The Perils of Carceral Austerity: How Cost-Cutting Undermines Prison Safety and Fuels Privatization

Abstract

One of the most prevailing arguments and goals for prison reform in the U.S. today is to “cut costs.” This austerity approach often directly undermines the pay, treatment, and conditions of those who work in prisons, which has deadly on-the-ground consequences. Using observable correlations between austerity, conditions of correctional work, and conditions of prison I develop a theoretical explanation for how an austerity approach to “fixing” prisons makes these institutions less safe and contributes to privatization. Correctional workers are key to prison safety and are often overlooked or vilified at the expense of forging effective and lasting solutions to the carceral crisis.

1. Introduction

One of the most frequent arguments and goals for prison reform in the U.S. today is to “cut costs.” Reductions in correctional spending are often celebrated as prison reform victories (Cate 2022, 2023; Aviram 2015; Dagan and Teles 2016; The Pew Charitable Trusts 2018). However, an austerity approach to “fixing” prisons, much like many other segments of the public sector, makes these institutions less safe, harms public sector workers, and contributes to privatization (Cate 2022, 2023; Gottschalk 2000; Katz 1995; Lafer 2017; Moak 2022; Ravitch 2013; Reed 2020; Soss et al. 2008). Correctional workers, which includes correctional officers, case workers, nurses, doctors, therapists, social workers, janitorial staff, educators, librarians, and grounds and facilities maintenance, are key to prison safety and are often overlooked public sector workers that are vilified at the expense of deeper and qualitative understandings of the carceral crisis (Schoenfeld and Everly 2023). Prison reform today tends to put the cart before the horse—reducing spending on institutions before significantly reducing their reach and before investing in alternatives to the functions that are served by prisons in the U.S.

This article shows how an austerity approach to prison reform has (1) made working in prisons more precarious, (2) which in turn, makes prisons more dangerous for inmates and (3) has facilitated exploitative privatization, which has exacerbated points 1 and 2. Rather than leading to decarceration, austerity approaches have made an already exceptionally cruel prison system even more brutal. My findings suggest that successful and humane decarceration requires greater financial investment in a public goods approach to prison reform, particularly in supporting public sector workers.

The horrid conditions in American prisons have been well documented (Adler and Chen 2023; Cate 2022; Human Rights Watch 1991; Lynch 2010; Reiter 2016; Strong 2022; Tonry 2016). The U.S. does not stand out simply for the extraordinarily high rate of incarceration, the social concentration of mass incarceration’s effects—but also for its grueling conditions of confinement (Tonry 2016). Understandably, advocates for reform have sought to end investments to institutions in such states of extreme failure. Prior reform efforts to improve the deeply flawed correctional system have largely failed or made conditions worse (Aviram 2015; Cate 2016, 2022, 2023; Cate and HoSang 2018; Gottschalk 2011, 2016). Thus, many reformers concerned with these intransigent injustices perpetuated by the system are wary of any attempts to further invest in or attempt to improve these institutions.

Yet, part of the worthy goals of significant downsizing of prisons should be efforts to increase investments in these institutions in order to make them safer. This argument is largely absent from reform efforts, particularly the most popular ones being promoted by large foundations, major nonprofits, and advocacy organizations which frequently use cuts to correctional budgets as a key measure of successful reform (Cate 2022, 2023; Cate and HoSang 2018). Slogans like “smart on crime” and “justice reinvestment” are built upon the assumption that less money to prisons will solve the many problems created by American prisons (Cate and HoSang 2018; Gottschalk 2016; The Pew Charitable Trusts 2018). In this paper I argue that this logic has serious flaws and has dangerous and harmful consequences on the ground. Rather than austerity driven solutions—prison reformers should embrace arguments that effective and just decarceration will require more expenditures for fewer prisoners.

This paper begins by situating this analysis in the existing literature. Drawing from data on correction work and rates of mortality and violence in prison, the analysis dissects the major contours of correctional worker shortages and high turnover. The next section of the paper details how these conditions of labor relate to the conditions of prison by looking at the impact on rates of violence, negligence and preventable deaths behind bars. The paper then explores the major political responses to the crises that emerge from these conditions and shows that a continued commitment to austerity has led to doubling down on punitive solutions and has put serious limitations on strategies for meaningful reforms. Lastly, the paper concludes by proposing a public goods approach to prison reform instead of more austerity and privatization.

2. Literature Review

This paper takes seriously how the historical and political developments to the conditions of labor are critical to understanding the broader conditions of prisons themselves. There has been considerable scholarly attention on the psychology, attitudes and impact of correctional work on individuals, the inhumane conditions of U.S. prisons, and the pitfalls of austerity driven prison reforms but little attention to the relationship between these analyses which has hampered prison reform efforts. This paper connects the existing literature on correctional work and prison conditions and applies them to recent developments in order to strengthen proposals for how to resolve the problems and injustices of the carceral state.

2.1. Correctional Workers

The vast majority of attention in the literature on correctional workers is focused on the psychology of correctional officers and the job effects on them. There is a broad literature on the attitudes of correctional officers, how these attitudes impact reform efforts and are shaped by broader cultures and mandates of the carceral state, and how they impact decisions that correctional officers make (Haggerty and Bucerius 2021; Lambert et al. 2019; Lerman and Page 2012; May et al. 2020; Trounson et al. 2019). Related to this focus, there are a number of studies of the impact on correctional officers themselves in the form of their mental health, burnout, stress, “corrections fatigue,” rates of PTSD and job satisfaction (Butler et al. 2019; Cho et al. 2020; Denhof and Spinaris 2016; Denhof et al. 2014; Lambert and Paoline 2005; Lambert et al. 2007; Regehr et al. 2021; Ricciardelli and Power 2020; Schaufeli and Peeters 2000; Spinaris et al. 2012; Vickovic and Morrow 2020). Some studies connect these attitudes and mental health outcomes to conditions of labor (i.e., staffing shortages, compensation, austerity) (see Schoenfeld and Everly 2023) but generally these factors are either treated as background or they are completely absent from analyses.

In addition to mostly focusing on psychology and attitudes, this literature on workers in prisons has also primarily focused on correctional officers. To the small degree that other workers (case workers, medical professionals, education, food, janitorial, grounds crews) are addressed they are not considered as part of a broader sector workforce. These workers are interconnected in ways that are critical to understanding the work of individual occupations and overall conditions of confinement. The existing literature has largely been silent on how cuts to public sector correctional work degrade prison conditions. This oversight hides how conditions of labor extend beyond simply adequate funding for workers themselves but also for ensuring those inside of prison get basic protections and services needed to survive.

Related to this, there is also a lack of historical perspective on the political shifts over time in correctional worker staffing as a product of austerity and privatization. Specifically, there is little attention to how as part of broader neoliberal transformations states have eliminated pension programs, reduced hazard pay qualifications, and cut wages—political decisions that have led to higher turnover, shortages and worse conditions of confinement. There is a wealth of literature on how neoliberalism and the retrenchment of the public sector negatively impact the populations being served (for example, in education, healthcare, and welfare) but little focus on corrections (Gottschalk 2000; Katz 1995; Lafer 2017; Moak 2022; Ravitch 2013; Reed 2020; Soss et al. 2008). In sum, the existing literature on correctional workers has not put together the relationship between austerity and the conditions that workers face in doing their jobs and how those correspond with conditions of confinement for people behind bars.

2.2. Austerity Driven Prison Reforms

The analysis in this paper borrows from the extensive scholarship on the pitfalls of austerity driven reforms that shows “cost cuts” can make prisons more dangerous, increase privatization, and have been largely unable to significantly reduce incarceration rates (Aviram 2015; Beckett 2018; Cate 2016; Cate and HoSang 2018; Gottschalk 2011, 2016). This article builds off this literature to explore how conditions of correctional work help explain how austerity leads to worse conditions of confinement. One of the most concerning dangers of austerity arguments for prison reform that scholars have identified is that less money does not necessarily mean less reach—but instead greater cruelty. These scholars have made the important intervention that austerity and “cost-cutting” motivations do not necessarily reduce prison populations but do make prisons “leaner and meaner” (Gottschalk 2007, p. 670; Lynch 2010). Reductions to the support for correctional workers facilitate these outcomes. For example, scholarship on Canadian prisons has linked austerity to worsened conditions of labor for correctional officers as well as inhumane living conditions for prisons (Ricciardelli et al. 2018). This research shows that correctional working conditions are the living conditions for those in prisons and vice versa (Comack et al. 2012).1

Relatedly, scholars have shown that investments in public sector workers is a bulwark against privatization and can have positive impacts on conditions of prisons and rates of incarceration (Doob and Gartner 2011; McCoy 2017; Thompson 2011a). This literature complicates Joshua Page’s (2011) account that correction officers’ advocacy in California was pivotal in promoting draconian penal policies and driving up incarceration rates. Suggestions that public sector correctional workers impede prison reform ignore the history of prison guard organizing for better conditions of confinement, and obscures more critical drivers of mass incarceration (Kirchoff 2010; Thompson 2011a). States with correctional guard unions overall have lower rates of incarceration than those without these organizations, and researchers cite numerous examples of these unions advocating for improved conditions of confinement, downsizing prisons and shifting their jobs away from correctional duties (Doob and Gartner 2011; Thompson 2011a). Overall, there is strong scholarly support for the idea that investing in public workers is critical in countering the neoliberal forces that propel and sustain mass incarceration.

2.3. Prisons as Sites of Financial Extraction

There is also an important literature on U.S. prisons that shows how austerity and the “financialization” of criminal justice makes life in prison more dangerous and inhumane (Page and Soss 2021; Lynch 2010). Austerity has pushed ever more costs for basic survival onto the people incarcerated and their friends and family (Bardelli et al. 2022a, 2022b). This scholarship shows how austerity fuels privatization, through the increased use of “pay-to-stay fees,” making prisons a site for financial extraction as well as inhumane conditions of confinement (Bardelli et al. 2022b; Friedman 2021; Strong 2022). As Strong (2022) shows in Arizona, austerity both inside and outside of prison contributed to the privatization of prison healthcare and the resultant deadly outcomes. Strong makes the case that an austere prison, whether privatized or not, will always be antithetical to sustaining the lives of those in its care (p. 1057). The commodification of prison life from phone calls, banking, commissaries, healthcare, and probation services to electronic monitoring, all to the tune of multi-billion-dollar industries, leads to opportunities for further extraction, penalization, and cruelty.

The analysis that follows not only supports these claims but also adds a particular focus on how the extraction of the labor of workers in prisons (particularly in the form of decreasing or stagnating wages, reduced pensions, increased workloads, and privatization) is an important form of extraction in its own right but is also bears an important relationship to creating deadly outcomes of incarceration. A prisoner denied healthcare is a healthcare provider denied the wages and working conditions to provide that care. Austerity and privatization take direct aim at sustaining and supporting those who labor in prison as part of this extractive and negligent approach to criminal justice. A robust refutation of austerity, as this foundational literature persuasively calls for, requires an embrace of a public goods approach to sustaining life inside and outside of prisons. The inverse of austerity and privatization is robust support for a public goods approach to prison reform (Cate 2023), which entails support inside and out of prisons for publicly supported dignified work and wages.

3. Analytic Approach

Understanding the relationship between austerity, correctional work, and the conditions of confinement requires an analysis of how previous rounds of austerity reforms have affected the conditions of both correctional workers and those who are incarcerated. The analysis of this paper draws from state level data on correctional officer mean salaries and numbers of correctional workers from 2000–2020 and mortality rates per 100,000 for people in jails and prison from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. See Appendix A for the breakdown of these comprehensive national statistics side-by-side by state. This data provides broad level trends and correlations between correctional work and safety in prison. To complement these descriptive statistics, the paper also uses a survey of state level examples to trace what austerity looks like on the ground for correctional workers and those who are incarcerated.2

In the state-level case studies, I considered issues related to staff shortages and high turnover: pay, pensions, healthcare benefits, hazard pay, overtime rules, requirements and training, privatization. Second, I considered factors related to shortages and high turnover: lockdowns, lack of medical care, lack of programming, reduced contact with visitors and legal representatives, rates of violence, rates of homicides, rates of prison deaths, and rates of death by suicide. There are no systematic or consistent national level data sets on most of these variables; therefore, my analysis attempts to stitch together as many examples and reports as possible to get a general sense of how these factors interact in particular locations at particular points in time to build a theoretical case for the relationship between austerity, workers and conditions of confinement. To do this, I rely on extensive analysis of state level and national newspapers, legislative records, state and federal reports, nonprofit reports, legal cases, and secondary literature. Lastly, I analyze the political choices that relate to these issues (legislation, budgetary choices over time, and privatization) as well as the most common political responses to the problems of worker shortages and diminished conditions of confinement.

Table 1. Description of Data Sources.

Conditions for Correctional Workers
Correctional Officer Salaries	National Data	BJS
Correctional Officer Benefits	State Level examples	KY, SC, MS, TX, AZ
Guard to Inmate Ratio	National Data	BJS
Extent of Shortages and Turnover	State Level examples	WV, FL, NH, SC, KY, GA, MS, MI, NC, MO
Caseloads	State Level examples	KY, OR, IL, NE, MS, MD
Overtime	State Level examples	NE, MD
Conditions of Confinement
Rates of Mortality	National Data	BJS
Suicides	National Data/State Level examples	BJS, NC, KY
Violence	State Level examples	GA, SC, KY, MS, D.C.
Lockdowns	State Level examples	WI, SC, MS, NE, TX
Healthcare	State Level examples	MO, MS, IL, SC, NV, AZ, FL

summarizes the data sources used for the major components of the paper detailed in the sections that follow.

Additionally, the Figure 1 provides an overview of the analytic relationships observed in this paper. This is a non-causal map of the relationships between the effects of austerity and privatization on conditions for corrections workers and conditions of confinement. Each section of this paper explores the elements of the figure below highlighting how austerity in corrections impacts workers and people who are incarcerated and fuels and is fueled by efforts to privatize prisons.

4. Extent of Worker Shortages

Austerity and privatization have coincided with severe staff shortages, high turnover, and strains on the workforce in prisons (Bardelli et al. 2023; Cate 2022). The rise in incarceration was geared towards not just locking as many people up but has always been about doing it as cheaply as possible (Bardelli et al. 2023; Clegg and Usmani 2019; Lynch 2010). In fact, stripping prisons of basic necessities was a key part of ratcheting up punitive commitments in the system—particularly through the 1990s (Gottschalk 2016; Lynch 2010).3 Those who labor in prison have not been spared the larger attacks on public sector work. The salaries, benefits, and conditions of working in prison have all significantly deteriorated over the last several decades causing the conditions of confinement to become ever more lethal (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024; Cate 2022).

4.1. Salaries

Looking at the trend over time in correctional worker salaries shows that austerity and declines in public sector funding have been the prevailing order since 2000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024). In 2022 the nation experienced the lowest number of workers in state prisons in the last two decades (Heffernan and Li 2024). A majority of states experienced a drop in the number of people working in corrections (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024). Yet, the overall population of the incarcerated has not significantly reduced and is in fact rebounding after the COVID-19 pandemic (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024; Heffernan and Li 2024).4 One of the main outcomes of austerity and also a key contributor to severe shortages has been stagnating and reduced salaries and benefits for those working in prisons.

Comparing salaries of correctional officers in every state from 2000 to 2022 reveals that all but 13 states have seen declines in the real value of salaries.5 Of the 13 states where salaries raised, ten of them raised by 6% or less over this time, adjusted for inflation. Among the 37 states that have seen reductions in salaries over this time the decline has been anywhere from 2–15%, adjusted for inflation. Mean correctional salaries in 2022 ranged from $33k to $84k, with 75% of states having a mean salary of $55k or less.6 These mean comparisons of salary mask the low starting salaries that are offered in most states. For example, in Mississippi the starting salary for a corrections officer is $24,903 (Bozelko 2015; Fantz 2015; Gates 2017). Overall, salaries in corrections have largely stagnated or been reduced over the past 20 years, contributing to the severe shortages and high turnover of people occupying these positions.

4.2. Benefits

Austerity has driven down wages as well as benefits for workers, another major factor in increased shortages and high turnover. Like many other public sector workers, those working in corrections have seen diminished or cut benefits packages.7 For example, in Kentucky, working for the Kentucky Department of Corrections was once a much sought-after job in the state. Qualifications were more rigorous and the benefits package for corrections workers was significantly better 30 years ago than it is today. People stayed in these positions with far lower turnover rates. But since the state gutted the pension system (first in 2008 and then again in 2013)8 and has failed to regularize raises, wages have comparatively dropped and without the promise of retirement people have steadily left the job. Case workers (Classification and Treatment Officer (CTO) in Kentucky) fare even worse than correctional officers making less and rarely receiving raises, creating even more dire shortages amongst these workers (Harper 2021). In Kentucky, a bill proposed in the House in 2022 to restore pension packages for correctional officers to where they were before the changes in 2014 failed to advance out of committee. Not a single organization advocating for prison reform endorsed the bill (Caudill 2022; Cheves 2022; Kentucky General Assembly 2022).

Reductions in pay and benefits are a critical piece of understanding the shortages and crises of conditions of confinement in prisons, but have to be considered in a more expansive consideration of the conditions of labor beyond just these measures. Low pay, reduced or no pensions are just part of a constellation of factors of the conditions of correctional work. The understaffing and overburdening of workers contribute to these jobs being among the most stressful and dangerous of public sector work (Bozelko 2015; Cantrell 2015, p. 221; Fantz 2015; Gates 2016; Hager 2015; Mitchell 2015). Correctional workers routinely have one of the highest rates of divorce, heart disease, and drug and alcohol addiction, and have the shortest life spans of any state civil servants (Ferdik and Smith 2017; Thompson 2011b; Zoukis 2018).

Pay, benefits, and conditions of labor make these jobs the least desirable in public sector work (and often even less competitive than the worst private sector jobs) meaning workers with the fewest options take these unattractive jobs. In Mississippi, where correctional workers have the lowest salaries in the nation, 65% of these workers are women and 89% are Black. Nationwide, about 23.8% of correctional officers are Black, comprising about twice their representation in the general population (Data USA n.d.). Given these demographics, austerity in corrections has meant a severe downgrading of the working conditions for some of the most marginalized workers. Without addressing the changes to retirement or instating more significant raises, pay raise schedules, limiting mandated overtime, increasing mental health support, and changing the nature of the job more fundamentally, the deep crisis of understaffing is unlikely to abate.

4.3. Extent of Shortages and Turnover

The broad nationwide trends in reducing the wages and benefits of correctional work have fueled a crisis of shortages and high turnover. In the states that have pursued aggressive austerity, the problems are particularly acute. West Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire have all had such severe shortages in staffing they have had to call in national guard troops to work in prisons. In West Virginia, in 2019 the state had its lowest levels of staffing ever experienced and then from 2019 to 2023 there was a 26% increase in vacancies (Adams 2023).9 The base salary in the state is $33,214. In South Carolina, many facilities have been operating with staff vacancies above 50% (Hansotia 2021). As of 2022, there were more unfilled positions in Kentucky’s correctional system than actual positions filled (Caudill 2022). One Kentucky jail was so short staffed in 2022 that there were periods in which there were only two officers at the jail to cover about 400 incarcerated people (McSwine 2022). Similarly, in Georgia a corrections officer testified before the state House of Representatives in 2021 that “on a good day there were about 6 to 7 officers to supervise roughly 1200 people” (Blakinger et al. 2021). In Mississippi, the state saw a 60% reduction in the correctional officer workforce in just 5 years (from 2014–2019) (Cate 2022). This meant that in 2019, the state prisons had correctional officer vacancy rates of over 50% and turnover rates of as high as 90% in one prison (Neff and Santo 2019). Predictably, working under these conditions causes further attrition fueling a downward spiral in staffing crises (Nam-Sonenstein and Sanders 2024).

While the vast majority of scholarly and journalistic attention is on the shortages of correctional officers, these shortages have significantly impacted other workers in prison as well, most notably health care professionals. Before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic inadequate pay and poor conditions of labor have contributed to catastrophic nursing shortages in prisons. For example, in Wayne County Michigan COVID-19 decimated staffing and the jail is in a dire state of understaffing. Before the pandemic the problem was already bad with the jail reporting high rates of suicide and violence. After further decline in staffing from COVID-19 it is even worse. The jail saw a 50% drop in nurses going from about 7–10 nurses for every 600–700 inmates to 3–4 (Jones 2020).

Similarly in North Carolina, in 2022, post-COVID-19, the state reported the highest vacancy rates for nurses in state history (North Carolina Department of Public Safety 2022). Changes related to pay and other incentives have helped fill some of the vacancies, but the crisis continues. As of 2024, the vacancy rate was still 40% statewide for correctional based nurses. In a memorandum on the crisis the state reported the rise in nurse pay rates was “costly” but “essential” for mitigating the nursing shortage and providing safer care for the people in prison (North Carolina Department of Adult Correction 2023, p. 2).

In Missouri, COVID-19 worsened already severe prison nursing shortages in the state (Associated Press 2024). For example, in a St. Louis County jail from 2019 to 2021 the jail saw a more than 50% drop in their nurses and medical assistants going from 50 to 23. The shortage caused a spike in spending on temporary firms, rising by more than $4 million. In Kansas City two prisons had to relocate people in prison to other facilities due to the shortages (Associated Press 2024).10 In Florida, a severe prison physician and nurse shortage outpaces the broader statewide nurse shortage (McGivern 2024). These staffing issues have caused the state to face numerous costly lawsuits in response to widespread negligent care.

4.4. Overworked and Burned Out

Extreme shortages leave those remaining in these positions tremendously strained and overworked. Large increases in overtime work are a consequence of shortages and an indication of the long hours that people have to work in these positions. For example, a jail in Louisville, Kentucky reported paying out over $100,000 in overtime in just 10 days due to shortages (McSwine 2022).11 Staff under these conditions are routinely working 60-h to 72-h weeks which means typically 16-h shifts, often with no breaks (Cheves 2022; Gardner 2022). In Eastern Oregon, staffing shortages result in 17-h workdays and mandated overtime (Dake 2023). At a federal prison in Illinois the shortage of staff was so significant that officers are sometimes forced to work 60 h of overtime in a week (NBC News 2021). In Nebraska, overtime hours quadrupled between 2010 and 2021, forcing officers to work longer and more difficult hours (Blakinger et al. 2021). In just the first three months of 2022 the state spent nearly $8 million on overtime which was over 20% of the all the pay for the Department of Corrections, and the Department of Corrections has the highest rate of overtime as a share of total compensation of any agency in the state (Foreman 2022). In Maryland, correctional workers make up more than half of the overtime costs for all state workers in the state (AFSCME Maryland n.d.).12 In Mississippi, understaffing causes corrections workers to work double or even triple shifts, working for over 24 h at a time (Associated Press 2018).

Predictably, the more workers are mandated to work overtime within severely understaffed contexts, the more they get burned out (Schaufeli and Peeters 2000; Cho et al. 2020). Such enormous strain on these workers then makes them likelier to leave the job which creates a spiral in which the poor working conditions worsen, causing more staff to leave (Heffernan and Li 2024).13

4.5. Augmentation

Another indication and effect of severe shortages have been the increased augmentation of work inside of prisons, where workers are tasked with doing work they are not trained or hired to do. For example, due to nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs being vacant, cooks, teachers, nurses, dentists and other workers are tasked with guarding inmates (Blakinger et al. 2021; NBC News 2021). The first Trump administration curtailed hiring causing vacancies to increase by 64% between 2016 and 2018 which directly led to the increase in augmentation in federal prisons (Thrush 2023). The situation spurred picketing across the country to push back on the issue of understaffing (Blakinger et al. 2021).

In addition to a wide range of workers serving as guards, there are also instances of guards being augmented to compensate for shortages to other personnel. In Baltimore, to make up for a 65% shortage in dietary staff, correctional officers work overtime to cover this important function, increasing risks of foodborne illness and accidents because they are not trained for this work (Clark et al. 2018). Not only are these workers unequipped for the jobs they are shifted into, but widespread augmentation is an indication of the consequences of stripping away funding for these other important workers in prisons under austerity. When a teacher is sent to fill in as an officer, this means they are unable to do their work of providing education. Medical workers have reported that when they are made to serve as substitute guards, people with serious health conditions are not treated in a timely manner (Thrush 2023).

4.6. Privatization and Shortages

The effects of austerity on staffing and conditions of labor are closely tied to increased privatization. The commitment to austerity in running prisons is fundamentally incapable of sustaining life (Strong 2022) and therefore, privatization offers both the promise of “cheaper alternatives” and an important shield from the inevitable liabilities that come from the lethal and inhumane conditions of confinement in this context. A major motivation for outsourcing is precisely to limit legal liability as a spokesperson for the private healthcare industry claimed, “the biggest thing we do is indemnify the county against risk and reliability, [and] do everything we can to keep them out of trouble” (Neate 2016; Fenne 2023). Private contracts offload legal liability which leads to contract renewals that often do not address patient and worker concerns (Fenne 2023).

The close connections between privatization and austerity can best be exemplified in the development of prison health care. A number of influential lawsuits over adequate prison health care from the 1970s created requirements for hiring many more medical professionals to meet the health care needs of the prison populations. However, the court decision of the 1970s coincided with the full-frontal assault on public goods, welfare state expansion, and the fight for healthcare more broadly. Additionally, the following years marked the beginning of the powerful ascendance of a “get tough” approach to prison policy and the bipartisan embrace of austerity politics. The new requirements for adequate medical care required additional costs. There was little political will to push greater investment in prisons—a political demand made even more difficult in the context of a country without universal healthcare. As states faced the need to meet the demands of lawsuits, private companies developed products and services to pitch to state prison officials as being cheaper than public solutions (McDonald 1999). In Illinois, after the consent decree from the 1980 case Lightfoot v. Walker that required the state to meet new requirements for adequate healthcare—the state sought out a physician’s group to help with implementing these new guidelines. That group subsequently formed one of the first correctional health care companies that then spun off into Corizon Health—a large private healthcare company still in operation today (Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability 2019, p. 35; Szep et al. 2020).14

In 1997, 12 states had contracts with private firms to provide health care services to their entire inmate population, and another 20 states had contracted a portion of their health care system to private firms. By 2000, 34 states had some privatized health care contracts and 24 state corrections health care systems were run completely by private contractors (Kinsella 2004). By 2009 approximately 40% of all correctional health expenditures were going to private companies (Fenne 2023). The private prison health care industry pounced on the opportunities to sell their “cheaper” version in the wake of the Great Recession, as a prison healthcare company executive stated in 2009, “We think the idea of outsourcing this type of service will be an attractive option as states try to cut budgets” (Fenne 2023; Mueller 2009). As of today, healthcare in U.S. prisons and jails is a multibillion-dollar industry controlled by a handful of large companies (such as private equity-owned Wellpath and YesCare (formerly known as Corizon Health) (Fenne 2023). Similarly, U.S. jails have heavily privatized medical care, in 2010 about half of all jails had privatized these services and by 2018 the percentage was over 62% (Szep et al. 2020).15

Increased privatization was fueled by the allure of “cheaper options,” shielding the public from liability, as well as promises to alleviate long standing problems with staffing shortages. Outsourcing and forms of privatization have been one way that states have sought to address the problem of staffing shortages; however, this often exacerbates the underlying causes of the shortages (low pay, high caseloads, poor conditions of labor).

As this section on contours of worker shortages has shown, austerity and privatization have been woefully incapable of ensuring adequate staffing of prisons and have further exacerbated the cycle of austerity driven cuts to public sector workers, worse conditions, higher turnover, greater understaffing fueling more rounds of cuts and privatization and on and on the spiral to ever greater crisis. These effects lead to dangerous conditions for workers and for people incarcerated. The deterioration of the conditions for workers in prison must be considered in relationship to the deterioration of safety in prison.

5. Connection Between Correctional Work and Conditions of Confinement

The following sections detail how the severe shortages and deteriorations of working conditions in prison caused by austerity and privatization closely relate to dangerous and deadly conditions of confinement for those in prisons and jails in the U.S. After detailing broad data on the correlations between low pay and high workloads for corrections workers and mortality rates, the analysis explores how undermining public sector workers through austerity and privatization increases lockdowns, violence in prisons, suicides, and leads to tragically insufficient healthcare.

Examining state-level data on the number of correctional workers, salaries, numbers of people incarcerated and rates of mortality in prisons reveals important correlations between the conditions and pay for workers and safety for prisoners. The four states (Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky) with the highest rates of mortality in prisons (above 500 per 100,000) and nearly twice the national average are among the ten states with the lowest salaries in the country. Alternatively, seven of the ten states with the highest salaries (New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Alaska, Illinois, Washington and Hawaii) have among the lowest rates of mortality (below 300 per 100,000). Notably, the two states with the largest increases in salaries from 2000–2022 Maine (14%) and North Dakota (12%) have among the lowest prison mortality rates in the country (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2021; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024).

Between 2000 and 2022, both the salaries and number of guards decreased while the inmate population increased in several states (Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee). Five of these seven states are among the states with the highest mortality rates (above 400 per 100,000) and are located in the South (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2021).16 On the opposite end of these trends, there are five states where over this same period of time the number of guards went up, salaries increased and the inmate population went down: California, Delaware, Illinois, New Mexico, and Rhode Island. All five of these states have mortality rates below 300 per 100,000. These correlations align with well documented trends: the South is the least unionized, has the lowest expenditures on welfare and has amongst the highest incarceration rates (Childers 2023; Nellis 2024). It is important to consider how these correlations between austerity and broad social policymaking also exist for corrections.

5.1. Lockdowns

Austerity and understaffing contribute to the increased use of lockdowns which correlates with increased violence and suicides. Lockdowns consist of extended periods of time where people are largely confined to their cells (often in unsanitary conditions) with little to no time outdoors, without access to visits from family or legal representatives, without access to prison libraries, medical care, use of showers, or any other programming (Heffernan and Li 2024; Koran 2023). The use of lockdowns often occurs as a result of a lack of staff to carry out the regular operations of a facility. In Wisconsin, the state has used lockdowns of its prisons for months on end—a trend occurring throughout the country. Prior to the pandemic when the use of lockdowns accelerated in South Carolina an ACLU report found that the state had a “near constant use of lockdowns due to the chronic lack of adequate staff” (Hansotia 2021, p. 13). In 2019, also before the widespread use of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the South Mississippi Correctional Institute instituted a lockdown that lasted for seven months and resulted in deadly violence in the prison (Mitchell 2019). The use of long lockdowns has precipitated riots and serious violent outbreaks causing death and injury to people incarcerated and correctional workers throughout the country but most notably in states with the conflagration of austerity across multiple measures: staffing shortages, privatization, and lowest levels of spending (Blakinger et al. 2021; Cate 2022).

Lockdowns comprise one of the more extreme outcomes of austerity and understaffing issues, but even short of these long lockdowns, the everyday operations of most prisons under austerity conditions exemplify the limits and diminished standards of care that come from these larger trends. Most prisons experience some form of semi-lockdown in the form of limited access to programming, visits, healthcare, and simple movements within the prison. For example, in Nebraska two-thirds of those inside of the state’s prisons cannot see visitors on the weekends because of a lack of staffing, often the only time when many loved ones can travel to see someone on the inside (Blakinger et al. 2021). Similarly, in a federal prison in Texas, people in the prison are locked in their cells every weekend because there are not enough guards (NBC News 2021). The understaffing of prisons that leads to lockdowns is a critical factor in driving up violence and suicides. American prisons are already grueling and repressive, but without even the bare minimum functionality of making visits, getting out of a cell once a day, getting to shower and eat—the worst and deadliest aspects of incarceration get even worse.

5.2. Violence

The lack of investment in paying and supporting workers in prison has correlated with the increased lethality of prisons in the form of alarming rates of violence and suicides. The vast majority of states (80%) have experienced an increase in the rate of morality in their prisons from 2001 to 2019 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2021).17 While the acute problem of understaffing has facilitated sharp increases in homicides and suicides, comparative studies with the prisons of Western Europe suggests that the longstanding lack of support staff and well-trained officers also contribute to higher rates of violence and death in U.S. prisons (Tonry 2016; Subramanian 2021). Even within the U.S. model of highly repressive and punitive training and requirements of correctional workers, the woeful lack of staffing further exacerbates hazardous conditions of confinement.

In Georgia, between 2017 and 2021 the state Department of Corrections saw major staffing shortages and vacancies and a large increase in homicides. In 2017 there were 8 homicides compared to 48 homicides from January 2020 to August 2021. During that time there was a 56% annual turnover rate for corrections officers and 40% of the jobs were vacant. These conditions sparked The Southern Center for Human Rights to sue the Georgia Department of Corrections and in 2021 the US Department of Justice opened an investigation into the corrections department citing understaffing as a central issue (Blakinger et al. 2021). Following the opening of the investigation the state house held a hearing where mothers of Georgia inmates who have died while in custody testified about the serious neglect that contributed to their sons’ deaths. Stephanie Lee testified that her son, Justin Wilkerson, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, made multiple suicide attempts before being killed by his cellmate. Lee stated “The GDC (Georgia Department of Corrections) failed to address and treat his mental illness. [Then], the GDC failed to protect Justin” (Williams 2021). Numerous officials and correctional workers attribute more assaults on officers and prison homicides to understaffing (Heffernan and Li 2024). In South Carolina between 2013 and 2018 serious assaults in prisons increased by 68% and homicides significantly rose as well (Hansotia 2021). In a Kentucky juvenile prison understaffing contributed to a violent outbreak where several young people and staff were injured (Schreiner 2023). In the wake of budget cuts, large declines in staffing and high turnover, in January 2020 there were more prison homicides in just one month in Mississippi than the annual total for any year since at least 2014 (Mitchell 2020; WKRG News 2020; Zhu 2020).

Between 2023 and 2024 the District of Columbia Department of Corrections had a death rate in its jails that was 3 times the national average. A D.C. Auditor report cited decrepit facilities and understaffing as major causes of the crisis (Gathright 2025). In 2024 the jail population reached its highest levels in six years, combined with understaffing this has created serious safety challenges. For example, the audit examined reports that understaffing led to staff failing to respond to someone’s injuries from a stabbing and failed to perform required safety checks every 30 min that could have prevented overdose deaths (Gathright 2025). The crumbling infrastructure of the jails, extensive mold and vermin infestations, also causes health risks—yet D.C. has abandoned a publicly funded project to replace these unsafe facilities in pursuit of private financing options (Koma 2025).18

In a sign of just how horrific the level of negligence is due to underfunding and understaffing there was a particularly egregious case in Georgia where a person inside of a prison was left dead and decomposing for five days. When the coroner was finally called, they had to use two body bags to remove the body because of how badly it was decomposed (Robbins and Teegardin 2023). Authorities believe that the victim, Anthony Joseph Zino, aged 71, was murdered by his cellmate as a mercy killing (Robbins and Teegardin 2023). Zino’s death reveals the lethal and cruel consequences of austerity. From 2013 to 2023 the Georgia Department of Corrections reported they had experienced a 40% drop in full-time state prison workers (Nam-Sonenstein and Sanders 2024). Homicide rates in state-run prisons have climbed over the past two decades. The percentage of state prisoner deaths resulting from homicides in the U.S. more than doubled between 2001 and 2018 (Carson 2021a).19 The decline in staffing produced through austerity corresponds to devastating on the ground consequences for those incarcerated.

5.3. Suicides

Similarly, the increased rates of suicide in prisons is a multi-faceted problem, one stemming from the overuse of incarceration generally and the population characteristics of who gets ensnared in the American carceral state: the most marginalized, poorest, most repressed, and those who suffer from mental and physical ailments (Carson 2021b; Department of Justice 2024; Vera Institute of Justice n.d.). On top of these critical factors, the abysmal conditions of American prisons and inhumane treatment of those incarcerated exacerbate already high levels of suicide (Vera Institute of Justice n.d.). Nationwide, the number of state prisoners who died by suicide increased by 85% from 2001 to 2019 (Carson 2021b). A survey of several states indicates that austerity is connected to increased rates of inmate suicides.

Suicide rates have been increasing over the past few years in North Carolina where the state is operating with chronic staff shortages (Alexander and Off 2017, 2023). Since 2020 about half of the deaths by suicide in prisons in the state occurred in solitary confinement cells (Off 2025). State prison policy is that individuals with suicide risks are supposed to be cared for by health services—unless there is no space available (North Carolina Department of Adult Correction 2025).20 States like North Carolina have made important strides in researching and advocating for limitations on solitary confinement but face challenges in adequately funding and implementing these changes (Off 2025).

In Louisville, Kentucky, a spike in the number of people dying in a local jail spurred the Metro Council to investigate the facility. The Investigator concluded that multiple suicides in the jail could have been prevented if officers had a direct line of sight into the cells (Lally and Vancampen 2022). Not being in the jail, getting proper healthcare, having support, connection to others, and access to enrichment programs may also have prevented these suicides, but what is clear is that a lack of funding across the board undermines all of these solutions and is most acutely observed in the lack of the most basic staffing needs.

5.4. Lack of Healthcare

In addition to increased violence (assaults, homicides, and suicides), the most lethal outcome of austerity and understaffing is a lack of adequate medical care. There are countless reports of people dying in prison because of being denied timely, basic health care. Short of these most extreme and all too frequent cases, even more broadly, a lack of basic health care leads to individuals suffering tremendous pain and anguish. In one particularly egregious example, an incarcerated man in Missouri pulled out his own teeth because he was unable to get a dental appointment (Heffernan and Li 2024). Basic health needs are routinely not met because of understaffing and underfunding. Incarcerated individuals frequently go without recreation time for weeks on end, suffer from malnutrition, and some women report they cannot even get menstrual supplies (Heffernan and Li 2024).

Lack of staffing greatly impacts the ability of prisons to provide necessary medical and mental health services. A 2018 report of a prison in Mississippi showed that because of short staffing 70% of medical visits had to be cancelled (Neff and Santo 2020). In Illinois, a lack of staffing caused the cancellation of one-on-one therapy, with the only counseling available being brief, conducted through a cell door, and where an entire tier can hear the conversation (Blakinger et al. 2021). In the federal system, there has been a reduction of more than 35% of inmates that are designated for higher mental health care resulting in individuals with long histories of psychiatric problems not getting any routine care (Thompson and Eldridge 2018).

In South Carolina, a lockdown of an entire unit meant that those individuals did not have food or medicine for 2.5 days, nearly causing one man to slip into a diabetic coma (Hansotia 2021, p. 33). Despite numerous lawsuits (even successful ones) addressing inadequate mental health care services, the South Carolina Department of Corrections continues to provide “woefully inadequate” care for people with mental illness in prison (Hansotia 2021). Excerpts from a report tracking the implementation of a 2014 settlement agreement find that understaffing remains critically insufficient to comply with the orders. For example, the report from 2018 found “SCDC is highly unlikely, if not completely unable, to achieve substantial compliance with the Settlement Agreement and the provision of constitutionally adequate and required mental health care without major and consistent increases in staffing and resources and/or major reduction in the number of people housed in SCDC facilities” (Hansotia 2021, p. 32). But instead of investing in the necessary workforce to provide this care as well as reducing the number of people incarcerated, the state resorts to frequent lockdowns and solitary confinement, repressive policies that exacerbate these dire mental health problems.

As of 2018, the South Carolina prison system found that about 56% of incarcerated people suffered from a diagnosed medical condition (ranging from diabetes to asthma or cancer) and yet employed just 11 doctors and 221 nurses to manage the more than 19,000 people incarcerated (Hansotia 2021, p. 33). High caseloads not only lead to compromised health care but also contribute to the burnout and psychological stress endured by the medical professionals themselves. Again, fueling a cycle where these are highly unattractive positions, particularly since they do not come with competitive salaries. As Dr. Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer for the jail system in New York City, who inspects conditions in prisons around the country for court cases succinctly concludes: “understaffing will lead to an increase in preventable prison deaths” (Blakinger et al. 2021).

In addition to the direct issues of inadequate healthcare stemming from the lack of staffing of medical professionals, the effects of austerity also contribute to a lack of health through harmful conditions of confinement in the form of crumbling infrastructure, lack of good nutrition, proper sanitation to prevent the spread of disease and inadequate opportunities for exercise and programming enrichment (Delaney et al. 2018; Equal Justice Initiative 2025; Hopwood 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and heightened this crisis showing that overcrowded, poorly maintained, decrepit infrastructure, and generally poor health care is highly conducive to the spread of disease and led to particularly devastating and deadly impacts (Craig et al. 2023). As just one example, severe staffing shortages in Nevada during the pandemic left those in prison without adequate access to food, cleaning supplies, or proper hygiene (Gentry 2021).

In short, because of the exceptionally brutal conditions of confinement inside of prisons in the U.S. people are forced to endure extremely unhealthy conditions, before even factoring in the limited health care responses they receive to the myriad ailments that this population suffers. Calls for austerity or further cuts only make this dire situation worse.

5.5. Effects of Privatization on Prison Healthcare

Austerity and privatization work in tandem to cause staff shortages and the insufficient provision of care in prisons. The rise of privatization as a response to understaffing and underfunding (private companies sell themselves as cheaper and better capable of attracting workers) ends up exacerbating the crisis, and ultimately makes prisons even more lethal. Private companies reduce the amount spent on caring for prisoners by augmenting workers, reducing licensing requirements, and paying workers less in order to maximize profits.21

The result is even worse outcomes than the already dire conditions in publicly controlled prisons, and often greater expenses for worse services. For example, federal prison spending on outsourced healthcare increased by 24% to $327 million between 2010 and 2014, according to a Justice Department report (U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General 2016). The department surveyed 69 prisons and found that all of them paid much more for outsourced medical services than they did previously under Medicare rates, with some prisons spending as much as 385% more (Neate 2016).

Predictably, this higher price tag for less quality service results in greater lethality. A Reuters survey of more than 500 jails in the U.S. found that between 2016 and 2018, jails relying on contracts from the five largest health care contractors had anywhere from 18% to 58% higher death rates (depending on the company) (Szep et al. 2020). Of the five states that have the highest rates of prison mortality from 2019 (at least 500 per 100,000 state prisoners) four of these states have entirely outsourced healthcare systems: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky (The Pew Charitable Trusts 2018).

Strong’s (2022) in-depth analysis of the role of austerity driven privatization of healthcare in Arizona unequivocally reveals that the major drops in staffing, subsequent delays and denials of care were devastating to the lives of those in prison. The alarming rises in deaths led to the dubbing of the system as a de facto “second death-row” where simply being incarcerated was akin to a death sentence (Strong 2022, p. 1051). As a number of scholars have shown, privatized health care fails on all of its promises: it does not provide “market competition” sufficient to drive down prices, it leads to higher turnover, less oversight and accountability, and the tension between profitability and best medicine practices cannot be overcome (Strong 2022; Gelman 2020; Zullo 2017).

Privatized health care systems are often highly volatile due to the frequent termination of contracts—caused by litigation and scandals related to inadequate care provided by the companies or because these companies attempt to renegotiate the terms of contracts that create conflicts with state agencies who seek other deals (Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability 2019). The “competition” of the private market to provide services at the cheapest price point contributes to volatile relationships between the state and private sector, leading to unstable service delivery and with that unstable employment for the workers private firms hire making them incapable of resolving understaffing shortages and just making these problems worse (Fenne 2023; Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability 2019; Gelman 2020).

5.6. Diminished Accountability

While privatization, a frequent counterpart to austerity, fails on all of its promises and worsens the conditions of workers and those in prison alike, it also diminishes accountability. In the context of austerity, privatization provides an offloading of the liabilities that come from a system that is incapable of sustaining life (Strong 2022). Yet, these private entities, while shielding the public from liability, do not provide any meaningful accountability for workers, those in prisons, or the general public.

Private prison healthcare companies fight off repeated lawsuits through rebranding, shifting contracts or even going so far as filing for bankruptcy to evade liability (Desai 2025). Wellpath, one of the largest private prison health care companies holding contracts in 40 states, has been sued more than 1500 times yet remains in business, after several reconstitutions and continues to report large profits (Desai 2025; Jarosz et al. 2021). In 2025, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas to avoid their liabilities (over $100 million), just as another prison healthcare firm Corizon did successfully in 2023 (Desai 2025). A 2018 report from the Project on Government Oversight found that Correct Care and its acquired companies had been sued nearly 1400 times in the previous decade (Wigand 2021). Widespread lawsuits have not curtailed companies like CMCG and Corizon from steadily increasing their profits. Corizon’s revenue grew from 2012 to 2015 by 15.6% to $1.55 billion (CoreCivic Inc. 2016).22 Austerity often leads to privatization and both push public policy ever further away from public control or accountability over something as critical as the treatment of people locked behind bars.

5.7. Florida: The Privatization Racket

Florida provides an example of all these broader dynamics and how they play out on the state-level. In 2011 the state of Florida outsourced its prison healthcare system. Since then, the state has gone through a number of different contracts, been plagued with dangerous insufficiencies and continued to struggle to get staff and provide adequate health care. Additionally, the cost savings of this privatization have been dubious at best. Thus, privatization has resulted in not fulfilling any of its promises: reduced costs, better care, better staffing, or the streamlined provision of care.

Florida has engaged in a rapid succession of private contracts that all have extracted more money from the state while destroying jobs and working conditions for correctional workers and continually undermining care for those in prison. Between 2001 and 2022 the state switched its contracts of various portions of its prison healthcare over eight times: Wexford Health Sources, Inc. (five years), Prison Health Services (less than one year), Correctional Medical Services (one year), MHM Medical Group (three years), Corizon (five years), Wexford (five years), and finally Centurion with contracts that eventually expanded to statewide comprehensive coverage starting in 2018 (Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability 2019). The turmoil of these periods of contract negotiations led to major losses in health care staff requiring the Department of Corrections to rely on overtime and temporary staff. An independent audit in 2019 found that Centurion had not made any progress in improving staffing (one of the promised benefits of the contract). As part of the broader austerity approach to corrections, the state moved from 8 to 12 h shifts in order to cut 3700 jobs (Klas 2019). The mortality rate of prisoners in Florida over this time period nearly doubled going from 243 per 100,000 in 2002 to 460 per 100,000 in 2018 (Carson 2021a). A journal article from 2019 found that between 2008 and 2014 close to one in four incarcerated inmate deaths were due to trauma or illnesses that called for emergency surgery, but only a third of those people got the surgery they needed (Busko et al. 2019; Martinez 2019).23

The example of Florida highlights the major findings of this section on the connection between correctional work and conditions of confinement. Austerity has contributed to severe staff shortages and increased privatization at the expense of the safety and health of those locked behind bars. Increases in lockdowns, violence, suicide, as well as diminished access to healthcare are making prisons in the U.S. more lethal and inhumane. Increased privatization produced through austerity has exacerbated these problems and pushed carceral policy even further from public control and oversight while introducing powerful private interests that are fundamentally at odds with sustaining life behind bars. There is a critical need for public good solutions to correctional work in order to put a stop to the downward spiral of more austerity, more privatization, and more preventable deaths and suffering.

6. Political Responses

The responses to the crisis of austerity, staff shortages, and worsened conditions of confinement have been diverse. Yet, for the most part there have been very few serious challenges to austerity which remains a significant limitation on the success of any intervention. Any increases in funding tend to only be supported if they are punitively oriented interventions. Otherwise, there has been some effort to “reallocate” and shift money, but these changes remain incapable of getting to the core of what is causing these problems in the first place. This last section details the three main avenues states have pursued in addressing the crises of staff shortages and inhumane conditions of confinement which have been 1. more punishment, 2. technological fixes, and 3. deprofessionalizing prison work. Rather than investing in public sector workers of all kinds, the knee-jerk response of more punishment, more privatization and more degraded work is the hallmark of the austerity approach that needs to be ended.

6.1. More Punishment

Greater disorder and increased violence, like many times before often spurs increased punitiveness, exacerbating the very problems described in this analysis of deadly conditions of confinement. While there has been a slowing of carceral growth across the U.S. and even drops in incarceration rates, these trends have been highly uneven across the country and may prove to be fleeting. Releases during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that decarcerative efforts can be quickly implemented and successful in reducing the number of individuals under correctional control but can also be quickly reversed without more substantial and lasting changes to the criminal code and broader social policy (Czaczkes 2024; Heffernan and Li 2024). Between 2000 and 2022 twenty-three states saw declines in the number of people incarcerated, with particularly large drops in places like California and Texas, but the remaining 27 states continued to record increases in incarceration over this time (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2022).24 There was a net decline, but this suggests that while the contours of where and how people are being incarcerated shift over time and are highly uneven, there have not been broad decarcerative trends (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2022; Czaczkes 2024). Further, reports suggest that some of these declines are quickly being made back up in the last several years as we return to a post-COVID-19 pandemic status quo (Czaczkes 2024). Any indications that we have truly turned a corner are likely premature. The deeper crises of social and economic inequality continue to get much worse. Further, crises like staffing shortages have tended to lead to policymakers doubling down on punitive, privatized solutions rather than spurring genuinely new directions in policy.

In places like Kentucky where these austerity measures and shortages have been felt deeply the trend in policy has been a continuation and ratcheting up of punitiveness. From 2010 to 2021 while the state passed several landmark pieces of criminal justice reform legislation aimed to lower incarceration and reduce criminalization, there were six times as many pieces of legislation that did the opposite: increased or enhanced punishment (Mitchell et al. 2021). In reaction to the increased violence and disorder in youth facilities throughout the state, there has been a proposal as recently as 2023 to build two new juvenile detention centers (Schreiner 2023).

Kentucky is not alone. Increased violence in prisons has spurred calls for ever greater punishment for the perpetrators rather than addressing serious issues of underfunding and understaffing. Investing in more repression is not an effective response to these problems, but it is the most popular solution in the absence of proposals to address violence through investments in public sector workers and genuine lasting decarcerative measures. In South Carolina, in response to major spikes in violence, prison officials blamed the use of contraband cell phones rather than addressing the issue of understaffing (Hansotia 2021). This was a largely implausible explanation (there are cell phones in every prison in the U.S. and cell phones had been present prior to the rise in violence in the state) that sidestepped the issue of austerity that is causing extreme levels of shortages and turnover amongst correctional workers (Hansotia 2021). Similarly, in Mississippi, the state responded to increased violence in prisons by blaming and punishing workers. In the context of severe shortages and a drastic lack of funding, the state implemented a program called “Operation Zero Tolerance” which ratcheted up searches and penalties for correctional workers charged with smuggling in contraband (Hattiesburg American 2018).25

These proposals not only ignore that a lack of support for workers is closely tied to inhumane conditions of confinement—but also ignore that this very austerity in the form of low wages and little to no benefits is also one major reason that correctional workers sell contraband in order to supplement their insufficient incomes. Torturous and inhumane conditions of confinement and a lack of safety on the inside also spur drug use and weapon possession (Jenkins and Schwartzapfel 2021). Further, the repressive nature of American prisons where people are not allowed to connect with the outside world causes those on the inside to attempt to illegally access a cell phone (Blakinger 2023).

The majority of states in the U.S. have strict punitive laws for contraband cell phone possession in prison and jails. In Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee—states with severe understaffing and underfunding—possession of a cell phone can carry a sentence of more than ten years in prison (Urban Institute 2025).26 In 2024, again in the context of staff shortages and spiking rates of violence, Georgia increased the penalty for corrections officers who were convicted of bringing contraband into prisons from a minimum of two years in prison to 10 years. While the legislators supporting the bill acknowledged that low pay and harsh conditions could be a contributing factor to these problems, they ultimately determined punishment was the best solution. As Georgia State Senator Randy Robertson stated in an interview about the bill, “When public safety professionals cross the line, I think the punishment needs to be swift, and it needs to be harsh” (Biello 2024). At the federal level, a bipartisan bill was passed in the Senate in 2024 and is being considered again in 2025 to upgrade the charge of smuggling in a contraband cell phone in a federal prison from a misdemeanor offense to a felony (Grassley et al. 2025; Ossoff 2024).27 Both political parties interested in prison reform remain stuck on punishing their way out of these crises rather than addressing issues of pay, benefits, and conditions of labor and confinement.

More punishment for the problems of prison disorder and violence is also heaped onto those in prison themselves as one more form of punitive repression as well as financial extraction. In addition to the widespread torturous use of solitary confinement and other severely restrictive and cruel punishments for offenses committed in prison (which are adjudicated without any due process protections) (Reiter 2016), prison infractions are another source of financial extraction. One-third of all prison systems in the U.S. levy disciplinary fines and fees for prison disciplinary infractions, further exacerbating problems of debt and excessive financial hardship on incarcerated people (Wang 2024).

While limiting and ending these unnecessarily harsh and unproductive policies should be a major focus of prison reform work, there also needs to be an affirmative response of investing in the essential workers that support conditions of confinement that are essential for the safety of people who are incarcerated. Any meaningful solutions to these problems will require accelerated decarceration but also significant investments and these should be channeled specifically into workers who are critical to reversing the deadly, extractive, and inhumane conditions of confinement. In the absence of advocacy for public sector workers as one critical part of decarcerative solutions, politicians and prison administrators have instead turned to technological fixes in the form of privatized security and surveillance.

6.2. The Technological Fix

A concerning development in response to increased violence in prisons stemming from dramatic underfunding, understaffing, overcrowding and diminished basic care for those on the inside has been to pursue technological fixes that buttress a punitive and repressive approach to resolving these crises. Increased contracting with private companies to provide security technology is another way under austerity that politicians and prison officials are shifting public funding to the private sector, divesting from workers and investing in technology in the form of surveillance to manage rather than solve the problems of violence.

In addition to increasing the penalties for contraband in prisons, states like Mississippi have also invested in body scanners, elaborate netting and K-9 teams to curtail these problems, despite reports that they are often ineffective (Associated Press 2014). In Nevada officials are responding to staff shortages by replacing the need for correctional officers with surveillance technology. The Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) is planning to use surveillance wristbands, sensors, thermal cameras, and drones that would reduce the need for more workers (Foreman 2022). Following a small scale model used by the police department in Glendale, Arizona (where the technology is provided by Motorola), the state plans to launch a platform called “Overwatch” that entails a central command center where one person can monitor live video feeds and then deploy a limited number of staff in emergency situations (Girten 2022). Drones and tracking bracelets are also part of this plan (Crampton 2022). The NDOC has already started allocating money towards this effort (Foreman 2022). The implementation of drones is part of a $240 million package to address the staff shortages, where at least $20 million would be allocated for surveillance and body cameras in all 17 facilities in Nevada (Girten 2022). One of the companies, Strix Drones proposes to supply the Nevada prison system with drones equipped with AI and thermal imaging to “enhance perimeter security” (Strix Drones 2024). In 2022, the state of Montana also began researching the use of drones as a solution to staffing shortages, looking at the Nevada proposal as a model (Girten 2022; Roscoe 2023). Members of the Criminal Justice Oversight Council heard a presentation on the Nevada approach, and are considering the potential of technological solutions to address staffing shortages (Girten 2022).

In addition to using drones to surveille those who are incarcerated, prison officials are also using these technologies to further fortress prisons from outside interference. As part of preventing outside contraband as the major focus of “safety” rather than the safety to those on the inside getting proper healthcare, states are moving quickly to ratchet up punishments for the use of drones near correctional facilities. Fourteen states already have punitive laws addressing this violation (Urban Institute 2025). In Missouri the maximum penalty for flying a drone over a prison is 15 years and in Georgia it is 10 years (Urban Institute 2025). This is another area ripe for privatization since the heavy focus on the threat of drones used to deliver contraband into prisons has initiated many proposals and products from the technology and security sectors to provide defense from outside drones (DroneShield n.d.).

In 2019 South Carolina spent $8 million installing golf netting over state prisons to prevent outside drones from navigating over prisons but it was ineffective (Link 2022). They subsequently invested in drone detection systems and “drones equipped with high resolution cameras and infrared technology that pilots use to conduct surveillance over the state’s 21 institutions” (Link 2022). As South Carolina Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said in regard to the struggle over preventing drones over prisons in 2019, “This is a war” (Sabol 2022). Private security companies marketing drones are seizing the opportunity to profit off of this war. For example, the company Airsight asserts in their promotional material that “Drone detection technology could reduce violence” (Brown 2025). Companies like Drone Defense and Sentrycs claim they can prevent drone flights within a prison’s airspace through counter-drone technology that they claim will “increase prison security” (Drone Defence 2023; Sentrycs 2023).

This trend of ever-fortifying prisons against the outside world and using expensive technologies to more closely surveil and control prison populations without investing in workers or adequate conditions of confinement is a troubling development. It is the predictable and inevitable consequence of decades of neoliberal approaches to broad social policy but also to how to run and manage prisons. This approach is not likely to make anyone safer, but instead leads to more grueling and inhumane conditions of confinement while also further eroding public sector work.

6.3. Deprofessionalizing

In addition to replacing workers with repressive and punitive oriented technologies, another tactic to respond to the long running issues of shortages and turnover within the context of austerity and low wages has been to deprofessionalize corrections work by lowering age, education, and training requirements. Many of the states that have the worst problems with low pay and shortages as well as high mortality rates inside of their prisons such as South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona have all lowered the age requirement to work as a correctional officer from 21 to 18 (Richardson 2023). Related to this effort states are recruiting at high schools and buying recruitment ads on social media to attract these younger workers (Heffernan and Li 2024). In Maryland, unions have continued to emphasize that salary is the central cause of shortages in correctional staff, but in 2018, then Republican Governor Larry Hogan continued to insist it was a recruitment problem and one that could be solved by deskilling and outsourcing (Herald-Mail Media 2018a). Instead of committing to investments in pay and benefits for public sector workers, the state reduced standards for workers and hired outside firms to do recruitment (Herald-Mail Media 2018a, 2018b).

The process of privatizing work in prisons also leads to deprofessionalizing and deskilling the workforce. One of the central strategies that private prison healthcare companies use to lower costs (and increase profits) is to replace health professionals with cheaper workers—for example replacing nurses with nurse assistants and doctors with physician assistants (Nam-Sonenstein 2025). The use of subcontracting within these arrangements also leads to further undermining the training and qualifications of workers with little to no accountability or standardization of employment requirements. These latest rounds of deprofessionalization are all the more startling given that the U.S. already spends very little on training of correctional workers compared to other countries. For example, in Germany, training for correctional officers spans two years with time in the prison and at school (Chammah 2015c). Comparatively, there is often little to no training before starting the job in the U.S. (for example, in North Carolina training lasts for 6 weeks and begins after employment starts) (North Carolina Department of Adult Correction n.d.; York 2019).

7. Conclusions

The adherence to an austerity framework is a major impediment to finding lasting solutions to the problems catalogued thus far and for promoting humane and effective decarceration. Powerful foundations, think tanks, nonprofits and politicians advocating for prison reform often frame their proposals as ways to protect taxpayers and reduce spending (Cate 2022, 2023; Cate and HoSang 2018; The Pew Charitable Trusts 2018). This scarcity mindset in a context of tremendous wealth leads to piecemeal solutions lacking the bold and transformative visions that are necessary to scale back the carceral state and keep those involved in these institutions safe. Indeed, the sense among reformers that they have to sell their ideas through notions of “cost efficiency” and “smarter” ways of spending money shows just how captured this policy arena is by the logic of austerity (Cate 2022, 2023; Cate and HoSang 2018). By deferring to the goal of cost savings and protecting taxpayers, these efforts concede the fight over redistributing wealth. The now many decades losses in that fight contributed to the rise in mass incarceration in the first place and continues to sustain the carceral state (Cate 2023; Clegg and Usmani 2019; Gottschalk 2016).

In addition to conceding the larger structural battles over wealth redistribution, austerity is also a limiting factor in ambitious efforts to rethink the purpose and design of prisons. For example, Oregon made a concerted effort to adopt Norwegian style reforms in 2017 tagging the policies as the “Oregon Way” for essentially focusing on humanizing those on the inside, reducing the use of isolation and repressive security, and providing rehabilitative services (Oregon Department of Corrections n.d.). Yet, staff shortages immediately stymied the implementation and in the long run a lack of adequate funding doomed the changes (Dake 2023). It might be that the adoption and belief in these reforms has to be won before arguments for funding can be made, but it is clear that as long as austerity remains the chief driver of policy (how to save money and reduce crime) that even ambitious proposals will have no chance of being implemented effectively.

Looking to the example of prisons in western Europe reinforces the main argument of this article that greater spending on corrections, particularly in the form of public sector workers, leads to substantially safer prisons. For example, in Germany, it costs roughly 120 euros ($135) a day for each prisoner as opposed to an average of about $85 in the U.S.—but with far fewer people in prison (Chammah 2015b).28 This higher investment largely goes towards workers and the prisoners themselves not expensive security technologies (Chammah 2015a).29 There is a consistent pay raise schedule for German correctional officers with additional bonuses for dependents, a set 41 h work week, health care benefits, and a pension (York 2019). In contrast to the desperate search for workers in the U.S., in Germany it is highly competitive to become an officer, with a 10% acceptance rate to their training program (Chammah 2015c). German prisons rarely use solitary confinement; most incarcerated individuals are inside for significantly less time than those in the U.S. and they are given a greater degree of autonomy and respect (York 2019). Those in prison are paid 10 to 20 euros a day for their work and encouraged to save money while incarcerated (Chammah 2015a). This wage is higher than the federal minimum wage in the U.S. demonstrating why reversing austerity and neoliberal policies is so essential to raising the bar high enough for all Americans that those on the inside can have a chance of being treated with dignity—something that fundamentally cannot be met through “cost savings.”

There are real concerns that any argument for more correctional spending, even as part of broader increases in public goods, risks channeling funding into only corrections institutions which have often been the only place that politicians are willing to invest money. Similarly, some argue that starving prisons of funding will shrink the political constituencies that depend on them which eliminates a barrier to reform. But this argument assumes that correctional workers have been the powerful force supporting the expansion and intransigence of mass incarceration. If that were the case, they would have probably been much better at assuring they get paid a decent wage and keep benefits. Further, the desire for those working in prisons to have a good paying job along with humane and meaningful work can be complementary to radical and robust prison reforms (Doob and Gartner 2011; McCoy 2017; Thompson 2011a). Making prisons safer and more humane and supporting workers do not have to be viewed as fundamentally opposed. Therefore, these workers can be an important part of a coalition fighting for safe decarceration.

Labor organizers continue to emphasize these points along with calling for shifts in what correctional work entails (Crampton 2022). There are many instances of correctional guard unions arguing for compassionate releases, reduced incarceration (lower caseloads), and more enrichment support for those who are incarcerated (Doob and Gartner 2011; McCoy 2017; Thompson 2011a). Of course, there are also examples, like the ongoing battles in New York state, where correctional guard unions have opposed facility closures and solitary confinement reforms (Clark 2025; Sun Community News 2024; Vivenzio 2024). While these are complex battles, primarily conflicts like these tend to come down to concerns about adequate funding. Workers are resistant to unfunded mandates as well as downsizing that does not address high workloads or does not take seriously the need for just transition of jobs that might be lost (Sun Community News 2024; Vivenzio 2024).

It would be short-sighted to assume that increased investments in well-paid public workers in these institutions would necessarily be punitive or expansionary. Of course, that is a real possibility as we have seen state legislatures and corrections officials are all too willing to throw money at cruel privatized health care, expensive and oppressive technological surveillance, and simply hiring more guards with less training for less pay to continue to carry out the same-old highly punitive functions of the prison. Yet, considering these workers to be an essential frontline in a reimagined idea of what the conditions of prison should be in a substantially reduced system could be a critical leveraging point in making truly lasting changes. It is clear that the inverse trend over the past several decades—not taking seriously the treatment and purpose of these workers, or even actively undermining their work—does nothing to forge decarcerative goals or protect the humans who work in or are confined in prisons every day.