MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Department of Corrections celebrated the graduation of 96 correctional officer trainees Friday.
The agency’s largest graduating class in years is in part due to a new collaboration between ADOC and the Alabama Community College System known as ACTIVATE.
“It was more successful than we had anticipated,” said ADOC Commissioner John Hamm, referring to the ACTIVATE program, which helps those interested in jobs with ADOC meet the physical and educational pre-hiring requirements through free career prep programs.
The sizable graduation class, which will now go on to be assigned to correctional facilities across the state, comes amid ADOC’s long struggle to recruit and retain adequate staffing.
In 2017, in a case against the state that alleged ADOC provided constitutionally inadequate mental-health care, a judge ordered the agency to hire an additional 2,000 correctional officers by 2022, later extending it to 2025. At the time, it had around 2,150.
A court filing this week by plaintiffs said that seven months from the July 2025 deadline, ADOC still has a vacancy rate about 50%, and at the end of last quarter, had 1,612 unfilled positions.
“For the past year, even after a significant increase in officer pay, ADOC has gained a net of less than 100 officers per quarter,” the filing reads. “However, to comply with the Court’s order by July 2025, ADOC needs to hire the equivalent of 230 officers every month from now until July.”
Hamm told Alabama Daily News that the most recent graduating class of 96 correctional officers was the first to be impacted by the new ACTIVATE initiative, and that beyond helping recruit more officers, helped a better share of the applicants pass the academy’s physical training assessment.
Hamm had previously said in August that hiring more officers was hampered by a large share of applicants failing to pass the physical assessment, with just 453 passing of 1,191 applicants this year as of August, a 38% pass rate. This most recent round of applicants, which saw 96 of 109 pass the assessment, saw a pass rate of more than 80%.
Going forward, Hamm said he was optimistic that his agency could continue the momentum, which extended to adopting new methods to improve retention among correctional officers.
“I feel really good, and we are seeing the fruits of those labors; we’re getting really good at hiring, we have a lot of interest, we have a lot of applicants,” he told ADN.
“Also, we’re working on the retention part. We have field training officers that are going into the institutions so all these 96 will be assigned to a field training officer at the prison they’re assigned to, and will give them further, on-the-job training for a period of time. We think that’s really going to help with the retention as well.”
In March 2023, ADOC raised starting salaries. A new correctional officer trainee at a maximum security prison now has a starting salary of nearly $57,000, an increase of about $20,000. At the same time, current employees were given 10% pay raises.
State Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, was the ceremony’s keynote speaker. He stressed the importance of the graduates’ roles in the agency, and vowed to continually support improving their working conditions.
“You can always count on me to support you in whatever endeavor, which includes more resources, which includes better pay, which includes doing whatever necessary to support the recruitment effort to make sure that you work shorter hours under safer conditions,” England said.
“The most important thing to remember is that we’re really all on the same team, trying to make this better for everybody involved. So I want you to know that you’ve got my support, and also the support of the Alabama Legislature.”
England shared in Hamm’s optimism that ADOC could continue the momentum in hiring more officers, telling ADN after the ceremony that while the state “still (had) a long way to go,” 96 officers graduating in a single class was a sign of significant progress.
“This is the largest class in a decade, and to go from when I first got elected, having a severely understaffed prison system that was graduating classes of seven and eight, to seeing 96 is definite signs of progress,” he told ADN.
Were ADOC not to meet its deadline of hiring an additional 2,000 officers by July 2025, per the suit against the state, plaintiffs outlined several remedies the court has available to it, including holding it in contempt with a fine or other equitable remedies, appointment of a special master and/or receivership and convening a three-judge panel to consider prisoner release.