Despite annual recruitment goals described by a state prison official, the number of working corrections officers in Michigan has been in decline for years. A memo from the Director of the Department of Corrections outlined plans to expand recruitment, and acknowledged complaints of an exhausted workforce.
On September 4, in a converted wing that used to be a prisoner housing unit at Cooper Street Correctional Facility in Jackson County, Taylor Burgett sweated through a physical fitness test he wasn’t sure he could pass to keep his aspirations of becoming a corrections officer alive.
Nearly three hours into a corrections officer recruitment event at the prison hosted by the Michigan Department of Corrections, Burgett is one of only a small handful of people who showed up. He’s tired of his job as a baggage handler at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, and sees practical reasons to change industries.
“I wanted to move to Michigan because the cost of living is just so much better,” Burgett said. “(Being a corrections officer) is a public service job. And there’s more chance for upward mobility than there is in my current job.”
Burgett passes his physical fitness test — he said the worst part was 10 burpees — and when some paperwork clears he’ll be ready to enroll in the next corrections officer training academy in October.
At the Cooper Street recruitment event, Assistant Deputy Warden Nick Leslie didn’t want to answer specific questions about staff vacancies at the facility, but acknowledged some staffing difficulties.
“Staffing has its challenges, but it’s not in an inoperable state,” Leslie said. “It’s like any employers. If you get out there and talk to some of the big companies, I think that everybody’s looking for good people.”
Later that afternoon, the Michigan Corrections Organization — the union for officers — published a report claiming nearly a third of guard positions at Cooper Street Correctional Facility are vacant. As a result of the staffing crunch, it said officers are “forced to work double shifts multiple times per week and frequently on back-to-back days with no relief in sight.
Throughout the summer the union has complained about severe understaffing and the near-constant use of mandated overtime by administrators at multiple state facilities.
“The sheer mental and physical fatigue is first and foremost,” Michigan Corrections Organization President Byron Osborn told Michigan Public. “People aren’t able to have regular family time. They can’t even get regular tasks done. It’s work 16 hours, try go home and get some sleep, and come right back.
Osborne wrote an open letter to Governor Gretchen Whitmer in July asking her to put National Guard troops to work in prisons, to give corrections officers and provide relief from mandatory overtime. Whitmer’s office deferred to MDOC, which never issued a public response.
The precise picture of staffing levels is different at every prison. Corrections department recruitment manager LaChelle Fuller said she couldn’t answer questions about mandatory overtime or staffing vacancies, but said her goal is to hire 800 new officers per year. She said in 2019, she hired 842 officers. But the current pace of recruiting hasn’t been enough to offset a decades-long decline in the total number of working officers. State data shows the total number of corrections officers employed by the state declined more than 25% from 2020 to 2022.
Also on the same day as the Cooper Street recruitment event, September 4, Department of Corrections Director Heidi Washington sent a memo to department employees requesting volunteer participation in a “special staffing mission” to address staffing concerns at at Alger Correctional Facility in Munising.
“We have been facing staffing challenges at the facility and our coworkers need our support,” the memo said. “Similar missions have helped provide temporary relief to staff at Baraga Correctional Facility and Marquette Branch Prison in the Upper Peninsula.”
The memo outlined September 15 to 28 as the timeframe for the project. It said the department will be offering similar opportunities at other facilities, and volunteers would be assessed to determine if their temporary reassignment would create staffing concerns at their own facilities.
In an earlier memo from August, Washington thanked corrections department employees for their work, acknowledging staffing problems and complaints echoed by the union.
“We recognize the sacrifices you make to ensure our facilities remain operational while we continue to address staff vacancies. … It is important that we stay on track to get you the support you need to have a better work-life balance.”
Washington wrote department had had contracted PFM Group Consulting LLC to provide “fresh perspective to our staffing challenges”, collect data, and help the department “remove barriers for potential recruits.”
The memo also outlined plans to work with lawmakers to eliminate current college credit requirements for corrections officers, expand the department’s ongoing recruiting efforts, solicit ideas and feedback from staff and publish quarterly reports on staffing vacancies across the state.
Walking to the parking lot of the Cooper Street facility after passing his physical fitness test, Burgett was congratulated by his friend Nicholas Sanford, a current corrections department employee who accompanied Burgett to the open house and yelled encouragement throughout the test.
Sanford said being a corrections officer is demanding, and comes with risk even in ideal conditions. But it’s provided him economic stability through good economic times and bad.
“The department is a way for you to become one of the rare of Americans that can actually have a standard of living with no debt. That’s the counterpoint to the overtime,” Sanford said. “You can afford to live, and live well.”
Corrections department recruiting director LaChelle Fuller said pay for new corrections officers starts at $21.50 an hour. Within three years, officer base pay can increase to $68,500 annually, not including overtime.
