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The staffing crisis in American prisons did not happen overnight. It grew out of decades of prison expansion, shifting sentencing policies, changing workforce expectations, and a job that has become increasingly difficult to fill. Today, federal prisons face persistent vacancies, mandatory overtime, and mounting operational strain. At the same time, prison populations have fluctuated significantly over the past decade, reshaping the system’s needs and raising important questions about who should be working inside correctional facilities and why.

Inmates cost the U.S. government more than $8 billion a year and that number seem to be going up. Of the BOP’s nearly 154,000 prisoners, 24,000 of them are minimum security. BOP stated that the average cost of housing a minimum security prisoner in 2024 was $151.02 per day. The cost of housing someone in a U.S. penitentiary is $164.87 per day (the lows were $129.72 per day, with mediums being $122.50 per day). Since there are more minimum security prisoners than high, the total costs of housing minimum security prisoners far exceeds the costs of housing those in high security.