MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Department of Corrections will miss a July federal court deadline to hire additional correctional officers, but leadership says increased salaries and new recruiting efforts are bolstering staffing numbers after years of struggles.
Commissioner John Hamm spoke with Alabama Daily News at a correctional officer graduation ceremony at the Church of the Highlands in Montgomery, where ADOC celebrated its second class of correctional officer graduates for 2025, a class of 94 new employees. While short of the court’s 2017 order to hire an additional 2,000 officers, Hamm said his agency had still made significant progress in increasing its staff.
“We have gotten a very good process down, and you can just tell by the number of correctional officer trainees we have in these academy classes that it’s going well,” Hamm said. “(We’re) optimistic that this is going to be the smallest graduation this year, so hopefully our next two academy classes will have over 100 in those, so it’s going really well.”
Alabama is currently facing a flurry of lawsuits from a number of entities – organizations, individuals and the federal government – over the poor conditions of its prisons, which are crowded and understaffed. In 2017, a federal judge ordered ADOC, which had 2,146 correctional officers at the time, to hire an additional 2,000 officers by 2022, though later extended that deadline to July 1, 2025.
In the years following the court order, ADOC struggled to meet the court’s demand, and instead saw its staff shrink, with the agency operating with 1,744 correctional officers as of July of 2023.
“In 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, we lost so many correctional officers that we’re climbing out of that hole, it’s just taken some time,” Hamm said.
In 2023, salaries were increased, bumping starting pay by about $20,000 to nearly $57,000 a year, and 10% raises for existing staff.
While Hamm did not have the latest staffing numbers, ADOC’s most recent quarterly report shows that the agency has 2,038 correctional officers; hundreds more than the numbers from 2023, but still far below the additional 2,000 requested by the federal court, which would require the agency to have close to 4,000 officers.
“I think that number was probably out of reach from our sheer capacity to be able to run that many people through the academy,” Hamm said. “We’re going to be close, but we’re not going to actually hit that number.”
While it remains unknown what action the federal court will take with ADOC’s failure to adequately increase its staff, Hamm championed his agency’s recent efforts, which have seen increased graduation class sizes over the past two years, and suggested ADOC’s progress would be taken into account in a judge’s ultimate decision.
“The judges, the plaintiffs in some of our litigation, they cannot say we’re not improving on our hiring and bringing correctional officers into the system,” he said.
Besides the increase in pay, another initiative that has helped ADOC improve recruitment, Hamm said, has been the agency’s partnership with the Alabama Community College System with ACTIVATE, a career-readiness program that helps would-be correctional officers meet physical and educational requirements.
Before ACTIVATE kicked off, a significant share of correctional officer applicants failed the physical assessment, which had a 38% pass rate as of last August. The first graduating class since ACTIVATE launched, however, had a pass rate of more than 80%, with rates remaining as high since.
“For the last probably two years, we have had candidates come in that have an extremely higher pass rate on the physical assessment,” Hamm said.