Cooks, nurses guard inmates with US prisons down 6K officers

Staff members also may be pressed into duty as correctional officers "during irregular periods such as a pandemic,” the agency told The Associated Press.For years, the Bureau of Prisons has been plagued by systematic failures, from chronic violence to high-profile deaths. At a facility in California, a fight broke out among inmates soon after a teacher was sent to fill in as an officer.The expanded use of that practice, known as augmentation, is raising questions about whether the agency can carry out its required duties to ensure the safety of prisoners and staff members while also putting in place programs and classes such as those under the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul that received wide bipartisan support in Congress.“You can’t do programming, you can’t have safety, you can’t have a lot of things that make prisons operate without proper staffing," said Kevin Ring, the president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.The bureau insists everyone working at its facilities is a trained, sworn correctional worker, regardless of position or job title. Right now there are 152,376 prisoners in 122 facilities.The Bureau of Prisons is ending contracts with private lockups — the Mendota prison was set to receive 400 inmates from a for-profit facility in Texas — and is likely to seek the return of nearly 5,000 people who were released on home confinement during the pandemic.At the high-security penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois, where several inmates have been killed or killed themselves in recent months, about 20 nonofficer workers are augmented each day and officers are forced to work overtime in 16-hour days that sometimes add up to 60 hours or more of overtime per week.Last week, the agency suddenly recalled correctional officers who had been temporarily reassigned to help out at some of the system’s most understaffed facilities.