs.
I think that exploring additional activities because we get
so locked into our careers and what we do that we don't, if you
ask me right now what I enjoy doing outside of here, I do union
stuff 24/7.
I don't have an activity that I could tell you I enjoy. I
think those things are essential to helping the wellness of our
staff. And as Mr. Walker had said, actually identifying that we
are under stress is a huge thing. A lot of our officers are
assaulted and they want to go straight back to post because
that's who we are.
We don't want to accept that we have been harmed in any way
that we may need to decompress and take a moment. It's--that's
huge in corrections. We're, you know, we have to prove that we
are big and bad and somebody, and so we walk back into a place
where we just got assaulted from.
I think things of that nature are detrimental to us. I
think that we have to be able to identify, first that we're
under stress and we're not good at that. But then at offer
programs, our--the Bureau offers something called EAP, Employee
Assistance Program. You can call, you get like six free
sessions a year. But the stigma behind actually utilizing that
service is horrendous. And so, our employees will not do that.
Chair Booker. So, I hope you'll work with my staff----
Mrs. White. Absolutely.
Chair Booker. Will kind of move across the law enforcement
about how can we start emphasizing mental health.
Mrs. White. Absolutely.
Chair Booker. I just want to pull this out because my staff
really thought it was an important point. Seven years ago, I
guess we did a hiring freeze----
Mrs. White. Yes.
Senator Booker [continuing]. And it was one of the--it was
almost like the straw that broke the camel's back? Mrs. White.
Absolutely.
Chair Booker. Could you explain that to--for the record?
Mrs. White. Sure. So, 2016, we had a lot of vacant
positions. I think that was kind of the start of what I call
the perfect storm. Twenty years ago, people were knocking down
the door to come to the Bureau of Prisons. It was a great
salary. I doubled my salary. I was a pharmacy technician prior
to coming into the prison. I applied three different times.
People were knocking down the door to get into our agency.
The pay and the benefits were phenomenal. You didn't really
think about the--like Mr. Walker said, you don't really read,
and know the mental toll that it will take on you. It was the
pay and the benefits that was the pull to coming in--and I
totally lost my train of thought. Tell me your question again--
--
Chair Booker. No, no.
Mrs. White. I'm so sorry.
Chair Booker. No. What happened 7 years ago?----
Mrs. White. Sure.
Chair Booker [continuing]. That was with straw that broke
the camel's back.
Mrs. Walker. So, it was a unspoken, we had 6 or 7,000
vacant positions, and the agency was unofficially told to
freeze them----
Chair Booker. Right.
Mrs. White [continuing]. And from that point the agency has
shuffled and juggled numbers and percentages to the point that
it wasn't a true, we are not hiring. It wasn't a true cutoff,
but they weren't hiring. And so even--because they weren't
hiring and then through attrition, we lost even more
individuals.
And honestly, I can't tell you that it's the agency, or,
DOJ or who we for many years have tried to pull out where these
freezes are coming from. But it is detrimental, and that was
the start. 2016 was the start of the downfall.
I came in, in 2004, 2003, we had a legal decision we called
mission critical. And prior to me coming, my home institution
for a city, Arkansas, we had four people on the compound to
basically just monitor and run the compound and the traffic. We
now on a good day, have two individuals to do that. They called
it mission critical, and they cut a lot of positions.
And then the 2016, they froze all the positions. And so, it
has just been a constant decline from that point. And so that's
what I was telling, I think Senator Ossoff as far as when we--
when the council goes out and meets with congressional
officials, we have asked for staffing. We have asked for pay,
we have asked for a lot of things, but we have tried to hone in
because while every year we've been successful in getting
additional pay and stuff like that, we have not truly been
successful in getting additional officers added, even though
the number is 20,446 and we set around 12,000 officers.
Chair Booker. Could you just inform the floor if I'm not
necessary for this vote, you can close the vote out. Okay. I'm
just being pushed because there's a floor vote going on right
now, but if I'm not essential for it. I want to stay on point
just because we have this extraordinary opportunity to flesh
some of this out.
And so that seemed in the previous panel this afternoon to
Mr. Wetzel, the problem that I saw, is there's just no way to
catch up, when the competition for people who are willing to do
this kind of work is so fierce.
And I want you to flesh that out for me because she's
saying I'm trying to hire people when I'm offering them less
pay, more difficult working conditions and hours. I mean, who
would choose this job if I could work in State corrections,
county corrections, in the free market where we're in a high
labor demand market, there's just no way out of this hole
unless Congress does something to create financial incentives.
Am I wrong or am I right?
Mr. Wetzel. No. You're a hundred percent right. And, plus
you don't even have the agility to be competitive in a market
where you're competing with everyone. So, what's left is folks
who--I mean 5 to 15 year. So, you're in so long you can't get
out. I mean, one of the things that is a cautionary tale that
should scare us to death is the retention rate of new people
coming into corrections.
I saw reported in Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
budget hearing, 37 percent within 18 months. There's systems
that are--have about a 20 percent retention rate, year one. So,
what that signals is that look, when you're in it at some
period of time, it's all you know, you talk about rallying.
Sadly, for us, it's the get it done kind of mentality means
we're going to get it done and the folks who are in are going
to stay in. It's running new people out, because when you have
no point of reference and you go through training and you hear
this aspirational stuff, and you look at this generation who
wants to be mission driven, and you come in and there's
supposed to be two people working with you, and you're by
yourself and it doesn't recognize anything, and you can make
the same amount of money across the street, it's not going to
happen.
Chair Booker. And so, you're one of the people I look to,
and I have a ton of respect for, because I think you have a
view of the whole--the sort of correctional complex in the
country. There's no way out of this trap--you can just give me
yes or no. There's no way out of this trap we're in right now,
unless we find ways to make a more financially attractive
career, not job, a career path for people who are thinking
about going into corrections. Is that correct, yes?
Mr. Wetzel. No. Actually, you can't throw money at it, it's
not--that's not going to fix it.
Chair Booker. Okay.
Mr. Wetzel. You have to fundamentally change the work
conditions. Yes. I mean, if this was a warehouse, you won't
work in a warehouse where you have a chance of getting stabbed
every day.
Senator Booker. Right.
Mr. Wetzel. And if you could work at a warehouse and make
less, and you're not invested in the pension and the kind of
stuff, why wouldn't you?
Chair Booker. Right.
Mr. Wetzel. We have to fund, I mean, there's no--when you
look at--just look at the State employers and State prison
systems are two or three employer, add county jails. You're
talking about huge numbers of correctional officers around the
country, right. So, you would think there'd be career
concentrations in corrections. You would think academia, we
need other sectors to pay attention. We need strategies for
other sectors that have worked in this crisis.
We can't keep--this is like Henry Ford said, ``If I asked
what people what they wanted, they would've said build faster
horses.'' We're well beyond--you can't throw money at a
situation.
Chair Booker. Right.
Mr. Wetzel. How much can I pay you to go risk your life?
Chair Booker. Right. Now, that's wise. And I see Mr.
Walker, Mrs. White just shaking their heads up and down and
smiling like----
Mr. Wetzel. Well, in any other world, it wouldn't even be a
question----
Chair Booker. Right.
Mr. Wetzel [continuing]. Just in corrections, all of a
sudden, we think--we apply different rules that defy logic
anywhere else in the world, and then we expect good outcomes
from that, it may--it defies logic even more than most things
in this building do. I'm sorry.
Chair Booker. I want to get into two more things real
quick. There was a lot of--the Inspector General was talking
about contraband being snuck into prisons. The danger of
telephones in prisons and more. And I figure I--it would be
nice to ask people who actually have been correctional officers
about how do you stop contraband coming into prisons. Because I
think that was something else that I think people left thinking
about. Well, if we just make it a felony and not a misdemeanor
and some quick answers and solutions.
But I think you-all probably have some wisdom on this. How
do you stop this contraband that endangers officers as well.
How do you stop the contraband from coming into prisons? I'm
going to allow it a jump ball.
[Laughter.]
Mrs. White. I can start.
Chair Booker. Yes.
Mrs. White. More equipment, more staff are definitely
helpful. But----
Chair Booker. More equipment, meaning screeners and----
Mrs. White. Not necessarily, so they're--Senator Cotton is
on like a cell phone jamming bill----
Chair Booker. Yes.
Mrs. White [continuing]. That's super helpful, if we could
jam the signal to the cell phones and the drones that are
dropping drugs into our prison----
Chair Booker. Yes.
Mrs. White [continuing]. That's incredibly helpful. There
is technology out there. It is costly.
Chair Booker. Yes. Okay. Excellent. Mr. Walker, did you
have something to add?
Mr. Walker. Creating penalties for it is not the answer.
Look, I'm sitting in a cell and I know that it's illegal and
I'm going to do it anyway because I have a need. So, I think
that's part of the thought process or the thought exercise that
has to take place is--not the illegal part obviously, but the
part where the guy just needs a cell phone so he can stay in
contact with his family, his--who--so the need part undercuts
some of that contraband introduction into the system.
Specifically, in the area of cell phones, I think the
tablets--like California, we're doing the tablets now. So, it--
so that communication of being able to talk with your children,
talk to your loved one, that's cutting down some of that, the
blockers--it's not a blocker, but it's an authorization
process, so it's tracking everything. And someone mentioned it
in the hearing this morning----
Chair Booker. Yes.
Mr. Walker [continuing]. Is that they can track every call
that's made in----
Chair Booker. And so those three things----
Mr. Walker [continuing]. And around the State prisons.
Chair Booker [continuing]. One is this--the rates at which,
the cost at which to make these calls, the difficulties is to
communicate your family. If you create ease of communication,
the pressure for people getting phones for that--and those who
want those phones to continue to do illegal activity outside,
though, that's where the equipment that you're talking about.
Mr. Walker. Yes.
Chair Booker [continuing]. Is more helpful.
Mr. Walker. Yes.
Chair Booker. That's really helpful. I don't know if----
Mr. Wetzel. Let me just add this. Any other sector, you'd
say technology, for the military, they--you R and D, and you'd
have this stuff that didn't require staff. Our answers in
corrections, against this, we want to throw staff at it or we
want to lock more people up that we don't have the resources to
manage anyhow.
Chair Booker. Right.
Mr. Wetzel. So, all our discussion is around the two things
we cannot do, this--we have to pull from other sectors. It's
technology, it's creativity, it's academia. It's bright young
minds coming in the field and thinking differently.
Chair Booker. That's--I'm grateful you said that. Just Mr.
Wetzel, I want to stay on you. There are thousands of released
folks on home confinement. Their recidivism rates are
dramatically low. If they're compliant right now, is there any
reason to bring them back in?
Mr. Wetzel. Absolutely not. At a hearing about staffing at
a 40 percent vacancy rate. That should be criminal, if you're
going to bring somebody back who's not committing a crime.
Chair Booker. Okay. Before I close out Mr. Mangual, because
I just love and respect the academic work you do and the
studies you do, and you said something that I maybe want to
have a hearing on. And it's a bipartisan bill that I have
called the VICTIM Act, because in communities like mine, the
closeout rates for serious violent crime is so low.
And there's a great researcher that I read back in my
mayoral days who said, inner city communities often have too
much law enforcement that they don't need, which is low level
drug crimes and not enough law enforcement that they do need.
And so our bill, the VICTIM Act, is to try to get a lot
more resources to close out those serious violent crimes, which
the closeout rates are so low, really affirming, which my
experience really was in line with what you said, that the
number of people committing minor crimes when I was mayor were
just a small group of individuals who, when I first became
mayor, our closeout rate on murders was like 20 percent. I used
to joke that this is the best place in America to kill somebody
because it's so unlikely that you'll get caught.
Would you affirm the part of what I just said that said
that, like, something has to be done in getting law enforcement
the resources they need to focus on the criminals that are at
the center of a lot of the larger, more serious crimes?
Mr. Mangual. Absolutely. But I do think it's important to
recognize that there is a lot of overlap between offenders who
commit the most serious crimes and offenders who commit some of
them lower-level crimes.
And one of the most interesting statistics out of the early
1990's in New York when then Chief Bratton of the Transit
Police Department in 1990 started a big fare evasion program,
right. And, you know, I think people rightly think of fare
evasion is a relatively low-level offense.
Two statistics that came out of that enforcement program I
think really shocked a lot of people and created a lot of
support for the kind of broken window strategy that you know,
caught hold after that. One was that somewhere around 1 in 20
of the individuals who were arrested for evading the fare had
an illegal weapon on them.
And something like one in seven were found to have an
outstanding felony warrant, which is, you know, a two pretty
significant figures. And what that tells us is that most
criminals don't specialize. I think the research makes this
pretty clear, which means that tomorrow's shooter can be
yesterday's retail thief. Yesterday's thief can be, you know,
next week's car thief, et cetera.
So, I wouldn't necessarily sort of push the paradigm that,
you know, the only way to sort of solve the more serious crimes
is to abandon enforcement on the lower level stuff. I think
it's important to put ourselves in a situation in which we can
do both.
And one of the things that, you know, is very clear, and
there's great research by Anthony Braga, who's a professor now
at the University of Pennsylvania, which is developing into one
of the best criminology departments in the country, frankly,
looking at clearance rates for non-fatal shootings. Because we
see so many resources get diverted into homicide
investigations, which understandably so you know, non-fatal
shootings, which are the only difference between a fatal
shooting and a non-fatal shooting is usually aim and chance.
They don't get as many resources.
And when you increase those resources, when you put the
same amount of time in, what they found is that you can
increase the clearance rate, but all of that really comes down
to a question of resources. And like I said, during my
testimony, writ large across the board, the criminal justice
systems throughout this country are underfunded on so many
counts. A lot of the bad results that we see and that we want
to improve are simply a function of our inability to correctly
staff, to have morale, to have high quality individuals taking
these positions and dedicating themselves and doing them well.
And part of that is, you know, creating pay parity. You
know, part of that is, you know, having incentives, you know,
promotional ceilings being raised and giving people a sense of
ownership and pride in the work that they do.
But really, it's just a function of building out that
infrastructure. So many departments, police departments,
correctional departments are working off technology that's 30,
40 years old, you know, there are no data scientists within
these institutions doing the kinds of analysis to inform the
deployment of resources in any kind of strategic way that----
Chair Booker. So, there's enough head nodding on this
Committee when as you're talking, you're getting a lot of
affirmation. I want to just sort of end on this because when
you fairly talked about the First Step Act and the analysis we
have--so far is only a shorter period of time. It's not that 8-
year window you were discussing.
But I guess what frustrates me, not with anything you said,
but just frustrates me in general, is what I started seeing
when I was mayor, which was when we were punishing--thought we
were this--better punishing inmates by taking away Pell Grants
and all of these things, when all the data showed a dollar
invested in allowing somebody a pathway, people with--coming
out with BAs, where MAs have dramatically lower rates.
And I don't remember the exact data point, but it was
something like every dollar spent in education programs paid
for itself, returned to the taxpayer in terms of just the
reduced recidivism rates.
And so, to have a First Step Act that, as Senator
Whitehouse said, so passionately, that is not being done
because we don't have the staff to do it. This is something
good to pursue because the data you're talking about recidivism
would go down even further if there was actually access to the
programs that were articulated by the 86 members of the Senate
that voted for that Act. Would you agree with that?
Mr. Mangual. Yes. Look, I think that's certainly the hope,
but it's again, it's hard to know if we don't have the
resources to properly implement these things I mean, one of the
most staggering statistics that came out of the last year
annual report on the First Step Act was that about 29,000
individuals had been released as a result of the First Step
Act.
And if you look at the breakdown of individuals who had
received any of the evidence-based recidivism reduction
programs, about 14,000, almost half hadn't received any
programs. Now, part--a big part of that was because a good
chunk of that number never actually entered a BOP facility.
But, you know, also part--and partly because they just
receive lower sentences, but, you know, being able to
faithfully implement these things, they take time, they take
resources. If you don't have those, you simply can't actually
flesh out the plan for--to any level where we can, you know,
say with any kind of, you know, scientific certainty whether it
works.
Chair Booker. Mr. Mangual, you and I are going to agree
there, and I'm going to professionalize saying your name
correctly. I just want to say a few points before we close
because I have seen how--and this goes to the point we're
talking about--how when a kid gets caught up in the system
early it actually can create cycles of criminality, because of
the experiences they have in the criminal justice system.
And, you know, there's the very famous cases like Kalief
Browder and others where he was accused of stealing a backpack,
waited for 2 years before being even adjudicated. My first time
I went to Rikers with Jared Kushner's father, Charlie Kushner,
I asked the kids how long they'd been incarcerated, and they
were like, you know, 6 months, 8 months, a year. And I said,
well, what have you been convicted of? And they hadn't been
convicted.
And, many of them had spent time in solitary confinement.
And the difference between that experience and the experience
where I grew up in an affluent neighborhood where kids would
often do the same kind of things, would have station house
adjustments and never enter a system that traumatized them in
the first place.
And so, this idea that we create low-level penalties, and I
struggled with this when I was mayor, that yes, when we
stopped--we started saying, we're not going to ignore. And this
idea of ignoring crimes, if there's no accountability, then
you're inviting the thing to continue. It's just like common
sense, right?
So, we said this, open air drinking, which was the biggest
complaints I got from citizens in my community. You know, we
were going to start to talk, we weren't going to take people to
prison, we weren't going to give them the kind of ticket that
would create a poverty trap.
And we did find people that had illegal possession of
firearms and the likes. I'm not disagreeing with that. But what
I'm disagreeing with in terms of policy is creating a system
that takes our children into the system, traumatizes them, they
come back out, they start falling further and further behind in
school, or what have you.
We have to find a way to create a system that reflects the
best of our values. And it starts with supporting the
professionals that are a part of doing a job. Ms. White, when
you talked about the mission of corrections, it is not just
punishment. It is not, no correctional officer will say that.
It's so much of about this understanding that we are a society
that believes in rehabilitation, that believes in redemption,
and creating systems that promote and support that which
ultimately doing that to public safety.
I am really grateful for this panel and for you all,
allowing this engagement. I'm grateful for my Ranking Member
who I have a lot of respect for because I know he's seeking the
same ends that I am in our society, safe, strong communities.
I'm really happy that my friends, like Senator Padilla talked
about love because we're ultimately trying to create a more
beloved community here in our country.
And today in the United States Senate, the five of you have
really brought, I think the best of not just testimony, the
best of heart and intention to help us to solve very, very
difficult problems. I have learned a lot from you, and I know
that the record will reflect. I hope the makings of some
bipartisan ideas to really advance it, including the bill that
we're looking at now as a result of this morning's hearing,
which is Ranking Member Cotton's bill, directly to your idea of
creating better equipment.
Thank you everybody for your time, for your testimony. I
know there's some official closing remarks I'm supposed to
make, and I know the word love is not in them. Let me see.
Closing, here it goes.
Thank you to our Ranking Member, Senator Cotton. I think
I've done that already. Yes, sufficiently. Thank you to each of
our Subcommittee Members who are not here to hear this, special
thank you to our witnesses. I think I've given you a special
thank you. Federal and State prisons are suffering from
overstaffing. There's language that reflects what I've already
said.
This is the stuff I have to say. I want to remind the
Members of the Subcommittee that questions for the record are
due a week from today, Wednesday, a week from today at 5 p.m.
And I ask that the witnesses, and I know as busy as you are, as
understaffed and undersupported as you are, might be in your
job, please respond to those questions in a timely manner. They
will be more helpful than you know from a Committee that really
wants to do some substantive work in this area.
And with that, this hearing is adjourned. I'm grateful.
[Whereupon, at 4:30 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[Additional material submitted for the record follows.]
A P P E N D I X
Submitted by Senator Booker:
American Federation of State County (AFSCME) and Municipal
Employees Correctional Staffing Crisis........................ 84
AMIRACLE4SURE, The Nation's Correctional Staffing Crisis:
Assessing the Toll on Correctional Officers and Incarcerated
Persons....................................................... 365
Braggs v. Dunn (2017)............................................ 87
Braggs v. Dunn (2021)............................................ 175
Correctional Leaders Association (CLA)........................... 360
Mount, Makayla, letter........................................... 363
Major County Sheriffs of America (MCSA), The Nation's
Correctional Staffing Crisis: Assessing the Toll on
Correctional Officers and Incarcerated Persons................ 368
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Correctional Staffing........ 370
Submitted by Senator Cotton:
Bureau of Prisions, MANY Vacancies, screenshot................... 380
Major County Sheriffs of America (MCSA), The Nation's
Correctional Staffing Crisis: Assessing the Toll on
Correctional Officers and Incarcerated Persons................ 368
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[all]