Nurses and teachers shouldn’t be responsible for serving as prison guards
Augmentation has become an increasingly familiar practice in our federal prisons since the Bureau of Prisons started a cost-cutting initiative in 2005, and it’s likely to get worse. Rather than heed recent congressional calls to hire more staff and reduce an already unsafe inmate-to-correctional-officer ratio, the Trump administration has eliminated 6,000 positions and announced it intends to cut thousands more. Pressed to fill “mission critical” positions at understaffed facilities, wardens will have no choice but to increase reliance on augmentation.
The Bureau of Prisons justifies its use of augmentation by touting its philosophy that every employee is a “correctional worker first.”
…read the rest of the op-ed here.
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