The Alabama Department of Corrections on Thursday celebrated the graduation of 54 correctional officer trainees.
It’s the second graduating class this year and a third is expected to start in a few weeks. The state is under a federal court order to boost staffing by July 1, 2025. As of earlier this month, it was still more than 2,000 officers short, though showing some improvements in staff retention.
After the graduation, ADOC Commissioner John Hamm told reporters increasing staffing is priority No. 1 for the department.
“We have put a significant effort and amount of resources on recruiting and hiring more correctional officers,” Hamm said. “It’s no secret we need more correctional officers in our facilities.”
In 2017, a federal judge ordered the state to increase prison staffing to address “horrendously inadequate” care of mentally ill inmates. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson has extended that order to July 1, 2025.
A court filing earlier this month says that from January to March, ADOC’s staff vacancy rate decreased by 2.4 percentage points and staff increased at every prison except Hamilton Prison for the Aged and Infirm, the only state prison that’s fully staffed.
Overall, the ADOC’s vacancy rate is 58.9%.
Last year, the department raised officers’ pay significantly. Correctional officer trainees at the state’s maximum security prisons now earn $56,971 a year. Starting pay for officer trainees at medium security facilities is $54,290; work release and community work center trainees earn $51,727. With more experience, officers can earn more.
Hamm said the pay increase and marketing efforts have increased applications. The department is represented at hundreds of job fairs per year, he said.
“A lot of our issues at the department of corrections will be solved by having well-trained correctional officers (in prisons),” he said. “The more we have, the better off we’ll be.”
Those graduating Thursday completed 10 weeks of training to get Alabama Peace Officers’ Standard and Training Commission certification and become correctional officers.
Earlier this month, the department and the Alabama Community College System announced a free training program designed to get potential new correctional officers the educational and physical requirements needed to meet ADOC pre-hiring requirements. Enrollees could earn up to nine college credit hours for free.
Citing the significant pay increase, the partnership with ACCS, outreach efforts to recruit new trainees and plans for two new mega-prisons that officials say will be more secure, Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, said the state is working on the staffing issue.
“What else is there to do?” Albritton told Alabama Daily News. He’s chairman of the Senate General Fund budget committee.
“The only thing we can do is to make the best efforts and I think Alabama has made the best efforts we can to attack the problem,” Albritton said. “We’re not ignoring it. We haven’t ignored it. We have put resources into this in every way possible. We didn’t get here in five years, we got here over decades and generations of ignoring the problem. And now we’re trying to fix it. And it’s just gonna take some time.”
Carla Crowder, executive director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, said the positive staffing trend is good news and seems to be the result of the Legislature’s willingness to take the massive understaffing at ADOC seriously and pass a substantial pay raise.
“This shows that lawmakers truly can make a positive difference in Alabama’s prisons with targeted improvements,” Crowder told ADN on Thursday. “But obviously, we need much more.
There’s still an overall vacancy rate of nearly 60 percent, staffing isn’t even at 2017 levels and it will take until 2037 to fulfill a federal court order with a 2025 deadline. Also, has anyone anywhere in state government attempted to explain how they’re going to staff a 4,000-bed prison in 2 years with a 60 percent vacancy rate at the current prisons?”
Bullock, Easterling, and Ventress prisons have vacancy rates that exceed 70 percent, according to the June filing.
Correctional staffing at Bullock, one of ADOC’s mental health hubs, is exceptionally alarming, according to plaintiffs in the 2014 lawsuit that spurred the staffing mandate.
Sen. Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, attended the graduation in Selma and said it was a “bright spot” for the department and staffing efforts.
“This job is not sexy,” Singleton told reporters. “No one wants to go and be locked up on a daily basis, but it’s an important job. It’s about public safety.”
He said the officers are key to the state’s effort to rehabilitate inmates who will one day be released.