Wisconsin’s top prison official wrote to the governor in 2015 with a dire warning: The state prisons were dangerously understaffed, endangering both guards and inmates. Today, two of the state’s prisons have been in lockdown for months. Prison officials who initially blamed the restrictions on violent outbursts have since admitted that a shortage of guards has kept the lockdowns in place, reports the New York Times. The state had known for years that it was losing guards faster than it could replace them, an examination by the Times and Wisconsin Watch found. Almost half the jobs for guards at the state’s maximum-security prisons were unfilled in mid-2023, up from just 10 percent at the start of 2017, an analysis of Department of Corrections data showed.
The lack of personnel drove prison officials to take extreme shortcuts in how they ran the facilities. Even so, state leaders did not take significant steps until last year, long after the earliest problems were apparent. Wisconsin’s struggle to staff its prisons reflects how the job of prison guard, long seen as a stable position with generous benefits, has become increasingly undesirable. Working conditions deteriorated as the pandemic ravaged aging correctional facilities, and other entry-level jobs suddenly began offering higher wages. The number of people employed by state prisons fell in 2022 to its lowest point in more than two decades.